Sociology of the ‘pause’

Posted on June 12, 2013 by | 683 Comments

by Judith Curry

The ‘pause’ has gone mainstream, with an article by Justin Gillis in the NYTimes.

NYTimes published the following article: What to Make of a Warming Plateau.  Excerpts:

The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.

The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.

But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.

What to make of it all?

So the real question is where all that heat is going, if not to warm the surface. And a prime suspect is the deep ocean. 

The deep-ocean theory is one of a half-dozen explanations that have been proffered for the warming plateau. Perhaps the answer will turn out to be some mix of all of them. And in any event, computer forecasts of climate change suggest that pauses in warming lasting a couple of decades should not surprise us.

Now, here is a crucial piece of background: It turns out we had an earlier plateau in global warming, from roughly the 1950s to the 1970s, and scientists do not fully understand that one either. A lot of evidence suggests that sunlight-blocking pollution from dirty factories may have played a role, as did natural variability in ocean circulation. The pollution was ultimately reduced by stronger clean-air laws in the West.

What happened when the mid-20th-century lull came to an end? You guessed it: an extremely rapid warming of the planet.

So, if past is prologue, this current plateau will end at some point, too, and a new era of rapid global warming will begin. 

Joe Romm

Joe Romm counters with an article entitled: Climate Scientists Ring Alarm Bell, NY Time Hits Snooze Button. Excerpts:

The Times piece focuses on the recent seeming slowdown in one indicator of global warming — surface air temperatures — and uses some especially inartful language to describe it.

The headline is “What to Make of a Warming Plateau.” I’m sure that the super-sophisticated word-smiths at the Times (who filed this story under “science/earth”) are aware that “in geology and earth science” a plateau is “an area of highland, usually consisting of relatively flat terrain.”

Memo to Times: We ain’t at a flat highpoint. We aren’t anywhere near the highpoint and we’re not even close to flat on any scale of time relevant to human civilization.

It’s pretty hard to find any evidence of “quiet” in this country (between superstorm Sandy and record-smashing heat) or up in the Arctic (where the ice is disintegrating decades ahead of schedule, which appears to be driving more extreme weather) or in the deep ocean

Washington Post

Romm refers to a recent op-ed in the Washington Post written by Michael Oppenheimer and Kevin Trenberth, entitled Climate science tells us the alarm bells are ringing, which is written in response to Lamar Smith’s recent op-ed.  Excerpts:

Legions of studies support the view that, left unabated, this warming will produce dangerous effects….

Man-made heat-trapping gases are warming our planet and leading to increases in extreme weather events. Droughts are becoming longer and deeper in many areas. The risk of wildfires is increasing. The year 2012, the hottest on record for the United States, illustrated this risk with severe, widespread drought accompanied by extensive wildfires….

We know a lot, more than enough to recognize that the alarm bells are ringing.

Increases in heat waves and record high temperatures; record lows in Arctic sea ice; more severe rainstorms, droughts and wildfires; and coastal communities threatened by rising seas all offer a preview of the new normal in a warmer world.

Much has been made of a short-term reduction in the rate of atmospheric warming. But “global” warming requires looking at the entire planet. While the increase in atmospheric temperature has slowed, ocean warming rose dramatically after 2000. Excess heat is being trapped in Earth’s climate system, and observations of the Global Climate Observing System and others are increasingly able to locate it. Simplistic interpretations of cherry-picked data hide the realities.

Joe Romm states:

In this tale of two city newspapers, who is right? You won’t be surprised that I side with the climate scientists.

JC comment:  I’ve always wondered why Michael Oppenheimer, a political scientist, gets to be called a climate scientist, whereby Freeman Dyson, a famous physicist does not.  They are both from Princeton, both have studied the climate change problem, but neither has published primary research on climate change detection and attribution.

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn, nemesis of Michael Mann, has an entertaining take on Justin Gillis’ article and the pause:

Fortunately, Times man Justin Gillis has an explanation for the forlorn droop on Dr Mann’s hockey stick – or at any rate for the previous cooling trend:

Now, here is a crucial piece of background: It turns out we had an earlier plateau in global warming, from roughly the 1950s to the 1970s, and scientists do not fully understand that one either. A lot of evidence suggests that sunlight-blocking pollution from dirty factories may have played a role, as did natural variability in ocean circulation. The pollution was ultimately reduced by stronger clean-air laws in the West.

So environmental laws led to the global warming of the Eighties and Nineties? Great! Whether today’s cooling is a blip in the global warming trend of the Nineties, or the Nineties warming was a blip in the global cooling trend of the Fifties, I cannot say. But either way it doesn’t look like a hockey blade.

Spinning the pause

Different people have used different graphics to depict the pause.

Here is David Rose’s infamous figure:

MoS2 Template Master

Here is Tamino’s figure (used by Romm):

print

Here is the figure from HadCRUT4 used in my recent testimony:

hadcrutJustin Gillis states:

As you might imagine, those dismissive of climate-change concerns have made much of this warming plateau. They typically argue that “global warming stopped 15 years ago” or some similar statement, and then assert that this disproves the whole notion that greenhouse gases are causing warming.

Rarely do they mention that most of the warmest years in the historical record have occurred recently. Moreover, their claim depends on careful selection of the starting and ending points. The starting point is almost always 1998, a particularly warm year because of a strong El Niño weather pattern.

Bishop Hill and WUWT take issue with the accusation of starting at 1998, a particularly warm El Nino year.  From WUWT:

It can be shown that the plateau may extend further back than that, and that nature still rules the climate system, more so than man. I’m not sure why Gillis thinks 15 years is the number people use starting at 1998, I don’t know of anyone making that claim recently. Even CRU’s Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview that there had been no “statistically significant” warming since 1995, a point also brought up in 2008 by Dr. Richard Lindzen at WUWT when he said: “Why bother with the arguments about an El Nino anomaly in 1998?”

More importantly, the kickoff point for this most recent discussion by The Mail’s  David Rose started 16 years ago, in 1997. The 15 year/1998 choice seems like a purposeful misdirection by Gillis. Using 1997 as preferred by Rose, we are fast approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17 year test, and if we use Jones and Lindzen’s 1995 start point, we’ve passed it. What will Gillis say then?

Sociology

This brings us to some sociology of climate change science.  The primary issue in the public debate surrounding climate change is currently the pause in surface temperatures.   People care about surface temperature since people live on the surface and obtain their food and water resources from the surface (hence the troposphere and ocean below 700 m are less relevant). Further, the main type of adverse impacts in terms of extreme weather events that can be attributed to AGW are heat waves.  The IPCC has made the increase in global average surface temperature an icon of AGW.

In terms of the policy debate, the pause has the following implications:

  1. In 2006, James Hansen famously stated that ‘we have 10 years to act.’  The pause gives us some breathing room to figure out which policies make sense and for the technologies to come on line.
  2. The urgency for addressing AGW is regarded as proportional to climate sensitivity; if equilibrium climate sensitivity is below 2C, then AGW is less compelling as a primary driver for global energy policy.

The public debate about the pause is being conducted primarily in the MSM, op-eds, congressional testimony, and yes the blogosphere.  Few journal articles have been published that explicitly tackle the pause; in any event the publication cycle occurs much more slowly than the public debate.

Re the MSM, the UK has led the way, primarily in the Mail (David Rose) and the Guardian, but also with the recent article in the Economist (see my previous post UK MSM on climate sensitivity).  The U.S. MSM has come on strong particularly in the last month, with substantial ink from the WaPo and the NYTimes.  The recent congressional testimony by John Christy and myself have influenced the dialogue, including the recent op-ed by Lamar Smith.

The blogosphere has really played the dominant role behind much of what is being reported by the MSM.  Let me provide an example.  Recall the figure prepared by Ed Hawkins, that compares CMIP5 simulations with observations:

jpegfile

In my previous post Spinning the climate model – observation comparison, I wrote that I spotted a link to Ed Hawkins blog in a post by Roger Pielke Jr that referenced a tweet by Hawkins, which then sent me to Hawkins’ blog where I spotted the above diagram.

I really liked this diagram, and I included it in my congressional testimony that was originally written for hearing on March 5 that was rescheduled and eventually held on April 25.  On March 13, I received emails from David Rose (Mail) and John Parker (Economist) regarding articles on climate sensitivity that they were preparing.  I was very busy at the time, and sent each of them the relevant pages from my forthcoming congressional testimony that included Ed Hawkins’ figure. Both articles used Hawkins’ figure:

I know that my testimony led David Rose to use Hawkins’ diagram; I suspect the same for the Economist article (either directly or via Rose’s article).

So why am I relating this particular story?  A mainstream climate scientist, Hawkins, posts an unpublished diagram on a relatively obscure blog (8 Feb).  RP Jr picks this up from a tweet, which he posts on his blog (15 Feb),  JC posts Hawkins’ figure at CE (22 Feb).  Makes it into the MSM on 16 March.  Subsequently goes viral.  Included in the U.S. Congressional Record on April 25.

(Note:  Ed Hawkins has a recent blog post on this topic, Comparing Global Temperature Observations and Simulations, Again)

This to me is a fascinating example of the ‘power’ of the climate blogosphere.   The few mainstream scientists that are active in the climate blogosphere seem better at picking up the pulse of the public debate on climate change.  Further, the climate blogosphere is pulling technically educated people from other fields: e.g. Steve McIntyre, Tamino, Lucia, Nic Lewis, etc. who are more focused on issues of the greatest relevance to the public debate on climate change.

For an interesting take on the ‘power’ of the climate blogosphere, see also this recent essay by Pointman entitled How to run a really bad infowar campaign.

This entry was posted in Data and observations, Sociology of science. Bookmark the permalink.

683 responses to “Sociology of the ‘pause’”

  1. Herman Alexander Pope | June 12, 2013 at 9:07 am |

    Just look at the actual data. It snows more when oceans are warm and warming stops, every time.

  2. omanuel | June 12, 2013 at 9:15 am |

    Thank you, Professir Curry, for helping restore society to reality. Oliver K. Manuel

  3. Jim Cripwell | June 12, 2013 at 9:17 am |

    From the Gillis article in the NYT. “So, if past is prologue, this current plateau will end at some point, too, and a new era of rapid global warming will begin. ”

    Let me try and pose my question in a proper form. There is no sign that the amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is going to decreaase in the future. We can, therefore, assume that the rate of rise in CO2 levels will continue at approximately the current rate. If CAGW is correct, then during the 21st century, global temperatures must rise by n C, where n is a number greater than 2. What has happened to temperatures before the year 2000, is irrelevant. What matters is what the rise in temperature during the 21 st century is going to be; as the NYT article observes.

    Now if temperatures are to be n C greater in the year 2100 than they were in the year 2001, then the average rate of rise in temperature in the 21st century must be n C per century. However, we know that there has been a negligible rise in global tempertaures during the first decade or so, so that for the rest of the century, the rate of rise of temperature needs to be n+ C per century. We know that, the second decade of the 21 st century (2011 toi 2020), for the first 2 1/2 years, is cooler than the first decade of th4e 21st century (2001 to 2010). See
    http://notrickszone.com/2013/06/08/honeycutt-nuccitelli-climate-bet-progress-report-so-far-new-decade-is-cooler-than-the-last-ready-to-concede/

    So, if CAGW is to be proven to be correct, starting sometime in the near future, global temperatures must start rising at a rate that is at least n+ C per century. The longer it is before temperatures start rising at this rate, the greater the rate needs to be for the rest of the century.

    Now, since clearly at the moment, global temperatures are not rising at n+ C per century, this rate of rise must have to happen sometime in the future. So my question is, how long do we wait for temperatures to start rising at a rate of n+ C per century, before we conclude that they are never going to rise at a rate of n+ C per century?

    If people want to claim that I have cherry-picked dates, please substitute any other dates, and rephrase the question. I merely chose some dates to illustrate the question. I suspect any dates will do.

    • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 9:39 am |

      I think it is a mistake to use only RSS and UAH as the data sources for any argument.

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 9:51 am |

        Of course that’s what you think. These are the only truly global record we have of troposphere temperature with the accuracy to make statesments about trends in the hundredths of a per decade. You probably didn’t think it a mistake until the satellite data drifted outside, on the cool side, of the 95% confidence bound of the CMP5 model forecasts. Then suddenly it becomes a mistake to use that data. People like you Bob Droege are amazing but utterly predictable at the same time. The mistake is using the models, Bog, not the satellites. Write that down.

      • Jim Cripwell | June 12, 2013 at 10:21 am |

        Bob, you write “I think it is a mistake to use only RSS and UAH as the data sources for any argument.”

        I did not use the RSS and UAH data to support my argument. You can use any data set, you like, the question remains the same. I understand that the bet on which decade would be cooler was based on the satellite data. That is why this data appears in my reference.

        And you have not attempted to address the question. I wonder why.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 11:22 am |

        For the life of the series, both RSS and UAH are positive statistically significant and greater than 0.1 C per decade.
        I would not call 75S to 75N a truly global data set.
        The Best and NOAA land data sets both are above 2 C per century and statistically significant for the period 1979 to 2013.
        http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
        Does that address your question Jim?

        Although I don’t believe that temperature change is the only measure of whether warming is a serious problem or not.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:25 am |

        It’s only a problem if overweening human guilt can be attached, and since warming and plant food are both good things, it’s gonna be awhile before it is a problem for a free people.
        ===============

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 11:43 am |

        Bad Botonist, CO2 is not plant food.

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 5:21 pm |

        Did you perhaps mean to write botanist?

        Next time try “plant scientist” it isn’t so hard to spell.

        But seriously, it’s more apt to call it plant food than pollutant.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 5:44 pm |

        David,
        Botanist, Botonist, whatever, maybe you can tell me why gardeners add CO2 to their greenhouses?
        Careful, this is a trick question and the first thing that comes to your mind is likely wrong.
        Spelling has never been my strong suit.

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 3:26 pm |

        This is a trick answer, Bob. It’s sciency stuff from the literature which I know makes it uber-tricky for you.

        http://www.imok.ufl.edu/docs/pdf/vegetable_hort/trans_pp2.pdf

        Let me know if any of the words are too big for you and I’ll go find something geared for children.

      • Bob Droege | June 14, 2013 at 10:24 am |

        Well done Dave,
        Did your realize your cite gives both the obvious answer and the answer I was looking for?
        You have exceptional research skills.
        I ask again, why do Greenhouse operators add CO2 to greenhouses?

        “In a fully productive greenhouse
        without ventilation and without C02
        enrichment of the atmosphere, C02
        concentration may fall below 200
        ml-L-1.”
        I notice you didn’t answer the question, just a cite and an insult

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 11:05 am |

        Well Bob. Any surprises in the literature for you about botanical effect of CO2 enrichment? None for me of course. People have known about the botanical effects of CO2 under natural lighting for at least as long as people have had greenhouses and natural gas applicances which I believe goes back at least to Victorian England when natural gas was so widely used the streets were lit with NG lamps. Victorian England is knows as the golden age of greenhouses.

        After global transportation systems matured it became cheaper to grow crops thousands of miles away and ship them than it was to make artificially warm weather in a greenhouse for year-round local growing. Thus the golden age of the greenhouse ended.

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 11:52 am |

        Oh I’m sorry Bob. The correct answer to your question is that greenhouse growers supplement with CO2 because it’s plant food and more is better up to several times ambient level in standard atmosphere. It’s pretty much the same answer for why farmers feed corn to cattle. It’s not rocket science.

      • Bob Droege | June 14, 2013 at 12:07 pm |

        No Dave,
        Less is worse is more important than more is better

        Like your cite said, plants can suck all the CO2 out of a greenhouse, thus inhibiting plant growth.

      • kim | June 14, 2013 at 1:34 pm |

        Omigod, Carbon Capturing Plants. What’ll they think of next?
        ======

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 1:52 pm |

        Starving a plant is the same as starving an animal, Bob. I think most folk and maybe even scientists too would agree that strarving your farm animals to death is worse than overfeeding. This is why it’s just better to call it plant food that way everyone understands because everyone understands the need for food. Even a child can understand it that way.

    • Steven Mosher | June 12, 2013 at 11:13 am |

      “Let me try and pose my question in a proper form. There is no sign that the amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels is going to decreaase in the future. We can, therefore, assume that the rate of rise in CO2 levels will continue at approximately the current rate. If CAGW is correct, then during the 21st century, global temperatures must rise by n C, where n is a number greater than 2.

      #########
      wrong. The rise in temperatures will depend on C02 and other green house gases and changes in land use. C02 is just one of many forcings.
      write that down 100 times.

    • Climate Weenie | June 12, 2013 at 12:30 pm |

      ###”We can, therefore, assume that the rate of rise in CO2 levels will continue at approximately the current rate. If CAGW is correct, then during the 21st century, global temperatures must rise by n C, where n is a number greater than 2.” ###

      Current GHG forcings are fairly constant and the temperature rise has been around 1.4 C per century.

      Other things will change ( population getting older, population declining by 2050?, how as albedo changed?, how WILL albedo change? ) but persistence and climatology indicates any forecast should start around 1.4C.

      • Climate Weenie | June 12, 2013 at 12:31 pm |

        “Current GHG forcings are fairly constant and the temperature rise has been around 1.4 C per century.”

        should read”

        The rate of increase in GHG forcings is fairly constant and the temperature rise has been around 1.4 C per century.

  4. David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 9:18 am |

    NYT. Et tu, Brute?

    A hush falls over teh cwrod.

  5. Tom Fuller | June 12, 2013 at 9:21 am |

    Greetings from Shanghai, which is experiencing the coolest start of a summer in living memory.

    I think anthropology is more appropriate a discipline to observe the interactions than sociology, as the self-sealed, self-referential nature of the different tribes doesn’t allow for much in the way of interaction.

    As near as I can tell, climate scientists are at most curious about the lull in temperature rises–as noted, it’s happened before and is still too short to call into question the observed mechanics and theoretical underpinnings of climate science.

    It’s the polemicists that are agitated, most notably (and predictably) Joe Romm. They don’t want to take the news-grabbing, if always implausible, conjectures about ultra-high sensitivity off the table. It’s… demotivating.

    Given the way energy consumption is increasing, any positive value for sensitivity is legitimate cause for concern about the latter half of this century. And that’s true even if there’s another 25-year pause between 2050 and 2075, or something like that.

    We are on course to consume six times as much energy as we did in 2010 by the year 2075. If it all comes from coal, we’re ruined.

    • DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 2:16 pm |

      I do believe you have hit large numbers of nails on their heads.

    • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 5:32 pm |

      Tom Fuller | June 12, 2013 at 9:21 am | Reply

      “Given the way energy consumption is increasing, any positive value for sensitivity is legitimate cause for concern about the latter half of this century.”

      Energy consumption increased enormously over the past 15 years and global average temperature remained constant.

      Now I know correlation doesn’t always mean causation, Tom, but lack of correlation still means lack of causation doesn’t it?

      • Tom Fuller | June 13, 2013 at 11:59 pm |

        Too soon to say, if my statistics courses are right. When we get to around 32, 33, 35 years, then it means something–at least to me. I don’t trust Kevin Trenberth about many things, and that includes his 17-year deadline. He was just sticking his finger into… the air… and came up with that. I think this is a 25-year pause very similar to the last 25-year pause. It just doesn’t mean very much statistically. Sawtooth waveform superimposed on rising secular trend. Leading edge to trailing edge can be a couple of decades. Happens all the time.

  6. Barry Woods | June 12, 2013 at 9:27 am |

    Hi Judy

    I think it all started with Ed Hawkins talking to James Annan on Twitter !! and tweeting the graphs that I think the economist graph came from)

    (see here 6th Feb)

    https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins/status/299562689598980096

    ——————–
    Ed Hawkins ‏
    @ed_hawkins 6 Feb
    The CMIP5 global temperature projections for 20 simulators that ran all RCP scenarios (& +0.6K for relative to pre-ind) pic.twitter.com/OnLO1d0B

    James Annan
    @jamesannan 6 Feb
    @ed_hawkins please replot normalised to 1961-90

    Ed Hawkins
    ‏@ed_hawkins
    @jamesannan CMIP5 projections relative to 1986-2005 (http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~ed/all_sim_GL_ANN.png …) & 1961-1990 (http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~ed/all_sim_GL_ANN_61-90.png …).

    Barry Woods ‏@BarryJWoods 7 Feb
    it will be interesting what the observed line looks like in 2020 only seven years away… @ed_hawkins @jamesannan ie more data

  7. Peter Lang | June 12, 2013 at 9:28 am |

    So why am I relating this particular story? A mainstream climate scientist, Hawkins, posts an unpublished diagram on a relatively obscure blog (8 Feb). RP Jr picks this up from a tweet, which he posts on his blog (15 Feb), JC posts Hawkins’ figure at CE (22 Feb). Makes it into the MSM on 16 March. Subsequently goes viral. Included in the U.S. Congressional Record on April 25.

    …

    This to me is a fascinating example of the ‘power’ of the climate blogosphere.

    Fascinating. That’s a good sign.

  8. angech | June 12, 2013 at 9:29 am |

    The pause is really,really biting. none of the proponents of AGW /CC are prepared to discuss it in a scientific manner. Instead the consensus is redusted and pushed with the 97% report of Cook making it into Wikipedia in record time as a ? reference point to claim the consensus.
    The three pillars of CO2 rising effect have been Arctic sea ice, surface temperature measurements and sea level rise. When one weakens another is brought out.One down, one going and one that should go [colder weather, sea volume, hence height, diminishes].
    THE mystery of the missing heat is like the mystery of the dog that didn’t bark. It simply isn’t there.

  9. Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 9:33 am |

    I think Ben Santer said at least 17 years to determine a climate trend, note the important “at least” that everyone seems to ignore.

    Checking the skeptical science trend calculator, no 17 year trends ending in 2013 are negative, but all but the land data are not statistically significant.

    I observe that the pause evaporates as soon as statistical significance is reached by increasing the time interval backwards from today.

    • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 9:44 am |

      You think? Stop thinking and start looking things up.

      Separating Signal and Noise in Atmospheric Temperature Changes: The Importance of Timescale, J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2011JD016263, in press.

      “Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”

      You’re welcome.

      • heinrich | June 12, 2013 at 10:02 am |

        ”
        You think? Stop thinking and start looking things up.
        ”

        Thinking and research are not mutually exclusive.

        You’re welcome.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 10:35 am |

        What’s the point Dave, I said I think and I way right, in fact I had read that paper, and was relying on memory, which served correctly.

        If the pause becomes statistically significant, look for my mea culpa here.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 10:51 am |

        Heh, it’s been seventeen years since Santer deprecated the narrative in Barcelona. Sing, cicadas, sing.
        ==============

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 12:55 pm |

        Dave, thank you for providing a cite for the Santer quote.

        The OP should have linked to Santer’s paper rather than to a WUWT post.
        And in the case of the Jones quote, the OP did not even refer to the original interview, but a secondary newspaper cite which ommited key parts of the Jones interview.
        I remember that Santer said “at least” and Jones said “but only just”
        Remember that and write that down.

        That criticism is not for you Dave, again thanks for original sources.

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 2:16 pm |

        Actually your memory failed you. Santer said 17 years minimum for human attribution not 17 years for a trend. Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit either. What is?

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 2:28 pm |

        A trend is neccessary for human attribution what’s the matter?

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 5:04 pm |

        Aha! Prevarication is your strong suit!

        I knew you, a person who probably can’t tie his shoes in the morning without help, must have some kind of talent.

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 5:06 pm |

        I must have really hit a nerve in the Heiny when I said anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can be a climate scientist. The truth hurts, eh Heiny?

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 5:36 pm |

        David,
        You are really nitpicking and misquoting Santer as much as I am, which I’ll admit is not much.
        One could say that temperature records and temperature trends are synonomous in the way Santer used the term temperature records, especially since he used the word trend or trends some 5 times in the abstract of the relevant paper.
        I am glad I give you so much pleasure.

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 3:29 pm |

        I quoted Santer directly. No misquote possible unless that’s not Santer’s paper that has Santer’s name as the author.

        “Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”

      • Bob Droege | June 14, 2013 at 11:06 am |

        No Dave, I meant the other time you quoted Santer

        “17 years minimum for human attribution”

        That is a misquote

    • Beth Cooper | June 12, 2013 at 11:35 am |

      Say Bob, “Ben Santer said re climate trends …’ Hmm, but
      Phil Jones also said… in a BBC interview that there had been no
      sign of significant warming since 1995. If yer take a look at the
      satelite data you’ll see how long (?) was the trend that determined
      global warming. About as long as a strong El Nino … And yer
      could take a look at Tony Brown’s extensive climate research
      while yr about it too.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 12:34 pm |

        Beth:
        One, you are misquoting Phil Jones, don’t do it again and write that down.
        Two, while Tony’s research is interesting, he claims the CET to be a valid proxy for global temps, I tend to agree for the period before there was significan human contributions to the amoun of CO2 in the atmosphere, but lateley CET is not soo good.
        Thirdly, I don’t understand you point about the lenth of a El Nino affecting a period of statistical significance, please elaborate.
        Fourth and lastly, doesn’t matter what Dr. Spencers latest data point is, his series still is statistically significant for the life of the series in the warming direction, and until one gets a statistically significant trend of no warming or cooling, you will get no mea culpa from me.

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 2:23 pm |

        Oh my. The possibility of a mea culpa from Bob Droege. Be still my beating heart!

      • Beth Cooper | June 13, 2013 at 9:58 pm |

        See detailed commentary on Lucia’s Blackboard and Air Vent
        re statistical significance claims. And here’s my source.
        http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html
        BC

      • Bob Droege | June 14, 2013 at 12:50 pm |

        Beth,
        you have to watch out for sources which change “the warming since 1995 is not statistically significant but only just” to “in the last 15 years there has been no statistically significant warming” and then to “There has been no global warming since 1995”

        Can you track those changes or do you need help?

    • Herman Alexander Pope | June 12, 2013 at 12:49 pm |

      THE REAL “LONG TERM TREND” IS THAT A COLD PERIOD FOLLOWS EVERY WARM PERIOD.

      THAT OCCURS BECAUSE IT SNOWS A LOT IN EVERY WARM PERIOD. OBSERVE OCTOBER 2012 TO MAY 2013. THE WARMER IT GETS THE MORE THE SNOW INCREASES. LOOK AT ACTUAL DATA.

  10. Barry Woods | June 12, 2013 at 9:34 am |

    Actually it started a little before that, Ed was chatting, tweeting graphs to Andrew Revkin, Gavin Schmitt, Andrew Montford and Doug Mcneall

    look back to 6th Feb 2013 here:
    https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins

  11. pokerguy | June 12, 2013 at 9:46 am |

    Thanks for this, Dr. C. That the NYT’s, the great bastion of western climate alarmism and the warmists last, great hope has conceded the pause has to be seen as significant. I don’t even much care what they’re saying about it… it’s the admission that it exists that’s important.

    • heinrich | June 12, 2013 at 10:09 am |

      ”
      That the NYT’s, the great bastion of western climate alarmism and the warmists last, great hope has conceded the pause has to be seen as significant.
      ”

      Actually, one needs at least 17 years of NYT concessions to argue significance.

      Also – the last, great hope of climate alarmists and warmists is James Delingpole. Strange, but true.

  12. Girma | June 12, 2013 at 9:49 am |

    But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not

    Why did they call us deniers when we sceptics predicted this pause four years ago?

    • pokerguy | June 12, 2013 at 10:05 am |

      Good question, Girma

      Also, I love the “given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on.”

      Ya think? I suppose it is somewhat important now that I think about it. Maybe not really, really important. But kinda important.

      And good thing the rest of us have those “practitioners of climate science” to figure this all out for us, especially since most of them did their best to deny the significance of the pause…if not the pause itself… until very recently.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:06 am |

        The globe is cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
        ==========================================

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 11:27 am |

        Kim, all that means is that you understand Newton’s law of cooling.

        Paging Mr. Obvious.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:28 am |

        No, the pause is obvious, the cooling subtle.
        =====

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 12:25 pm |

        The pause is obvious, but not statistically significant, there is the rub.

      • Herman Alexander Pope | June 12, 2013 at 12:55 pm |

        The cooling will occur on a schedule similar to the schedule after the peak of the Roman and Medieval Warm periods. Nothing significant has changed. The only change is a fraction of a trace of something and that will most likely have a fraction of a trace of influence on sea level and temperature. The good news is that it has more than a trace of influence on how green things grow and how much less water the green growing things need.

      • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 7:25 pm |

        Bob Droege

        The only thing “significant” about the current pause in global warming is:

        – that it has followed almost three decades of relatively rapid warming (which have been largely attributed to human GHGs)
        – that it is occurring when human GHG emissions are unabated and atmospheric concentrations are at an all-time high
        – that even die-hard supporters of the “consensus” view on CAGW (Hansen, Trenberth, etc.) have acknowledged that it exists
        – that it has triggered several new observation based studies on the CO2-temperature response (or equilibrium climate sensitivity), which all point to a lower ECS than previously predicted by the models.

        Other than that, it is not “significant”.

        Just like the warming period before it, it has had no “significant” impact on humans or our environment.

        Max

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 8:19 pm |

        Manacker,
        One day you will crack open both a dictionary and a basic statistics textbook and learn the difference between significant and statistically significant.

        The pause is not statistically significant as we speak, and whether the warming is significant is a different question.

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 8:25 am |

        If you think that CO2 is warming us, think how cooling we’d now be without anthro input. If you think its effect is minimal you can at least hope that the present cooling(pause) is driven by the oceanic oscillations, and given faith in the constancy of Total Solar Irradiation, you can hope the pause will end around 2030 and gradual warming will resume. Given, of course, faith in the constancy and the utility of the measurement of TSI. The sun is very sultry and we must avoid its ultry-violet rays.

        Pick a climate sensitivity that frightens you, and calculate how cold we’d now be without man’s input. At much over two, we’d now be beyond the previously tested lower limits of the Holocene had there been no anthro input.
        ====================

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 8:36 am |

        Kim the new Climate Rationalizing Bot. What version of upgrade you at? Windows only (barely) started to work at 3.0.

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:06 am |

        v42.
        ==

  13. Rob Bradley | June 12, 2013 at 9:58 am |

    An insightful analysis that is propelling the debate forward. One would think that in the information age, the differences could be narrowed better than has otherwise been the case. But hard data is coming to the rescue.

  14. heinrich | June 12, 2013 at 9:59 am |

    ”
    For an interesting take on the ‘power’ of the climate blogosphere, see also this recent essay by Pointman entitled How to run a really bad infowar campaign.
    ”
    http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/how-to-run-a-really-bad-infowar-campaign/

    Oh – This is really beautiful stuff, Judith. Interesting. Powerful, even…

    ”
    The whole alarmist movement is majestically spiralling inwards ever more quickly towards that event horizon around the black hole of political oblivion.
    ”

    ”
    That wide open Serengeti of the skeptic blogosphere is by now strewn with the rotting corpses of the scientific reputations of people like Hansen, Mann, Shakun, Marcott, Lewandowsky, Gergis, Cook and many others. A fair few of them have received their Purple Hearts from Retraction Watch.
    ”

    ”
    The most cursory glance at comments under some skeptic articles, points to a diversity of specialist expertise in the sceptic community that far exceeds anything to be found in the alarmist camp.
    ”

    Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Make it stop!

    Isn’t it just amazing what climate keyboard-warriors with a sense of dramatic flair and a knack for narcissism can accomplish with no data, no analysis, and without a single citation to a scientific publication?

    Take that – you climate “scientists”!

    • kim | June 12, 2013 at 10:53 am |

      Ponder the wonder, Heinrich.
      =============

    • timg56 | June 12, 2013 at 7:14 pm |

      when it comes to the “communicating” issue, you are far closer to being part of the problem than part of the solution. If you can’t see valid points in Pointman’s commentary, well at least you are eligible for confirmation as a true member of the faith.

    • David L. Hagen | June 12, 2013 at 9:21 pm |

      Pointman’s Purpose –fighting for justice for the poor

      “. . .The reason I began commenting was that I hated the effect the environmental movement was having on the developing world. A thinly veiled political movement, which is perceived as simply a fashionable lifestyle choice in the developed world, is causing death and misery amongst the eighty percent of humanity not fortunate enough to live well above the poverty line. Its influence and policies prevent the developing nations industrialising and maintain the status quo of keeping them in a state of permanent, grinding, border-line poverty. That is immoral and must be fought. Future historians, especially black African ones, will categorise the effects of the environmental movement as genocidal and they will be correct.

      Fighting AGW is an Information War and it’s fought in arenas of public opinion to which the people most harmed by it have absolutely no access. I write, post and comment in an effort to redress that fundamental injustice. . . .”

      In “How to run a really bad infowar campaign”
      Pointman provides great inspiration:

      “. . . any small group of people determined to resist what they consider to be a bad thing, can make a difference. They may have no representation politically, or any voice in the media, or anybody prepared to speak for them, but nowadays they can go to the mattresses by heading off into the blogosphere and doing it for themselves.

      Yes, they’ll have to learn a few new techy things, find out how to effectively present their views, put up with being slandered, libelled and generally be prepared to take a few drubbings, but if their cause has merit and above all truth, they know it can eventually win, because they’ll have already seen it done.”

      ©Pointman

      This is great inspiration and motivation to continue raising the issues of the severe abuse of science and the severe harm being done to the poor by alarmist “climate scientists”.

  15. Kirsten | June 12, 2013 at 10:02 am |

    Let’s get to a REAL starting point – the geological record. See The Whole Story of Climate by E. Kirsten Peters or explore http://www.climatewholestory.com

    • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 12, 2013 at 12:48 pm |

      The university library had this on the New book shelf. I paged through it and found only one figure, as I recall it was a chart of the warming trend. If an author of a scientific book can’t make the effort to use the tools of science, such as diagrams and illustrations, I am not going to make the effort to read it.

    • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 3:18 pm |

      Interesting quotes from E. Kirsten Peters

      “But it may be, of course, that all ice at the poles is going to melt – in which case that natural record will be lost.”
      “But if civilization survives I like to hope they will have some kind of written record about the atmosphere, including what we did to it. ”
      “I have no doubt that climate will change, and it will do so for two basic reasons. First, through industrialization we have markedly changed the composition of the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the air now stand at higher levels than ever before during the whole time period of the Holocene and Pleistocene Epochs (the last two million years of geologic time). It would be astonishing if climate did not change in response to such developments.”

      • DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 4:04 pm |

        “There are more knives and forks in the world now than ever before during the whole time period of the Holocene and Pleistocene Epochs (the last two million years of geologic time). It would be astonishing if climate did not change in response to such developments.”

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 5:49 pm |

        Doc Martyn,

        That was the most mean spirited comment I’ve seen in a while. It was so well done it brought a tear to my eye.

        +1

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 10:36 pm |

        Hey Doc,
        What about pirates?

    • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 5:41 pm |

      You’ve been misinformed. I’m near sighted. If you’re from Pasadena or Minnesota that means I can see close up just fine. All your concern is misplaced of course but in this particular case I should probably thank you for it. So thanks.

  16. Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 10:04 am |

    What pause?

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:101/mean:103/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/plot/best/mean:191/mean:193/to:1867/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/from:1988/to:1994/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2006/to:2008

    The ‘pause’, ‘plateau’, ‘slowing’, are all endpoint artefacts of conditions in the stratosphere that began following the 2007 temperature spike.

    This is no different than the Pinotubo lull of 1991.

    Remind me, what happened to GMT in the decade following 1991?

    • heinrich | June 12, 2013 at 10:15 am |

      ”
      What pause?
      ”

      The one that eveyone’s talking about, of course!

      Geez, Bart – Where have you been? The deep ocean or something?

      It’s all over teh blogs and Twitter and everything.

      Also – 9/11 was an inside job – and jet contrails are made of vaccines.

      • Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 10:26 am |

        Hrm. The techniques of Newton, Fourier and Einstein, or the techniques of Twitter? Which to choose? Which to choose?

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:09 am |

        Dematta derrida derida deranga disparajah dilingua hah!
        ====================

      • heinrich | June 12, 2013 at 11:43 am |

        ”
        The techniques of Newton, Fourier and Einstein, or the techniques of Twitter? Which to choose? Which to choose?
        ”

        It all depends – on whether one prefers popular untruths or unpopular truths.

        The former are easy to find – the latter are easy to avoid.

        YMMV.

    • lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 12:28 pm |

      Bart is correct, there is no pause. It’s a lie that climate deniers have come up with to mislead people.

      There is no statistically significant pause. The warming of the past 15 years is not statistically different than the preceding 15 years of warming.

      Tamino’s graph best exposes the lie in graphical form.

      • dennis adams | June 12, 2013 at 1:59 pm |

        lolwot
        Come on lolwot.! Once in a while you have good points. Things to consider and reflect on. And then you try to use statistical weasel words to deny something that any school kid can see. Something has changed in the last few years. What is it precisely? Who knows, but it is there. Should I believe you or my lying eyes. When you play the denier role on this one, you lose credibility for all your other arguments.

      • timg56 | June 12, 2013 at 7:18 pm |

        lolwot,

        You’ve uncovered the great conspiracy. Damn, I’m gonna be pissed if my monthly checks stop coming.

      • Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 10:49 pm |

        captdallas 0.8 or less | June 12, 2013 at 6:15 pm |

        Bzzt. Sloppy, rushed, pointless.

        A classic example of a graph that’s trying to make the people who look at it stupider than they started.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 12, 2013 at 10:52 pm |

        BartR, It is never “sloppy” to show measurement uncertainty and that is good habit unless you are into used car sales.

      • Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 10:54 pm |

        captdallas 0.8 or less | June 12, 2013 at 10:52 pm |

        But you don’t reveal anything about Uncertainty. All you do is fingerpaint without understanding or appreciation of what the words you say mean.

        Overstating Uncertainty is a sure sign of weak analyses.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 12, 2013 at 11:52 pm |

        Bart said:

        “Overstating Uncertainty is a sure sign of weak analyses.”

        True. What you have to do when faced with uncertainty is to maximize it, subject to constraints. That is one way of quantifying uncertainty without overstating it and it works remarkably well for many applications. For example, if you now the mean and the variance as constraints, then you can use a gaussian as an uncertainty envelope. That is called Normal statistics. Lo and behold, it works, Cappy could apply it to the plot he linked to.
        By the same token, if all you know is the mean, then you can use a damped exponential to quantify the uncertainty. That works well for highly disordered systems.

        The point is that you have to understand how to quantify the uncertainty, not act like Cappy and massively hand-wave and flail your way around it.

        This is a very recent example of quantifying uncertainty I did for a Lithium-ion battery discharge model:
        http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/06/characterization-of-battery-charging.html

        The goal was to estimate the battery discharge rate based on uncertainty in the electrochemical characteristics and properties of the anodic material. The end result is that by properly quantifying uncertainty, one can do an even better job in modeling than a conventional model with fixed parameters.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 13, 2013 at 11:34 pm |

        BartR, “Overstating Uncertainty is a sure sign of weak analyses.”

        I am more of a results kinda guy. You can have a very strong analysis that is not worth squat when new data is made available, kinda like the situation with climate science right now.

        Since you were taking BEST’s worst confidence segment and overly smoothing then splicing with other data, the picture changes when you put in the 95% confidence intervals.

        https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-zz3b_nx9E_I/Ua1L-4Q65RI/AAAAAAAAIZc/hXnBPycSUio/s815/oppo%2520and%2520CET.png

        No confidence intervals in that and it is splice to a distant region.

        https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-yCVnY6nXIiQ/UZmVEhGt-oI/AAAAAAAAIJs/EozQSkgn614/s817/IPWP%2520spliced%2520with%2520cru4%2520shifted%2520anomaly%2520from%25200ad.png

        No confidence intervals on that, but it is spliced to a more appropriate region.

        That Oppo IPWP data is available at noaa paleo and the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool is one of those ENSO related regions that seem to impact climate. It could be a teleconnection sweet-spot since it seems to be not too shabby a fit with the Central England Temperature.

        Since that matched up pretty well with the CRUt4 30-30 region, how about this?

        https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-u3b-zv8kbXw/UboHnO-BcbI/AAAAAAAAIko/OtKKX1EX6hc/s983/GISS%2520and%2520Hadley%2520from%25201915.png

        I plotted the monthly data with trends so anyone can see the noisy and even put in a 2 sigma range around the mean of the noisiest series. Extending the regressions to 2060 is kinda like a poor man’s projections. I don’t see 3 C in our immediate future. About 300 years from now? Possibly, but it is more likely temperatures will stay around those two lines. If you transfer those two lines to the Oppo recon, that is a fairly popular range.

      • Bart R | June 14, 2013 at 10:24 am |

        captdallas 0.8 or less | June 13, 2013 at 11:34 pm |

        Except you did not do as you say you did.

        Results that differ from claims are just mistakes or fraud.

        You include in your ‘variability’ every month from the 95% CI, splatted on top of all the other lines in the graph, needlessly obscuring them with extraneity. Unless you think that seasonal variability is of interest to viewers of the graph, you are simply, sloppily, in error.

        You don’t smooth your upper and lower bounds lines even by enough to remove seasonal variation, so we know your Uncertainty to be overstated by a factor of at least twelve. We could rest there with your errors, as they are enough to entirely invalidate your argument.

        Also, what is your basis for ‘overly smoothing’? 32 years is the right smoothing to achieve a useful confidence interval to discuss climate. What’s your basis for deciding what is and isn’t the right degree of smoothing? Aggressively smoothing only to 17 years — achieving mere 95% confidence — to present an estimate of where the climate likely is heading where we lack sufficient data to produce a proper 32-year curve is questionable, but in this case strongly consilient with other trendology, and smoothing to only five years is absolutely useless for climatology, but necessary for us to ask the question, “what happened between 2007 and 2008?”

        Is the peak of 2007 indicative of where the climate is heading due CO2 levels, and the nearly 0.7C drop in one year the start of a subdecadal dip typical of post-volcano climate? LIDAR suggests yes. The history of volcanic eruptions suggests yes. The behavior of the PDO as measured solely by regional surface temperatures is no more plausibly explained by cyclic oscillation than by volcanic aerosols in the upper stratum leading to local amplification. It typically takes about five years for such episodes to end, not the 20-40 years some suggest..

        And isn’t it interesting, how the 20-40 year range was established? There was a 40-year cool phase and a 20 year warm phase, then a 30-year cool and 30-year warm, then 20-year cool and 40-year warm. Well, (40, 30, 20, ..) could be described as 20-40, or it could be described as a decadally decreasing series with an expected next value of ten.

        Also, isn’t it interesting how the start of the cool phase was determined? By haphazardly asserting the 2007 flip was the start, instead of the 1998 flip that was much larger, and followed famously by La Nina’s. Would not then we have gone already fifteen years into that 20-40 year PDO cool phase. (The one that might be only 10 years long?)

        LIDAR suggests so. The history of the PDO suggests so.

        And then there’s the AMO, which Dr. Curry has recently been rightly congratulated on publishing about.. behind a paywall.. Well, the AMO is warm and due to stay warm for another two decades. Its behavior over the last half century is indistinguishable in amplitude or frequency from the half century before that, yet the normalized world climate in the last half century has dramatically warmer kinetics than the first half century. AMO explains, in other words, nothing.

        CET is just a regional record. Expressing overconfidence in its contribution while deprecated much larger records with overstated uncertainty is simply a biased presentation of fact. It’s clear you seek to confirm preconceived, and wrong, notions in this way.

        The most parsimonious, simple, universal explanation for the normalized decadal trendology of the past two decades suggests the best explanation is we’re seeing a combination of ocean oscillation and volcano aerosol bringing every possible downward pressure in the short term on the larger global trend, and we still have the highest temperatures globally in over two centuries due increasing CO2 level.

      • Bart R | June 14, 2013 at 1:58 pm |

        What the graph might look like, were one competently attempting to emphasize the Uncertainty and variability:

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:119/mean:121/detrend:0.42/offset:0.51/from:1890/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:101/mean:103/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:119/mean:121/offset:-0.51/detrend:-0.42/from:1890/plot/best-upper/mean:119/mean:121/to:1890/plot/best/mean:191/mean:193/to:1890/plot/best-lower/mean:119/mean:121/to:1890/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/from:1988/to:1994/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2006/to:2008

        We smooth the upper and lower bounds representations standing in for 95% CI to remove the Hale cycle. After all, we can demonstrate by method of isolates that the signal of the Hale cycle vanished from GMT’s unnatural normalized trend around 1950-1960 and has not been seen since, so it isn’t a very interesting signal and well-worth washing out of the curves.

        Further, as we know the data is not independent, the 95% CI lines from BEST are enormously overstated for their original stated purpose, as well as for the use we’re attempting to adapt them to. We’re at more like 99.5% CI, all told, with this representation. In short, we’re still overstating Uncertainty, and for no good reason.

        Our purpose is to understand the 2007-2008 flip of almost 0.7C in exactly one year. Looking back through similar historic events, 19 in 20 can be attributed to volcanic eruption sending aerosols above 10 km. Looking at past events, we see some weaker correlation with El Nino/La Nina pairs. The coincidence of such pairs with such eruptions is consilient with this explanation, historically.

        There is too little data, and of too little quality, to sustain alternate hypotheses. In Science, we historically recommend to Policy that the most parsimonious, simplest, most universal explanation — as this one is — is accurate or very nearly true.

        Therefore, with confidence, we can as informed citizens adopt a view that the present UNT due CO2E has not paused, and is entirely behaving as one would expect under the influence of unpredictable natural volcano and to a much lesser degree ocean overturning.

        Further, UCK due Forcing remains strong and growing, and can be laid entirely at the feet of a few leech-like Free Riders whose tyrannical usurpation of our Carbon Cycle adversely affects us all in the pocket.

  17. Girma | June 12, 2013 at 10:08 am |

    JC


    I know that my testimony led David Rose to use Hawkins’ diagram; I suspect the same for the Economist article (either directly or via Rose’s article).

    God bless you.

    Fighting for the integrity of science is a great cause.

  18. Girma | June 12, 2013 at 10:09 am |

    I know that my testimony led David Rose to use Hawkins’ diagram; I suspect the same for the Economist article (either directly or via Rose’s article).

    God bless you.

    Fighting for the integrity of science is a great cause.

  20. Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 10:21 am |

    The sociology of the pause merely proves the effectiveness of the Big Lie technique.

    Objectively, no trendologist could call a pause or plateau, and only one in six chance or so of slowing, on the data.

    We know from Santer than sub-17 year trend lines are below 95% predictive of actual climate trend. We know from better analyses that the confidence interval for periods below 30 years is too low for comparison purposes.

    At 32 years, we hit sufficient sigma level without losing too much granularity in climate observations to discuss GMT changes meaningfully. Using method of isolates we can confirm this. Using regression we can confirm this. Analysis by parts confirms this using segmentation of the data.

    The GWPF fostered the Pause Big Lie, riffing on and repeating over and over the observed chain of shorter artefacts in the record, starting from the 1998 El Nino spike, and following on a random pair of La Nina years and a random pair of high-atmosphere volcano plumes after the 2007 high point.

    Sociologically, we’re seeing the natural human tendency to doubt mathematics and yield to what we objectively know to be wrong.

    • lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 12:31 pm |

      Another part of the lie was to falsely claim Phil Jones and Pachauri had “admitted” the pause existed. Deniers make great use of Phil Jones saying warming since 1995 was not statistically significant and distort that to claim he said there had been no warming. They omit the fact that a year later Phil Jones pointed out warming since 1995 was now significant.

      Deniers have been lying repeatedly about this. To the point that some non-climate people (eg NYT) get tricked into thinking the pause is something that exists.

      Then they get lumped into the group of people who have “admitted it”.

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 12, 2013 at 2:22 pm |

        The big lie of the pause allows BAU to continue for a brief period. Any excuse is useful as long as it prolongs the period in which we do not have to think about alternative energy approaches.

        The big lie of the pause here is the same big lie in the plateauing in world-wide crude oil production. Yet the math is inverted. The powers that be decided to remove the plateau by calling refinery gains an increase in crude oil, and by adding natural gas liquids to the tally.

        Same result, same outcome. We don’t have to think about reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

        The people see what they want to see in the data, so they can rationalize short term gains over long term stability. And we are thick in the midst of those types on this commenting area.

    • DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 4:18 pm |

      I will not use 32 years, even, or 33, harminic of 11, so I used 37 years.

      http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/HADCRU437yearaverage_zps49abacfb.png

      The rate of temperature change peaked in 1991 and has fallen since then.

    • timg56 | June 12, 2013 at 7:25 pm |

      lol and web,

      I was told that believing in conspiracies was an attribute of climate denalists.

    • stevepostrel | June 12, 2013 at 7:48 pm |

      This line of argument is bizarre. Are you really claiming that the temperature measurements are too inaccurate to tell if surface temperatures have gone up or down between 1995 and today? And if not, just what are you talking about?

      It seems as though your argument is that a) the actual surface temperature is equal to some Platonic “true” temperature plus some unsystematic error process and b) that we should only be concerned with this Platonic ideal. But neither part of that argument is established, and in fact your are begging the question by saying “no statistically significant pause exists.”

      • stevepostrel | June 12, 2013 at 8:49 pm |

        The Met Office takes the same dim view of this type of statistical significance analysis as I have above. Here is their response to Keenan’s time-series analysis:

        http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/statistical-models-and-temperature

        Unless you are claiming measurement error, the “statistical significance” of the pause is not a useful way of thinking about the data. The actual rate of warming has clearly slowed or come to a halt (depending on exact starting points, etc.) over the last 18 years.

        The Platonic rate could be doing a lot of different things. The Met Office says Keenan’s preferred third-order driiftless AR process beats the linear-trend AR1, but that there are other processes that do have trends that do even better. Box-Cox wars are not usually terribly edifying.

  21. sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 10:24 am |

    Bart the Denier is having a very bad day.

    “I went to sleep with gum in my mouth and now there’s gum in my hair and when I got out of bed this morning the NY Times admitted there was a pause and by mistake I dropped my sweater in the sink while the water was running and I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.”

    • Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 10:31 am |

      sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 10:24 am |

      Now here’s a perfect example of the sociology of ‘The Pause’.

      Pure ad personam and propaganda with neither understanding nor science.

    • Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 11:19 am |

      sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 10:45 am |

      Well, neither of us has a sense of humor. On the one hand, I wrongly don’t sense you to have told a joke. On the other hand, you erringly sense you did.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:23 am |

        In the face of such contradiction, what’s a kibbitzer to do?
        =========

      • sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 12:51 pm |

        Bart R, I can see the spittle on your monitor. Calm down. Just because the NY Times has called you a denier is no reason to pretend you have a sense of humor.

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 2:39 pm |

        That’s not spittle.

      • Steven Mosher | June 14, 2013 at 11:05 am |

        I think we all should be equipped with tails

        http://neurowear.com/projects_detail/shippo.html

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 12:00 pm |

        Not only do I think tails are a step backward both literally and figuratively in human evolution I think we should get rid of all body parts and be able to download our minds into computers and if the damn climate models would grow up we could have a digital world indistinguishable from the real one. We still couldn’t decide on an optimum temperature for it which is really the root of the problem – we each need our own personal reality.

      • kim | June 14, 2013 at 1:27 pm |

        We are all equipped with tales. Some prehensive.
        ============

      • mwgrant | June 14, 2013 at 1:39 pm |

        Steven Mosher offered

        “I think we all should be equipped with tails”

        That was tried but there was a mis-communication and we were all equipped with tales.

  22. climatereason | June 12, 2013 at 10:34 am |

    And here is Tonyb’s ‘long slow thaw’ whereby CET demonstrates a slow rise in temperature trend throughout the instrumental record and an ‘inexplicable’ plunge over the last decade .

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/

    Only inexplicable of course if you believe in the constancy of climate shown in the hockey stick which smooths and averages imprecise proxies over extended periods and gets rid of the ‘noise’ that are the dramatic annual variations of temperatures clearly seen in CET. These variations are also readily seen in the written record as cold/warm/wet and dry periods intermingled with extremes way beyond anything seen in the modern era. .
    tonyb

  23. miker613 | June 12, 2013 at 10:35 am |

    What is the level of acceptance in the climate community of the calculations/measurements showing “missing heat going into the deep ocean”? And what do you think?

    • Ammonite | June 13, 2013 at 11:29 pm |

      miker613’s raises a question that strikes at the crux of the matter. Suppose energy accumulates in the deep ocean beyond the original expectations of the climate community. More in the depths means less at the surface. As such, transient surface temperature response will be muted compared to anticipation, ocean heat content will continue its inexorable rise and estimates of equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) using observational data that fail to account for deep ocean warming will form lower bounds for the true ECS.

      Is deep ocean warming happening? It appears so (though yet again the scientific community is hampered by less than perfect data). Please refer to the papers attached to the linked RealClimate article (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/04/the-answer-is-blowing-in-the-wind-the-warming-went-into-the-deep-end/#more-15062).

      • miker613 | June 14, 2013 at 1:04 pm |

        “Please refer to the papers attached to the linked RealClimate article.” Well, that’s what I was asking. I’m not a climate scientist. Are the papers any good? Have there been dissenting opinions? This “reanalysis” sounds rather worse than your “less than perfect data”, but maybe their analysis is good nonetheless. That’s what I’m asking.

      • kim | June 14, 2013 at 1:29 pm |

        That heat can do whatever human imagination requires of it, but will most likely willfully re-emerge at the end of the Holocene, thank Gaia.
        ==================

      • Ammonite | June 14, 2013 at 6:16 pm |

        The analyses lay some flesh on the bones of plausibility. A number of mechanisms have been proposed for deep ocean warming in various parts of the globe: a cold top layer insulator from glacial run-off in the southern ocean, relatively warmer waters sinking at the pole, enhanced ocean overturning from increased surface winds. Deep ocean warming remains an open area of research.

        For kim: if only witticism amounted to criticism.

  24. mosomoso | June 12, 2013 at 10:35 am |

    The NYT. Trust the journal of reference to be richly nuanced, multi-layered, and complex in this still-critical moment for the planet. Yes, they were right all along, and it’s still worse than we thought…it’s just that there’s always time for a little elaborate prose as humanity basks on its complacent plateau, takes in the lull.

    Note how they head the article with the picture of a stormy sky looming over Bangkok. No more sweltering polar bears or raging fire fronts for the Gray Lady. Nuance time!

    I get it, I get it. In future, I’ll look for an emphasis on extreme weather events rather than vulgar, simplistic, linear warming. (Never too reliable!) And because one can’t possibly run out of extreme weather events and the means to report and magnify them, the future looks much better for the NYT than for the daffy, hysterical Guardian.

    The Gray Lady has had long practice with climate prognostications.
    This from 1895: “Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.”
    Then there was their front page warning of “an Encroaching Ice Age” – in 1912!
    By 1933 they could report: “America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise.”
    But by the seventies, of course, you weren’t worth your flared jeans if you couldn’t raise a new Ice Age. Thus the NYT in 1974: “..the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure in a decade.” Government action was needed to avert “mass deaths by starvation and probably… anarchy and violence.”
    Next year, 1975, the Times gave us the bad news for sure: “A major cooling [was] widely considered to be inevitable.”

    Are there any adults in journalism? Any at all? Hello? Adults?

    • pokerguy | June 12, 2013 at 11:14 am |

      Moso,
      Beautifully done. One fine piece of writing sir.
      Among my favorites: “Yes, they were right all along, and it’s still worse than we thought…it’s just that there’s always time for a little elaborate prose as humanity basks on its complacent plateau, takes in the lull.”

    • JeffN | June 12, 2013 at 4:30 pm |

      A classic of this genre was from Bryan Walsh, of Time Magazine, who recently was tasked with addressing the fact that Time covered the coming ice age in a cover story in the 1970s.
      After a nifty little sleight of hand confusing different years and cover stories, his real conclusion was summed up in a quote:
      “But as John Cook points out over at Skeptical Science, global cooling was much more an invention of the media than it was a real scientific concern.”
      http://science.time.com/2013/06/06/sorry-a-time-magazine-cover-did-not-predict-a-coming-ice-age/#ixzz2W2EoJQX3

      Ah, yes. Don’t trust Time Magazine, according to Time Magazine. Except today, of course. Anyone who worries that today’s stories about climate are an “invention of the media” should be fitted for a tinfoil hat.
      According to Time Magazine, and who would doubt Time Magazine?
      I wonder if any enterprising reporter will call up the author of those stories from the ’70s and ask them why they made all that stuff up out of whole cloth.

      • DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 5:09 pm |

        “Don’t trust Time Magazine”; I am cut to the quick, my visits to the Dentist office will never be the same.

  25. kim | June 12, 2013 at 10:48 am |

    The sociology is settled. Sic semper Tyrannis.
    =============

  26. Beth Cooper | June 12, 2013 at 10:49 am |

    A pregnant pause, here’s a contretemps
    That puzzles the will and makes practitioners
    Of climate science wish they knew just what
    Exactly’s going down or whether missing
    Heat’s escaping into space. Alas!
    Shall we take arms against a sea of troubles
    And by opposing public slings and arrows,
    Silence them?
    To be, or not to be?
    That Is a question must give us pause…

    H/t Hamlet

  27. gbaikie | June 12, 2013 at 10:50 am |

    When glaciers are advancing for centuries during an interglacial period, this is not a normal period.
    If glaciers had not begun to retreat by 1850, and continued to advance to the present time, it would have been very strong evidence- hundreds of years of evidence- that we were at end of the current interglacial period.

    But because it’s warmed a bit for century or two, we don’t have such evidence.
    Instead, we simple don’t know when the interglacial period will end.

  28. sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 10:50 am |

    Bart R needs some valium. He’s having a no good very bad day.

  29. Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 10:55 am |

    Sociology is what you look back on and ruminate on to make some sense of like, why did academia join with the Left to abandon the scientific method and help destroy their economy?

  30. WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 12, 2013 at 10:56 am |

    It’s not Nic Foster, it’s Nick Stokes. There is also a Nic Lewis but like Steve McIntyre, he seems clueless about much of the science. I am not sure what expertise in finance and business adds to the mix. Sure they can spot a few accounting errors here and there but that’s about it. OTOH, Stokes is the man. On the skeptic side, you also have to givesome props to Lubos Motl and Clive Best.

    • kim | June 12, 2013 at 10:57 am |

      Nic Foster wants to know where to go to get his reputation back.
      ======

    • curryja | June 12, 2013 at 11:04 am |

      typo, i meant nic lewis, has been corrected

    • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 11:25 am |

      “The Science” isn’t as difficult as some would like to portray it. Access to information is so unversal anyone can easily get at textbooks and data anywhere anytime with as little as a smart phone.

      In other words the barriers to entry into “science” have been reduced to the size, weight, and cost of a laptop with a broadband internet connection. Competition in the marketplace of competing ideas increased by orders of magnitude with the lowering of the barriers.

      Get used to it.

      • heinrich | June 12, 2013 at 12:20 pm |

        If a high-speed data connection is equivalent to “science”, then the NSA must be full of Nobel laureates.

        Who needs universities with research labs, when you’ve got an iPhone and e-texts?

        Who needs “doctors” and “engineers” and “physicists” when you’ve got blogs and crowd-sourcing?

        Anyway – I really like the way you put scare-quotes around “science”.
        Did you learn how to do that in the marketplace of competing ideas?

      • David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 2:45 pm |

        I’m glad you found something to like in what I wrote. I’ll look harder at what you write in the hope that I’ll be able to return the favor some day.

      • timg56 | June 12, 2013 at 7:30 pm |

        Dave,

        That will take great commitment and likely several decades.

  31. Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 11:01 am |

    Sociology 101: California went Greek as a result of the Leftists’ pogrom against capitalism and the liberal corruption of the culture. Cities across America were driven to the brink of bankruptcy (much like GM was driven into debt by the unions). More and more resources were diverted from the productive to fuel a ravenous secular, socialist Big Government which included the doomsday-dropout factories of the Education Industrial Complex. Academia did more than any other institution to foster the climate porn industry and for a simple reason: to command power over the futures of the productive. That is what Eurocommunism was all about from the beginning and the global warming hoax was simply a tactic that the Left employed to achieve their Marxist Utopia.

    • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:04 am |

      There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.
      Nature’s confounded them all with a blip.
      ================

      • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 12:03 pm |

        No amount of slamming of Americanism and playing games with data will ever change nature’s mind about what comes next — not one bit.

      • Max_OK | June 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm |

        Well then, Waggy, why waste your time slamming Americanism and playing games with data? Unless, of course you want people to not like you. But then the question is why do you want to be disliked rather than liked?

  32. Rud Istvan | June 12, 2013 at 11:12 am |

    Judith, great commentary. What you are pointing out is something more powerful than the Internet or blogs. True scientific peer review is now happening faster in cyberspace than in paywalled ‘peer review space’ with respect to climate science. That is because although there are obviously a lot of laymen, and ‘crackpots’, there are also a lot of true peers. Some credentialed (e.g. Pielke) and some uncredentialed (e.g. Nic Lewis, Steve McIntyre) who have chosen to study and understand.
    Those folks are focusing on the big issues (uncertainty, sensitivity, pause…) rather than flawed intermodal comparison in co-opted pal reviewed literature.
    It may be the beginning of a new (at least improved) model for genuine scientific discourse.

  33. Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 11:15 am |

    Now, if there _were_ a pause, which there just isn’t sufficient evidence of to suggest, the GCMs project pauses about a third of the time.

    Why is there so much talk of ‘Pause’?

    Well, because it’s easy to imply to suggestible audiences — which all large enough audiences contain — that stops, pauses, plateaus and the like are equivalent to end or even ‘return to normal’ or disproof.

    Which, although there is no objective case for, is what the majority of readers take from stories that emphasize pause where there just isn’t one.

    The sociology of this phenomenon is the sociology of propaganda, and it appears the propaganda is intentional, orchestrated, encouraged and being fallen for by people who ought know better.

    When there is a pause, which I expect could happen.. it won’t mean much, and it certainly won’t mean disproof of GHE.

    It assuredly won’t touch the problems of UCK due Forcing, or be more than a nuance of UNT.

    • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:19 am |

      Think ‘Cat’s Pause’.
      =============

    • pokerguy | June 12, 2013 at 11:36 am |

      The ever reasonable Bart writes:
      “When there is a pause, which I expect could happen.. it won’t mean much, and it certainly won’t mean disproof of GHE

      However, I think we can safely say that at the very least, it (that is the pause that’s happening now…the one you refuse to acknowledge for reasons known only to you and your psychiatrist) does not strengthen the case for policies which might well be more harmful than the disease they purport to treat.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:39 am |

        The operation wasn’t successful, so the patient has a chance to live.
        ================

      • pokerguy | June 12, 2013 at 1:16 pm |

        Hah!
        OMG, the patient’s pulse is back. And I think his big toe twitched. We’d better open him up again and really muck around in there, like we really mean it this time.

      • Bart R | June 13, 2013 at 9:23 am |

        pokerguy | June 12, 2013 at 11:36 am |

        A graph is a visual metaphor. Interpreting data on a graph is a metaphorical exercise.

        Mixing metaphor with metaphor?

        That’s just a way to confuse your interpretation.

        Is it your intention to bring confusion to what ought be a clear issue?

        Why are you seeking to confuse the issue?

        And why do you think anyone would care what someone so confused thinks ‘we’ can safely say?

        If you’ve brought more confusion to the state of policy, you’re presenting an argument for more, rather than less, extreme measures to remedy the artificial confusion.. and with likelier result of applying bad remedies.

        But then, you’re kinda handwavy and vague in your confusion about what policies, what harm, what disease and what treatment you think is going on here.

        The ‘pause’, if it happens, does nothing to weaken either the case for GHE or UNT, nor the case for policies to address UCK.

        The GCMs predict pauses.

        Pauses are expected.

        The timing of pauses is known to be unpredictable due the unpredictable nature of those events that trigger subdecadal variability and the complex nature of their interactions with somewhat reliable ocean oscillations and planetary tilt.

        So there could be another 40 years like the past six, or ten, or fifteen (which would be three very different 40-year periods in a lot of ways), and it would do nothing to weaken the case to address UCK.

        Climate Kinetics are Unnatural, patently, on the data. If the data stopped showing unnatural patterns, that would be the test that would weaken the case for policy action to address the sources of the Forcings.

        These trends behave abnormally due large Forcing components from lucrative human activities that benefit relatively few who do not pay compensation for the benefit they obtain from these activities and who do not have the consent of the people they harm.

        Pauses, when they do happen, are just a natural effect in an unnatural course. You don’t say a drunk driver has sobered up just because his car hits a speed bump.

  34. Rud Istvan | June 12, 2013 at 11:36 am |

    Mosomoso, you not only have the ‘Grey Lady’ appropriately hoisted on her own Petard. Time ran a series of articles in the 70’s on the coming ice age. When it didn’t, they switched to global warming in about 1990. When it didn’t, they switched to extreme weather with Katrina, then doubled down with Sandy. Never mind that even NOAA says Sandy had nothing to do with AGW. Such main stream journals seldom let simple facts get in the way of their nuanced opinions. After all, they are smarter and wiser than the rest of us incapable of aspiring to their lofty positions as arbiters, rather than the reporters they no longer are.

    • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:38 am |

      The narrative cowers under colliding fronts. Extreme weather ahead.
      ================

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:34 am |

        An F5 flays Bart R’s brain and he sees an emerald city with a better use for the Times.
        ===========

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:34 am |

        Dang, that one hit before the alarum!
        =============

      • climatereason | June 13, 2013 at 11:21 am |

        BartR said

        ‘If you want to be Aussie online, then speak to Aussie topics. You want to complain about newspapers, complain about Aussie newspapers.’

        Bart, with respect this is the WORLD wide web. There is a clue there in those words that this is not a parish magazine where the most important subject are the state of the pavements outside the local Post office.

        Come now, I have never taken you to be parochial.
        tonyb

    • mosomoso | June 12, 2013 at 12:04 pm |

      Indeed, what do these people do but take hold of recent weather/climate conditions and start stretching, decorating their daft extrapolations with “scientists warn” and “geologists say”? All trends end (except black dresses with single pearls) but nobody feels that way when the weather is too hot, too cold or too turbulent. Enter the Times, the Guardian or Le Monde, using their august mastheads to lend some authority to the hysterics.

      If only Sarah Palin had looked Katie Couric in the eye and said: “Actually, I don’t read any of your fancy eastern rags, but the New York Times is perfect for wrappin’ salmon guts.” I’ll never forgive the woman for fumbling that golden moment.

      • Bart R | June 13, 2013 at 9:30 am |

        mosomoso | June 12, 2013 at 12:04 pm |

        I’m a bit confused.. I’d expect to hear an American with an opinion of Palin and/or Couric. But aren’t you.. y’know.. a foreigner?

        Not that this is the only thing wrong with your comment, but what makes foreigners think Sarah Palin is fair game for them? Or that American television is something Americans care to hear their opinion about or see them influence? When we want an Australian to say something on US television, I’m sure Mel Gibson’ll be available.

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 10:02 am |

        Just in case you really are confused, I am a homo sapiens commenting on the world wide web on whatever subject I please. Hope that helps with your confusion re nationality.

        In case you are confused to the point of obtuseness, the barbs were directed at Couric and her employers, Big Smug – not the capable Sarah Palin.

        As to the American born American citizen, Mel Gibson, I don’t hang with demented anti-Semites. Even if the guy was an Aussie I’d give him a wide berth. Mind you, the fact that he is American doesn’t make me shy of giving an opinion.

      • Bart R | June 13, 2013 at 10:34 am |

        mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 10:02 am |

        So that’d be three Americans you’ve attacked from foreignland, now?

        You attack American publications, with no American stake in these American businesses.

        You claim the Internet gives you that right.

        And sure, free speech is a fine value.

        Except yours is an argument by a foreigner to curtail domestic free speech that disagrees with your foreign views.

        How do you think that plays here in America?

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 10:43 am |

        “Except yours is an argument by a foreigner to curtail domestic free speech that disagrees with your foreign views.”

        You forgot to ask when I stopped beating my wife, and if I was absolutely sure I haven’t sacrificed baby dolphins to Baal.

        Bart R, I’m learning quickly that you will say ANYTTHING T

      • Bart R | June 13, 2013 at 11:10 am |

        mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 10:43 am |

        Anything T?

        Is that Anything True?

        Anything Timely?

        Anything To reveal hypocrits?

        We really ought devote some time to the Sociology of people who are so envious of America that they can’t help forgetting sometimes that they aren’t American.

        That they have no credible right to interfere in American political life, or attack American freedoms and values to an American audience.

        From the spectacle of Lord Monckton dressing up as a pink cowboy and assassinating the character of American scientists to Australians showing Palin love by, “I’ll never forgive the woman for fumbling“.. we see this over and over.

        If you want to be Aussie online, then speak to Aussie topics. You want to complain about newspapers, complain about Aussie newspapers. Not that there are so many left in the world that _aren’t_ Australian owned.. say, wouldn’t those be the ones that deny unnatural normalized trends and unnatural climate kinetics?

        Shilling for Murdock, moso?

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 11:15 am |

        Sorry, I hit enter when I meant to hit delete. Result was too many Ts and no more sentence.

        Bart, you will say anything to stay in an argument. Why not check if Gibson is an Aussie? Check to see if I have suggested curtailing anybody’s free speech. Read harder. Lose the bogus indignation and lame moralising and just read harder.

        Do I feel free to attack American publications? Definitely. Do I feel free to direct critical barbs at any number of Americans? Yes. Accuse me of that, by all means.

        Here in Australia we have locals who do Yankee-Go-Home as a response to “foreign” commenters. I assure you that I remind these provincial twerps that publications and opinions go everywhere on the web, and can be contradicted and rebutted freely everywhere they go.

        How do I think my opinions on American media will play with Americans? I know of one American who doesn’t like them. I’m glad he has a platform to say so.

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 11:27 am |

        Er, Bart, Rupert Murdoch is not an Australian citizen. He is an American citizen. Doh. Again.

        You know, Bart, I love America and Americans so much that I can even live with your aimless indignation and angry threshing. At least you’re excited about something. God knows what that is, but I love American energy in just about any form.

      • heinrich | June 13, 2013 at 11:41 am |

        ”
        We really ought devote some time to the Sociology of people who are so envious of America that they can’t help forgetting sometimes that they aren’t American.
        That they have no credible right to interfere in American political life, or attack American freedoms and values to an American audience.
        ”

        Speaking of credible rights:
        It’s not envy that encourages some people to interfere in US political life – it’s all that Manifest Destiny you USAians like to inflict on the ROTW.

        Your use of “American” is a case in point. Canadians and Mexicans and Brazilians and Venezuelans are American. (Don’t tell Wagathon.)

        And then there’s the exceptionalism. The audience is not “an American audience”.

        Since your “America” emits about 20% of the world’s CO2 – arguably everyone has a credible right to interfere in its political life.

        Don’t even get me started on the CIA and extra-judical assassinations.

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 12:03 pm |

        heinrich bellows an echo of angry thrashing and aimless indignation.
        =============

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 12:10 pm |

        While I’ve most certainly taken sharp digs at several Americans here – though not America’s dynamic Rupert Murdoch! – I just want to say that no amount of American failings can dim my love for the energy and generosity of America. Nothing in my comments should or could be construed as an attack on the great USA. I won’t apologise for misunderstandings because there can be none – for anyone even loosely attentive to what I actually wrote. My comments were no more anti-American than Monckton’s pink costume (which would be a hit among the cowboys at our local Kundabung Rodeo). And if anyone thinks this is a good opportunity for an anti-American rant…I have a sharp and ready tongue for such sport!

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 12:16 pm |

        Ah, these Ubu Abuelos. Bierce the heart of Chickamauga.
        ============

      • GaryM | June 13, 2013 at 1:26 pm |

        Ya gotta love the faux patriotism of progressives.

        Katie Couric is indeed an air headed pompous a$$. Palin should have ignored the set up by a liberal McCain advisers who were more interested in their personal professional futures, than the campaign, Murdoch is a breath of fresh air, except for his typical libertarian embrace of sleaze. Mel Gibson? Makes some great movies but is an anti-semitic jerk who shows that side of himself when he drinks.

        None of the above opinions have anything whatsoever to do with the nationality of the people involved. I prefer Thatcher as a politician to Palin, though not in the looks of charisma department. There are plenty of progressives at the BBC and the Aussie ABC who are just as air headed as Katie. And anti-semitism is all the rage on the left around the globe. Look at the UN. No don’t, it’ll make you sick.

        I think England and Australia, like the U.S., are headed by power hungry progressives who are running their countries into the ground. But there are no countries whose peoples and histories I admire more.

        This is not a tempest in a tea pot. It is a burp in a hot air balloon.

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 1:54 pm |

        Gary, in so many polite, aggressive, direct and indirect ways I’m being warned about “things” Jews are “doing” to me. Maybe they meant the guy who crowned my tooth back in 1990? He wore a kippah and didn’t talk rugby – but the crown is still sound. I dunno, it must all be happening mysteriously in the ether.

      • Bart R | June 13, 2013 at 10:47 pm |

        heinrich | June 13, 2013 at 11:41 am |

        Of all the responses, yours is the most nearly American, and I mean this in the best possible way.

        Foreign adventure, military or hostile actions on alien shores, is very much not a value of ‘USAians’, and has no role in Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is what it sounds like, the forming of a nation as geography and history, the democratic voice of free people and the united effort of all.

        These late-come, carpet-bagged, fake presentations of ‘US Interest’, where what is actually meant is the lining of some crooks’ pockets under the guise of the Flag, they are not what the USA stands for. You stand up against such fraud, and so any American ought count you as a friend, and value your view.

        If so for US adventure upon other nations and their own democratic interests, which ought be democratically settled among their own democratic peoples or we are a tyrant who interfere in that, then how much moreso ought any American take offense at an interloper on American soil, sowing discord and malice?

        Deriding US citizens and US free speech, interceding in US politics? How isn’t that as offensive as if an American did it to any other nation?

        Now, where there are truly international, truly global issues, the USA is seldom seen to shirk, and it is a shame on those occassions it does. By all means, hold any nation to account for calumny or negligence in such arenas. But Couric and Palin? Not even close.

      • GaryM | June 13, 2013 at 11:00 pm |

        “Manifest Destiny is what it sounds like, the forming of a nation as geography and history, the democratic voice of free people and the united effort of all.”

        Yeah, tell that to the American Indians, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the French, the British. Manifest destiny was about expansion – acquisition. It was many things, but not a democratic process. It was called the Mexican-American War, not the Mexican-American election.

        Oh, and as is true with most policies favoring an enormous increase in power to the government and subversion of the democratic process, it was a product of the “Democrat” Party.

        I love and am proud of my country, but I am not historically illiterate.

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 11:34 pm |

        Just want to reaffirm that, while I cannot be absolutely certain of people’s origins, the globally available NYT article by Justin Gillis is, in my opinion, typical of the manipulative trash retailed by the progressive Western media. Pushing climate alarmism is part of their stock-in-trade. Not only do they do it often, the Times does it crassly, once you scrape away the florid verbiage. They can expect plenty of pushing back from the likes of me. If criticising Couric (or mentioning the very capable Palin) and criticising non-Australian journalists is deemed to be interventionist, or an attack on the free speech of foreign nations, the problem is clearly with the person doing the deeming. It shows a desperation to stay in an argument at all costs, and little else. If desperate, you could construe any criticism of an American person as an attack on US citizens. But you’d have to be desperate. I’m prepared to call the American Mel Gibson a demented anti-semite. I don’t consider that to be an attack on US citizens.

        Of course, if a moderator or blog owner wants to exclude me, that is another matter. It’s not my blog, not my call. Won’t be taking orders from anyone else, that’s for sure. And while I won’t be making an issue of race or nationality, I will certainly check someone’s race or nationality before making an issue of it (so I don’t get it wrong twice). Doesn’t take long to find out – on the world wide web.

        By the way, Gary, I have no idea of your nationality – why would I care on the world wide web? – but I’m very flattered to have Australia praised along with the USA. Love ’em both. But maybe I’m easily pleased. I actually love France and the French, though I wouldn’t give Le Monde my steam on a cold morning!

      • Beth Cooper | June 14, 2013 at 12:40 am |

        As mosomoso, tony and Gary M comment re open society
        discussion, down with insularity, pc, and other barriers ter
        free speech. HerewithI borrow from a coupla Greeks.
        Democritus:
        ‘The wise man belongs to all countries, for the home of
        a great soul is the whole world.’
        Pericles:
        ‘We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling-block to
        acting wisely …and ‘although only a few may originate
        a policy, we are all able to judge it.’
        B-t-s.

      • mosomoso | June 14, 2013 at 2:05 am |

        “I love to toy with the Platonic notion
        That wisdom need not be of Athens Attic,
        But well may be Laconic,
        even Boeotian. At least I will not have it systematic.”

        Robert Frost, that arch-neglecter of walls and boundaries, once again.

      • Beth Cooper | June 14, 2013 at 3:00 am |

        ‘Something there is that does not love a wall’
        says Robert Frost. Say, I share his birthday and his
        dislike of limitations on human imagination as well.
        B-t-s

      • Peter Lang | June 14, 2013 at 3:16 am |

        I see a few comments here about freedom of the press and the Left’s inherent desire to suppress what they don’t want their readers to hear.

        I’ve just had a comment deleted from ClimateSpectator http://www.businessspectator.com.au/article/2013/6/14/wind-power/hello-newman-so-long-renewables. I reposted it and now I am shut out of reading or posting comments on this thread altogether. That’s an example of freedom of speech Left style.

        The comment that was deleted said:

        IPA’s Alan Moran, exposes the real cost of the Labor-Green policies to control the climate: $20 billion per year. That’s more than we spend on Defence. And it is pure waste. it wont make the slightest difference to the climate.

        Both sides say they want to lower carbon dioxide emissions by 5 per cent.

        To do this the Government’s policies will cost between $20-$30 billion a year, more than the entire defence budget. Labor’s strategy employs four kinds of measures.

        First there is the carbon tax with costs to consumers this year at $9 billion. The current tax rate at $23 per tonne was to increase annually, but the Government has now linked Australia’s tax to the European Union’s carbon price. Because this is only $4 per tonne, for 2015 the Government intends to reduce Australia’s tax rate, but it is forecasting escalating increases in later years with tax rates at $30-plus.

        Secondly, the Government is spending about $5 billion a year on subsidies to green schemes, half through the Clean Energy Fund’s low interest loans.

        Third, there is the renewable energy target, which subsidises windmills and rooftop solar through customers’ electricity bills. The target increases year by year and its annual costs will be $5 billion a year by 2020.

        And finally, there are measures such as efficiency standards on housing, refrigerators and other items. These impose up-front costs on purchasers, estimated at $750 million a year for new home owners.
        The Liberals say that action is worthless unless it is global and that Australia has the world’s most costly carbon abatement policies.

        A Liberal [i.e. conservative] Government would replace the $9 billion a year carbon tax with direct action policies. These involve spending $500 million a year to buy out carbon emissions from firms that can profitably reduce them. The Liberals would also discontinue $2 billion a year in subsidies for the Clean Energy Fund and intend to toughen approval processes for new windfarms.

        Read the full IPA article here:http://ipa.org.au/news/2912/taxes-on-carbon-too-drastic-and-too-soon

        What is wrong with my comment> Why would they delete it?
        [by the way, they frequently delete comments that do not support the party line]

      • Beth Cooper | June 14, 2013 at 5:09 am |

        Peter Lang down the thread re yr excellent comment
        deleted by Climate Spectator. Billions wasted on climate
        window dressing taken out of the public purse so that
        defence of the realm budget ..yer know, “essential”
        stuff we expect a government ter manage, is starved
        of funds.
        +10000000000000000000000000000000000000000
        Peter.

      • Peter Lang | June 14, 2013 at 5:31 am |

        Beth,

        Thank you. I am annoyed and frustrated because ‘BusinessSpectator’, ‘ClimateSpectator] and the rest of the ‘ … Spectators’, started by Alan Kohler and bough by News Limited (i.e. The Australian’), tried to propogatge the belief they are impartial. But they are just as biased and just as much an agent of the Labor-Green, ‘Progressive’, Left as most of the rest of the MSM and blog sites, like ABC ‘The Drum’, SBS, ‘The Conversation’, Crikey, GetUp!, New Matilda, SkepticalScience, and many more.

        What really annoys me that the Left ant the moral high ground but it is the Left leaning web sites that frequently delete comments they don’t like.

        Thank God for the Australian and Climate Etc.!

      • mosomoso | June 14, 2013 at 5:31 am |

        An excellent comment, Peter, and you can feel proud that Business Spectator deleted it. They are not merely fops at the BS. They are insolent fops.

      • Beth Cooper | June 14, 2013 at 5:57 am |

        It’s the ol’ – closed – society – closed – mind – we
        – hafta – stifle – debate – syndrome – Peter Lang,
        wa -aa -ay back ter Plato – on – the – hill – sayin’ – we –
        know – what’s – best – fer – yer and – we – will – tell yer –
        what -ter – think. – Orwellian – edu -cay -shun, – gate –
        keepin’ – commune -icay -shun – out – lets. Tsk!
        B-t-s

      • Peter Lang | June 14, 2013 at 6:04 am |

        Mosomoso,

        Thank you. Sometimes they resort to name calling instead of deleting. The serve I get from Tristan Edis, the Editor, is a mix of: old, extinct, retired, dinosaur geologists with a liberal sprinkling of denier or denialist, with or without my actual name spelled out. The majority of the commenters love it. The more they can get of this stuff from the Editor the better. But they’ve dropped from getting many comments per thread to none to a few. So, perhaps it is not helping to convince people of their doomsday beliefs.

      • tonyb | June 14, 2013 at 7:23 am |

        Beth

        I note that you are practising hyper hyper inflation with the awarding of umpteen points to Peter for his comment. It has been noted that Peter sees to have initiated the start of this trend.

        Hyper hyper inflation is completely against the interests of serfs, cutting the vaue of our meagre wages and the few groats we manage to save by buying cheaper gruel from the back of a donkey cart. It also has the effect of inflating the value of assets such as castles that our overlords own-but are beyond our reach. I shall have to bring it up at the serfs next general meeting,.

        In the meantime after a few weeks of summer here the climate has resumed its downward trajectory. There is an an emergency meeting by the met office to examine the reasons for this. In the process they will ignore the tens of thousands of clues they have of the cause of the changing climate as the numerous records of enormous historic climate variability in the UK goes unread in their own libraries and archives

        tonyb

      • Beth Cooper | June 14, 2013 at 7:44 am |

        Tony,

        Yer logic re hypher inflation is exemplary … I should
        have known better, I’m duly chastised. Re the climate
        downward trajectory yer mention, did yer know that
        the cold 1600’s, in Switzerland and Germany, 25
        peasant revolts were recorded? I’m preparing the next
        edishun of SU_g* on food and famine.
        *Excuse the hyphen.

        Beth the serf.

      • Faustino | June 14, 2013 at 7:51 am |

        Coming in late, just want to say, as a Brit who’s spent 30-odd years in Oz, that I’ve always been pro-American. In spite of having lived in Hollywood at one time.

    • heinrich | June 12, 2013 at 12:06 pm |

      “Time… Such main stream journals…”

      Too funny.

      Apparently, arbiters are a dime a dozen.

      BTW – It is just barely possible that Time has learned a few things since 1975.

    • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 12, 2013 at 12:25 pm |

      The BEST data set is providing us a means to evaluate the amount of land-based warming over a long time period. Since the land reaches steady-state much more quickly than the ocean, it provides a glimpse into the observation-based ECS value. From model fits to the data, this is showing a 3C increase per doubling of CO2, in agreement with the mean of a large set of climate models.

      Thanks to the BEST team.

      • sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 12:47 pm |

        All BEST does is prove that UHI exists and they seem to have trouble finding it.

      • Steven Mosher | June 12, 2013 at 1:51 pm |

        yes Sunshine, UHI is hard to find because it is relatively small, small relative to the noise. We know this by comparing RSS, UAH and the land record. Even the regional studies which find UHI point to values that are sub noise floor at the global scale.

        Yes, UHI is small. The LIA was real
        Yes UHI is small, the warming of the 30s in the US was not due to UHI.

        How big is small? less than .1C per decade in the modern (post 1950) period.

        We also know UHI is small by comparing CRN stations to the rest of the US.

      • sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 2:03 pm |

        “The waste heat generated by car engines, power plants, home furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning machinery plays an unappreciated role in influencing regional climates, new computer simulations suggest. By altering atmospheric circulation, human-made heat may raise temperatures by as much as 1 degree Celsius during winter in the northernmost parts of the world.”

        http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2013/05/25/waste-heat-responsible-for-most-of-northern-hemisphere-warming/

        Go back and try again Mosher. One day you might find it.

      • GaryM | June 12, 2013 at 2:10 pm |

        I think the word “global” should be banned from the climate debate.

        UHI is probably miniscule in the context of global mean temperatures, if global means the entire globe – land, sea, deep sea and upper troposphere. But the word is virtually never used that way by CAGWers.

        It is slightly less miniscule when “global” means all the spread and kriged surface air and SST “global” temp series.

        It is less miniscule when “global” is used to mean surface air temps only.

        And it is downright not miniscule at all when talking about the actual measured and reported land air temps. Which are certainly not “global,” in any meaningful sense of the word, but are the favorite tools of the polemicists.

      • Steven Mosher | June 12, 2013 at 2:17 pm |

        sorry sunshine

        ‘“The waste heat generated by car engines, power plants, home furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning machinery plays an unappreciated role in influencing regional climates, new computer simulations suggest. By altering atmospheric circulation, human-made heat may raise temperatures by as much as 1 degree Celsius during winter in the northernmost parts of the world.”

        If you actually read that paper and look at the source data you’ll find that this has no relation whatsoever to the problem.

        You can if you like get the global waste heat database, its in a 2.5 minute format. you can then see that it explains none of the temperature rise.

        You can do this simply by selecting areas that have no people, no industry, and no waste heat and you will see that the answer doesnt change. been there done that.

      • sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 2:22 pm |

        Mosher, one day the light will come on and you will find the UHI.

        Ha. Who am I kidding!

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 12, 2013 at 3:50 pm |

        Yea, Mosh is right, that paper explains that it is just moving the heat around geographically. It is a zero sum game as far as temperature. The claim is that the combustion of heat is enough to deflect weather patterns, so northern latitudes get more heat at the expense of other areas
        It takes some time to fully digest what these assertions are all about.

      • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 7:55 pm |

        Web

        Interesting that several new observation-based studies show that the previous IPCC AR4 model predictions of a mean 2xCO2 ECS value of 3.2C are exaggerated by a factor of around two on average.

        Have you somehow missed all these studies?

        If you’d like, I can cite the links for you.

        Hope this helps.

        Max

        Max

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 12:07 am |

        Manacker, the observational data that I audit and verify via modeling produces an ECS of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2.

        I wonder what they are doing wrong when they get a ECS of 1/2 this amount. They are probably estimating TCR and calling it ECS. Rookie mistake, likely.
        http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/stochastic-analysis-of-log-sensitivity.html
        Read the comment too.

    • Joshua | June 12, 2013 at 3:35 pm |

      I think the word “global” should be banned from the climate debate.

      Heh. This from the fella who always peal-clutches about centralization of power. But he’d like to determine what kind of terminology would be acceptable to use?

      And say, Gary… remember when you were on here telling us how the pollsters were skewing data as part of a conspiracy to affect the election in favor of Obama? Remember when you said that they were manipulating the data to make it appear to that Obama was doing better than he really was?

      Did you notice how, after the election, it became apparent that a significant majority of the polls were actually underestimating Obama’s performance?

      I haven’t noticed where you’ve explained how you could have been so completely wrong, and so completely confidence of a completely mistaken analysis.

      Did I mess your explanation, or have you just been continuing to duck accountability all these many months?

    • kim | June 12, 2013 at 4:01 pm |

      Web thinks the land reaches steady-state much more quickly than the ocean?

      Richard and Judy have discovered a new attribute to the North Atlantic Oscillation, previously mischaracterized by somebody whose papers I won’t read anymore.
      ==========

    • AK | June 12, 2013 at 7:58 pm |

      Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures. Scoop it up before somebody makes them take it down.

  36. Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 12:07 pm |

    Global warming is Kevin Trenberth’s Moby Dick.

  37. Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 12:18 pm |

    Let’s look at a simple model, of nothing relevant, but combine a 2C per century trend and a sinusoidal oscillation of +/- 0.2 C with a period of 60 years.

    It looks like flat trends for 40 years with increasing trends for 20 years.

    hmmmmm

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 4:05 pm |

        A sixty year cycle comprises approximately six solar cycles. Solar cycles alternate the shape of the peak of their cosmic waves. Three solar cycles cosmic ray peaks fit in each phase of the sixty year cycle, thus leaving two of each shape and one of the other in each phase, alternating through the cycle.

        It’s a great possible mechanism gearing the sun to the oceanic oscillations, but it’s been deprecated by Leif Svalgaard as a second or third order effect.

        Oh, well. The mechanism works its wonders in mysterious ways.
        =======================

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 5:52 pm |

        How come cosmic rays penetrate the cloud forming regions.
        If his theory had any merit, clouds would form as often at ground level.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 8:34 pm |

        That and if cosmic rays caused clouds, you wouldn’t see the aurorae.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 12, 2013 at 8:42 pm |

        Bob – the theory involves the formation of extra cloud condensation nuclei. The actual cloud processes as they condense around the nuclei obey the usual rules.

      • Faustino | June 13, 2013 at 12:08 am |

        I was always too hip to get the t-shirt.

    • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 8:46 pm |

      Bob Droege

      The cosmic ray cloud theory of Henrik Svensmark et al. is being studied at CERN as you undoubtedly know.

      This follows studies showing a good long-term correlation between solar activity (and cosmic rays) and climate and some rudimentary laboratory studies made by Svensmark and others/

      So far the cosmic ray cloud nucleation mechanism itself in the presence of certain naturally occurring aerosols has been corroborated experimentally at CERN.

      The scientists involved have cautioned us that this still does not validate (or falsify) the hypothesis that this mechanism will actually result in cloud formation in our atmosphere and a resulting change in Earth’s albedo, leading to change in climate.

      Further work is planned under controlled conditions simulating our atmosphere to either validate and quantify or falsify the Svensmark hypothesis.

      So let’s wait and see what this work tells us before we jump to any conclusions.

      Max

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 9:08 pm |

        The cosmic ray hypothesis fails for the reasons I have stated previously. I’ll state them all again.

        I don’t disagree that cosmic rays cause ionization which can cause the formation of cloud condensation nuclei(ccn), but:
        1. Cosmic rays do not correlate with temperature.
        2. There are not enough cosmic rays to affect the current concentration of ccn, even if the cloud forming regions stopped all the cosmic rays.
        3. But they don’t. If they penetrate to the ground, and they do, then they should cause cloud formation near ground level as often as at normal cloud level, but they don’t.
        4. You can see the aurorae, if cosmic rays caused clouds, those clouds would block the aurorae.

        It’s quacks like a dead duck

      • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 9:42 pm |

        Bob Droege

        I’d place my bets on CERN rather than Bob Droege.

        The temperature correlation is very good over a very long period – arguably a much better correlation than between CO2 and temperature.

        The mechanism has been validated.

        It remains now to be seen whether or not this mechanism can produce clouds under experimental conditions simulating our atmosphere.

        If it can and this effect can be quantified, we have a corroborated hypothesis.

        If it cannot, we have a falsified hypothesis.

        That’s the way it works, Bob – not just based on top of the head statements by a single individual.

        It’s called the scientific method.

        Max

        BTW the AGW theory also has not yet passed this stage. A mechanism has been identified and quantified in the lab, but so far there has been no experimental study under conditions simulating our atmosphere to corroborate and quantify or falsify the hypothesis that this mechanism causes changes in our climate, let alone that it causes positive feedbacks from water (as vapor or clouds) that triple this theoretical effect.

      • lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 9:55 pm |

        Manacker give it up, the cosmic ray theory is dead.

        1. Cosmic rays do not correlate with temperature.

        1. Cosmic rays do not correlate with temperature.

        1. Cosmic rays do not correlate with temperature.

        1. Cosmic rays do not correlate with temperature.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 12, 2013 at 10:16 pm |

        lolwot, You know what that doofus Murry Salby would do? He would try to integrate the cosmic rays and then show an agreement with temperature rise.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 10:27 pm |

        Thing is Max, you can’t tell which statements I have made that are off the top of my head and which ones are from empirical scientific observations.

        I actually have personally taken data that supports my arguments.

        Help me, I can make particles that are indistinguishable from cosmic rays.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 1:18 am |

        ‘Despite over 35 years of constant satellite-based measurements of cloud, reliable evidence of a long-hypothesized link between changes in solar activity and Earth’s cloud cover remains elusive. This work examines evidence of a cosmic ray cloud link from a range of sources, including satellite-based cloud measurements and long-term ground-based climatological measurements. The satellite-based studies can be divided into two categories: (1) monthly to decadal timescale analysis and (2) daily timescale epoch superpositional (composite) analysis. The latter analyses frequently focus on sudden high-magnitude reductions in the cosmic ray flux known as Forbush Decrease events. At present, two long-term independent global satellite cloud datasets are available (ISCCP and MODIS). Although the differences between them are considerable, neither shows evidence of a solar-cloud link at either long or short timescales. Furthermore, reports of observed correlations between solar activity and cloud over the 1983–1995 period are attributed to the chance agreement between solar changes and artificially induced cloud trends. It is possible that the satellite cloud datasets and analysis methods may simply be too insensitive to detect a small solar signal. Evidence from ground-based studies suggests that some weak but statistically significant cosmic ray-cloud relationships may exist at regional scales, involving mechanisms related to the global electric circuit. However, a poor understanding of these mechanisms and their effects on cloud makes the net impacts of such links uncertain. Regardless of this, it is clear that there is no robust evidence of a widespread link between the cosmic ray flux and clouds.’ http://www.benlaken.com/documents/SWSC_LPCD_12.pdf

        ‘The Earth’s climate is driven by the net sunlight deposited in the terrestrial atmosphere, and so, climate is critically sensitive to the solar irradiance and the Earth’s albedo. These two quantities should be linked in any proxy effort to understand the role of a varying Sun in climate change. We need to understand why studies using solar activity as a proxy for net sunlight seem to have real value, even though we know that there are terrestrial imprints of the solar cycle when the implied changes in solar irradiance seem too weak to induce an imprint. These two climate fundamentals appear somehow linked, and it would seem that knowing the relative variations and connectivity of the irradiance and terrestrial reflectance is at the heart of understanding the Sun–Earth connection.’ http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Goode_Palle_2007_JASTP.pdf

        Personally – I am much more inclined to the much less popular top down modulation of climate by solar UV idea – http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/3/034008

      • manacker | June 13, 2013 at 7:40 pm |

        lolwot

        Cosmic rays do not correlate with temperatures

        A lie repeated often enough becomes does not become the truth.

        (Sorry ’bout that, Lenin.)

        Max

        Check out:
        http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/shaviv-veizer-03.pdf

      • manacker | June 13, 2013 at 8:11 pm |

        Chief

        Thanks for the link to the Laken et al. paper on the link between cosmic rays and rapid mid-latitude cloud changes. There is also this link:
        http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/10941/2010/acp-10-10941-2010.pdf

        In the conclusion the authors have suggested that the GCR-cloud forcing

        may have had a significant impact on climate prior to the onset of anthropogenic warming, accounting for the presence of solar cycle relationships detectable in paleoclimate records.

        This is interesting, but don’t get me wrong. I am not necessarily a proponent of the “Svensmark” hypothesis as the principal driver of our climate.

        I am simply amused at how some bloggers here already have their minds made up that “Svensmark” is invalid, before the experimental work at CERN has even been completed.

        I prefer to “wait and see” what the experimental data show before discarding a hypothesis.

        The same goes for any other hypothesis regarding what makes our climate behave as it does, including AGW.

        So far I have seen no empirical evidence to support either Svensmark or AGW, and I conclude from this that it’s all much more complicated than the so-called “consensus” team (or simplistic guys like Webby) think.

        My guess is that clouds play a key role, but exactly what causes them to change over time is still uncertain (as even IPCC concedes).

        Your explanations make sense, but I think there is still much more that is unknown (or uncertain) than is known.

        And the work at CERN may help to improve our knowledge, one way or the other.

        Max

      • lolwot | June 13, 2013 at 8:23 pm |

        “I am simply amused at how some bloggers here already have their minds made up that “Svensmark” is invalid, before the experimental work at CERN has even been completed.”

        No amount of experimental work can alter the cosmic ray and temperature records.

        Repeat this after me:

        Cosmic rays do not correlate with temperature.

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 10:01 pm |

        But Nile River levels do correlate with Aurorae Borealis. Hmmmmmmm.
        ================

  38. John | June 12, 2013 at 12:33 pm |

    A reprise of my comment on Gillis’ article on WUWT:

    Whatever the actual effect of CO2 and co-amissions — I don’t think they are zero, but they are likely much less than the IPCC says, more like what Pat Michaels and all the new articles about climate sensitivity say — Gillis’ piece is propaganda. Here is why:

    In the second paragraph, Gillis says:

    “True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.”

    Two problems with this:

    1. That isn’t what Gillis and the people this article represents were saying a couple of years ago, they were denying there was any significant flattening of temperatures, while they denigrated the people who pointed out the diversion between model and reality; and
    2. The models say this shouldn’t be happening, contrary to Gillis’ new spin about natural variability.

    So this is more propaganda: deny anything is wrong with the models (who is the “Denier”?} until it gets too obvious that there is an issue, relative to reality. Then and only then do you admit to the obvious, fail to apologize to those you denegrated or acknowledge that they were right, and say that, OK, the models and reality aren’t exactly in sync, but you wouldn’t really expect them to be in sync. The opposite of what you said a few years ago.

    These are standard tools of a politician, not of a reporter (especially a science reporter), or of a scientist.

    Deeper into the article, Gillis says:

    “So the real question is where all that heat is going, if not to warm the surface. And a prime suspect is the deep ocean. Our measurements there are not good enough to confirm it absolutely, but a growing body of research suggests this may be an important part of the answer.”

    Note how this sentence silently slides by another, very likely possibility: that because we don’t understand how clouds work at the microphysics level, it is possible that more of the heat that Gillis asserts must be building up somewhere might actually be escaping to space. In other words, he still implicitly assumes the models are right in every important way, but doesn’t say this explicitly, or his readers might actually think for themselves and recall the issue of modelers not understanding cloud microphysics.

    Does Journalism school now teach propaganda as a vital part of the curriculum?

    I can certainly understand why the NY Times wouldn’t allow comments on this article. Their intelligent but easily herded followers might be exposed to ideas that might open their eyes!

    • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 12, 2013 at 3:29 pm |

      Hansen and the others knew about the heat sinking nature of the ocean back in 1981 and before that. The diffusional heat flow is a simple analysis to get right to first order.

      The problem is that the mass media doesn’t always know how to cover the science.

      One of the skeptics ought to evaluate a thermal model for themselves and find the missing heat. I certainly can’t see it. The papers by Levitus and Balmaseda don’t contradict the difference between land and ocean temperatures.

      Nod your head if you know what I am talking about.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 12, 2013 at 3:38 pm |

        Webster, “Hansen and the others knew about the heat sinking nature of the ocean back in 1981 and before that. The diffusional heat flow is a simple analysis to get right to first order. ”

        Correct, Hansen’s estimate was double Manabe’s estimate. Manabe had a more detailed ocean model at the time. Since 1981, there have been a few more instrument platforms installed and many more people involved. Currently, the data agrees more closely with Manabe’s estimate and are in fact in good agreement with Arrhenius’ unpublished second estimate. There are those that will ignore the progress of science though.

      • Matthew R Marler | June 12, 2013 at 4:33 pm |

        WebHubTelescope: One of the skeptics ought to evaluate a thermal model for themselves and find the missing heat.

        In a model you can put the heat anywhere you want it. The question is: “Where on Earth is the missing heat?”

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 6:52 pm |

        Where in the universe, which is likely not missing any heat, is the missing heat?
        ============

      • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 8:01 pm |

        Webby

        Nod your head if <you know what you are talking about.

        Max

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 12, 2013 at 8:39 pm |

        Why is everything you say so uninteresting webby?

        The missing heat in CERES is in shortwave as a result of cloud changes. Even if found it makes no difference to the case for global warming. It is irrelevant – other than pointing to a source of noise than overwhelms signal easily on this timescale. I would think that if you know enough to blame missing energy in CERES – you probably know enough to decide what the frequencies are. Desperate times to claim any hint of warming for a simplistic theory found more in social discourse than science.

        Diffusion of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean – again – is profoundly unphysical. It depends on using data to define an ‘effective diffusion’ – and it begs the question of if you have data why do you need an overly simplistic, unphysical and profoundly unphysical ‘thermal model’?

        Everyone nod but webby.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 12, 2013 at 10:13 pm |

        You guys are clueless. I took the Balmaseda data and the Levitus data and fit it to a textbook thermal diffusion model right here:
        http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html

        Look at the model. Look at the data. Look at the model. Look at the data. Look at the model. Look at the data. Notice how they overlap, using the diffusivity parameter that Hansen suggested in 1981.

        Ouch, that hard reality check must hurt! You play hockey, you’re gonna get checked.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 12, 2013 at 10:31 pm |

        It is astonishing that you still prattle and preen about so little.

        You fit curve to data – and then tell us to compare the data and the curve? This tells only about how well the curve is fitted – fairly poorly and with a great deal of data smoothing as it turns out. The pointlessness of the exercise is what gets me most.

        Diffusion tells us nothing about how oceans warm – the physical process is overwhelmingly solar heating. You bleat about these things repeatedly but never take the step of admitting that your ‘box model’ doesn’t represent realistic physical processes.

        Do you really think that diffusion is the governing process here? Stop wasting everyone’s time with your babbling.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 12, 2013 at 11:20 pm |

        Chef Hydro,
        I hope you will eventually learn some essential physics.

        What I am describing and modeling is first order physics — directly the result of a thermal forcing function at the surface, propagating downward by diffusion. A linear model works for thermal diffusion. It doesn’t matter if another solar forcing exists that is orders of magnitude higher, the GHE perturbation can be separated out and solved independently. That is linearity. No other behavior will readily match this behavior, which has now been known for decades.

        Perhaps someone else can say that I am being pedantic in pointing out the obvious, but I have no choice as you attempt to “Salby” the discussion by drawing on some fantasy physics that seems to match your own crazed imagination.

        Chef, Admit it, you got nothing, unable to even write a simple equation without messing it up completely, you are left to rage on.

        .

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 12, 2013 at 11:51 pm |

        Oh please – I know more about the physics of the environment than you can possibly understand. I point out the obvious that you are fitting a curve to ocean heat content data – a trivial and meaningless exercise about which you prattle and preen.

        ‘What I am describing and modeling is first order physics — directly the result of a thermal forcing function at the surface, propagating downward by diffusion. A linear model works for thermal diffusion. It doesn’t matter if another solar forcing exists that is orders of magnitude higher, the GHE perturbation can be separated out and solved independently. That is linearity. No other behavior will readily match this behavior, which has now been known for decades.’

        Another example of incoherent babbling idiocy?

        The ‘first order physics’ is that the sun warms the oceans which loses energy in 3 ways. Net IR up – convection – latent heat.

        The mechanism is not that a warm atmosphere warms the oceans by diffusion. This is a non-physical concept that can be used to derive an effective diffusion – but it does not make it a physically realistic model or anything like ‘first order physics’ in the terms of your babbling and preening.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 12:13 am |

        Get this, Chef Hydro thinks that if the surface of the ocean differentially warms, it can’t propagate heat downward.

        The Chef seems inept in the physical reasoning department, and totally incapable of putting the pen to paper and actually deriving a quantitative model.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 12:36 am |

        Heat transport in the oceans is dominated by advection and convection – this is not the process of diffusion as defined by physics.

        As for a model – should I smooth a curve over the data?

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/AdvancesinUnderstandingTop-of-AtmosphereRadiationVariability-Loebetal2011.png.html?sort=3&o=35 –

        Like the TOA radiation – webby’s ‘noise’ is much bigger than the ‘signal’.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 12:38 am |

        Oh – the source of heat is still not the atmosphere but the far away sun.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 1:26 am |

        Advection and convection moving in random directions is essentially the same math as you would use to describe diffusion.

        Chef Hydro, the fact is that you don’t understand how to model randomized motion. You can bellyache all you want about the phrases “effective diffusion” and “eddy diffusion”, but this is well known behavior.

        As it stands, I know how to model this behavior and you don’t, so you get all crabby about your inadequacies. Think about changing your stripes and stop being such a scientific Luddite.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 1:54 am |

        Take a step back. The energy in the oceans derives from the difference between incoming energy in sunlight and outgoing energy. That’s basic. The heat doesn’t come from the atmosphere.

        You may pretend that ocean wide heat transport in convection and advection can be modeled by diffusion – they can’t – they are spatially and temporally so variable as to preclude easy solutions of transport equations. The transport equations are physically realistic – diffusion in the sense of physics isn’t.

        So what you do is use a ‘forcing function’ fitted to data to reproduce the data while losing lots of the variability. The forcing function uses an ‘effective diffusion’ – a wholly imaginary function to represent the build up of heat in the oceans. This is a box model – and perfectly valid in the scheme of things – just that box models are by definition not physically realistic. As yours is not.

        I understand what you are doing – I just don’t know why you bother or just why you perpetually prattle and peen about it. It is a trivial and uninteresting result.

        You should grow up and stop being such an utter twit.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 7:51 am |

        Chef said:

        “I understand what you are doing – I just don’t know why you bother or just why you perpetually prattle and peen about it. It is a trivial and uninteresting result. “

        If you understood what I and Hansen and every climate scientist was saying, you would be able to counter it. The fact is you can’t.

        Given a thermal forcing function applied long enough, the full volume of the ocean will rise in temperature to reach a steady state. It will do this via an effective diffusivity to first-order. That is why it will take a long time to reach a quiescent condition.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 4:45 pm |

        Again – incoherent drivel. So incompetent it beggars belief. The thermal forcing function is the sun – and the ocean heat content change a function of energy gains and energy losses. You confuse box model math for the real physical processes in play – that argues for delusion rather than science.

        And again – the critical complaint is the triviality of the exercise. You create arbitrarily smoothed data from an already dodgy data set. Why bother?

        Where I differ from Hansen is natural variability. ‘Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.” http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703

        Your problem is that your simplistic curve fitting does nothing to engender understanding. The latter takes years of thinking and reading. The problem with Hansen is that he has nailed his colors to the mast. Polemic is substituted for inherent complexity. Sound familiar?

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 13, 2013 at 5:40 pm |

        To the blunder from down under:

        I see that you got nothing. Care to debunk my model? I made evrything as simple as possible, but not simpler. I think that is the correct quote.

      • Max_OK | June 13, 2013 at 6:09 pm |

        “The Blunder from Down Under” is a good one. I’ll have to remember it.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 6:14 pm |

        Box models are different in kind to physically realistic models. Hansen’s 1980’s model is a box model – yours is a box model. It is not physically realistic because it assumes heat from the atmosphere equilibriates with ocean heat content over time. This oversimplifies the physical processes involved which are large scale and complex. Your problem is always that you leap into gross simplifications prior to understanding the system in any detail at all.

        But again – your result is painfully trivial and you simply use it as an opportunity to prattle and preen. You use data to smooth and simplify data. Admit it why don’t you because it is true?

        It is merely curve fitting and means nothing at all. There is nothing to refute but silly posturing.

      • Matthew R Marler | June 13, 2013 at 6:14 pm |

        WebHubTelescope: Given a thermal forcing function applied long enough, the full volume of the ocean will rise in temperature to reach a steady state.

        Well, that’s your problem right off the bat. With the Earth climate system as it is, increased cloud cover following increased CO2 (increased radiation onto surface water), or increased temperature, may reduce the “thermal forcing function”. So you have a perfectly swell model for something that might not occur.

        Since both of us don’t have a model with demonstrated predictive power with sufficient accuracy, people should not believe the predictions of either of us.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 1:10 am |

        With warming, the average altitude of the lower atmosphere clouds (strato, cumulo) is predicted to increase. That is a first-order effect as the temperature lapse rate is constant to first-order. We can discuss second-order effects when you can understand the primary effect.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 1:45 am |

        See that’s your problem right there webby. You’re an idiot who confuses simple condensation physics for profound insight.

        http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/clouds/formation.htm

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 2:24 am |

        Yes, clouds form on along a line describing the P-T relationship. Watch how that changes when you apply a differential change to temperature. Change it by a small amount, what is referred to as a perturbation, and look at which way it goes.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 3:09 am |

        Warm, moist air expands and cools as it rises. Cloud droplets form when temperature falls to the saturation temperature at some height. In warmer conditions the point at which the saturation temperature – 100% relative humidity – is reached is higher.

        You are really just a pretentious, preening and prattling little fool rabbiting on about things that the merest children understand as if they were profound revelations. When you are not inventing utter nonsense that is.

      • Matthew R Marler | June 14, 2013 at 5:42 pm |

        WebHubTelescope: Yes, clouds form on along a line describing the P-T relationship. Watch how that changes when you apply a differential change to temperature. Change it by a small amount, what is referred to as a perturbation, and look at which way it goes.

        A small perturbation of a model that is incomplete and inaccurate is not going to give an accurate representation of the anticipated physical change. Unless your model accurately predicts summer thunderclouds and thunderstorms and such, like the daily monsoon rains in the Philipines and elsewhere, there is no hope for it to accurately predict the effects of CO2 change on cloud cover.

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 14, 2013 at 6:12 pm |

        Get rid of all the CO2 in the atmosphere. Note which way the temperature goes. Note what happens to the water vapor.

        Now add some CO2. The movements are reversed. Even a child could make sense of that.

        I wrote a post called the 33C discrepancy where I constrained the positive feedback from water vapor and estimated how much it would be if perturbed further with added CO2.

        It comes out to 1C change along with the 1.2 C change of CO2.

        Add in the other GHGs and albedo feedback that goes along for the ride and it is not difficult to derive the 3C ECS for doubling of CO2.

        We have the empirical data in front of us. You have to be able to explain the 33C increase over an atmosphere without the GHGs. Who has done that? You relying on Cotton? You relying on Myrrrrhhh? Name the model that predicts this without relying on GHGs.

        Face it, you have nothing but FUD.

      • manacker | June 14, 2013 at 6:36 pm |

        Webby

        You write:

        Get rid of all the CO2 in the atmosphere. Note which way the temperature goes. Note what happens to the water vapor.

        First thing that happens immediately (long before the thermometers or hygrometers show any change).

        All plants die.

        Shortly thereafter, all animals (including humans) die.

        GAME OVER. YOU LOSE.

        Whether or not this would result in a perceptible change in water vapor, clouds, or precipitation is sort of a moot point – there would be no life on the planet to observe this change if it were to occur (which is anything but certain).

        Fuggidaboudit, Webby.

        Max

      • Matthew R Marler | June 14, 2013 at 10:41 pm |

        WebHubTelescope: Get rid of all the CO2 in the atmosphere.

        The discussion is about what happens in the future as CO2 is added. For all that is reliably known now, increased CO2 might increase cloud cover (that’s just one of many known unknowns). Each time this is mentioned, you change the topic to something else.

        Now you ask for an obviously impossible counterfactual assumption. Get real!

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 15, 2013 at 12:02 am |

        Must not know about the utility of perturbations. Knock the levels of CO2 down and it will cool, which will drag down the water vapor and that will further cool until it reaches a feedback limited level. This is how we get to the 255K temperature of the earth without GHGs in the atmosphere.

        Now we reverse the direction and start adding some CO2 to the atmosphere. The temperature will rise, which will further increase the level of water vapor in the air and this will by the same token reach a feedback limited warming value.

        The doubling of CO2 with increase of water vapor will add about 2.2C warming and then 0.8C for other GHGs such as CH4 and N2O and albedo feedback along with additional uncertainty. This will get the value of 3C for a doubling of CO2.

        Lets look at the numbers. The delta Temperature for a delta [CO2] amount we can derive:

        T = 3 * ln(C/C0)
        dT = 3 * dC/C

        so we are increasing CO2 by 2 PPM per year at a level of 400 PPM.
        This gives
        dT = 3*2/400 = 0.015C per year on land or 0.15C per decade. It is about half this over the ocean due to half the heat being sequestered into deep waters. So the global average is about 0.1C per decade.

        That gives us a baseline. Now we can start adding second order effects due to observations we make on clouds, albedo, etc.

        That is the mainstream science.

      • Matthew R Marler | June 15, 2013 at 2:03 am |

        WebHubTelescope: That is the mainstream science.

        Well, yes, I have never disputed that. I have disputed the claim that the mainstream science (and the associated models) is complete and accurate. You probably know that even mainstream journals like Science have published peer-reviewed articles highlighting why the response of cloud cover is unknown.

        Perturb away, oh applied mathematician! Until the model that you are perturbing is demonstrably accurate, the consequences of your mathematical perturbations don’t have any physical implications

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 15, 2013 at 2:21 am |

        Uncertainty quantification is all about perturbations.
        We learned that in freshman physics.
        See the table here describing how to compute variances:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_propagation

        Again, we had to use that in freshman lab experiments.

        The fact that you have problems with the physical model that we use is not my problem. If you have something better, than show it.

        We can then use an information theory criteria to see which model matches the data better.

        Again, if you have something better, then what you have to do is show it off. There is no excuse not to do this anymore.

        The approach used by the majority of scientists is no longer one of annointing a correct model by decree; instead it is comparing different models in one-on-one fashion.

    • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 6:22 pm |

      The meshugenah Minnesotan and the dopey from the okie?

      Idiots.

      • manacker | June 14, 2013 at 10:09 pm |

        Or the grouchy old nerd from Minni-no-place and his adolescent sidekick, the okie-dokie-okie?

      • Peter Lang | June 14, 2013 at 10:44 pm |

        Manacker,

        Is even your near-infinite patience wearing thin?

      • manacker | June 15, 2013 at 2:24 am |

        Peter Lang

        Years ago on another blog, a countryman of yours taught me a pseudo-Latin motto, which I have carried close to my heart when blogging with the likes of Max_OK and Webster:

        Non illegitimi carborundum”

        (Don’t let the bastards wear you down.)

        Max

      • Peter Lang | June 15, 2013 at 2:38 am |

        Manacker,

        Thanks. I make use of useful idiots like Max_OK and others to demonstrate how their irrational fears about nuclear power and their love of renewable energy, despite the facts, shows they swallow any loony Left dogma without question. Clearly they do the same with CAGW.

        Useful idiots are very useful, as you well know :)

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 15, 2013 at 3:33 am |

        Correction, I don’t think you are blogging. You are commenting on someone else’s blog. To actually blog, you have to get a blog and write down an argument, like I do here:
        http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com

        I got started on this because my advisor’s advisor, the great physicist Robert L. Park started writing books on Voodoo Science and hosting one of the original science blogs, the What’s New blog sponsored by the American Physical Society.

        Bob Park maintained What’s New for years and year but may have finally called it quits. However it is not because he let all the cranks and crackpots like you grind him down, no not at all. Eventually the time will come for everyone to pass the torch.

        Long live the fight against voodoo science. Real science will outlast you Manacker.

  39. GaryM | June 12, 2013 at 12:43 pm |

    The sociology of the pause is no different from the sociology of the hockey stick, or the sociology of climate sensitivity, or of Hansen 88’s predictions, or of the “C” in CAGW, or….

    It is a political argument at its very core. It is about policy. If a “pause” would help push the drive to decarbonize the economy, the CAGWers would be singing its praises from academe to Real Climate.

    Situational logic is the hallmark of progressivism. Find what argument best leads to the result you want, and make it, early and often. Give no ground. Take no prisoners. Vilify anyone who disagrees with you.

    The only reason we aren’t further down the road to the decarbonization abyss? One word. The internet. (OK, one word and a definite article.)

    Blogs, alternative media and their websites. Almost everything is available to almost everyone. The debate the CAGW consensus never had, and never wanted to have, is taking place every day, and is available to everyone on the planet with access to a computer and telephone line or cable.

    The NY Times deigning to print one article about the pause, in the past, would have been a banner day for open, critical debate. But now it’s a yawn. It does mean that a lot of people who rely on the filtered news allowed them by the MSM will hear about it for the first time. But there are enough people now who have been freed from the left’s former information monopoly that the debate will be had, regardless of whether the NY Times or Washington Post decide to join in.

    Besides, reality will decide the debate.

    If there is a sudden up tick in temperatures in the west, it won’t matter why it occurs. People who pay the taxes live and vote will believe that it will continue, and will then let the left decarbonize the economy. (If that happens, once the economy grinds to a virtual halt, people may come to their senses and decide they made a mistake. or they may not.)

    If the “pause” (if there is one, which I don’t think we even know, being an agnostic on the accuracy of the reported temps anyway) continues or winters get worse, the opposite will happen. Voters will laugh at politicians who want to double the price of their gasoline when there is no evidence before their eyes of any real emergency. It again won’t matter what the cause of any pause of fall in temperatures is.

    Sociology is no more a science than alchemy. If you want to understand what is happening, look to politics, since that is what the debate has been about from the beginning. The opinions of the stupid voters influences the decisions of the politicians, most of whom want nothing more than to stay in power. And the internet gives those who would like to inject just a modicum of critical thought into the process at least a fighting chance.

    Despite all this, the near term future temps will still probably decide the debate anyway. But it sure is entertaining to argue about this stuff in the meantime.

    • GaryM | June 12, 2013 at 1:11 pm |

      Oh, and if you think situational logic is just a fantasy of my paranoid conservative dreams, take it from the intellectual leader of contemporary progressive activists, Saul Alinsky.

      ““An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. … To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.”

      There is no such thing as objective truth. All there is is the result you seek, power.

      • Faustino | June 13, 2013 at 12:14 am |

        Sock it to ’em, Gary. I met lots of Trotksyites, International Socialists, Angry Brigaders etc in the ’60s and ’70s, so got some insight into their workings. Most people haven’t seen them at work and don’t realise their modus operandi.

    • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 8:07 pm |

      Gary M

      reality will decide the debate.

      Indeed it will.

      But the path will be winding and tortuous.

      And the multi-billion dollar AGW business has too much momentum to die a quick death, even if the current pause in warming turns into a longer cooling trend.

      Max

  40. Cosmic Ray | June 12, 2013 at 12:51 pm |

    “The pause” was predicted back in 1979:
    Prediction: warming trend until year 2000, then very cold

    By coincidence, the Sun has been getting rather quiet in recent years.

    The cynic in me is saying climate scientists leveraged this study’s warming prediction in order to drive policy.
    And this same cynic is now telling me that climate scientists are leveraging this study again with their claims of extremes and storms. I’ve read that warm and cold fronts colliding can cause storms. If this study is correct, there will be colder cold fronts colliding with warm fronts and areas warmed by cities resulting in bigger storms.

    I wonder if “the pause” will lead to the end of “the cause?”

  41. lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 12:58 pm |

    Pause Mythology

    HadCRUT4 shows 0.093C+-0.108C/decade warming since 1995.

    Climate skeptics claim this a figure shows a pause in warming since 1995. Oh come on! Who are you kidding? (Yourselves and the public). The range above covers up to 0.2C/decade warming! Hardly a pause!

    Climate skeptics continue this lie about a pause by insisting that the globe was warming up to eg 1995 and then suddenly it stopped. The “pause”.

    Yet HadCRUT4 shows 0.146C+-0.071C/decade warming from 1970-1995. This significantly overlaps with the trend since 1995, painting a lie to the claim that the warming has changed. It certainly hasn’t altered statistically changed. In fact there is enough uncertainty in the data that the warming since 1995 might actually be greater than from 1980-1995!

    Also the trend from 1980-1995 is 0.097C+-0.14C/decade. Also not statistically significant, but we rarely hear this from skeptics as they want to promote the idea warming entered a pause after 1995. It wouldn’t do to have it paused before 1995.

    How to explain this bizarre inability by climate skeptics to understand the statistics of a trend? What could be put down to ignorance must in fact be put down to evil. Given the sufficient time and resources at the hands of the skeptics on this matter and the failure of them to correct themselves, this implies an act of evil. A collective evil by which they blinker out the facts of the data to push a story.

    Trends based on http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php

    • sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 1:10 pm |

      0.093C+-0.108C/decade

      So it could be negative of .015C / decade.

      Thanks.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 2:48 pm |

        equally likely to be +0.201, hey, that’s the IPCC about 0.2 C per decade.

        about 0.1 C per decade much more likely

      • sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 3:56 pm |

        Each version of HADCRUT4 makes recent temperatures warmer than the previous one. I’m sure they will turn a negative slope into a positive one with enough manipulation.

        But it will be too late. The AGW cult are the deniers. CO2 has no discernable effect.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 5:49 pm |

        You are implying that the addition of more coverage area when they changed from HADCRUT3 to HADCRUT4 was done merely to increase the temperature trend.

      • sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 11:54 pm |

        Bob, they added more northern stations (they claimed) and few if any southern stations. That would be cooking the books.

      • lolwot | June 13, 2013 at 6:08 am |

        adding northern stations doesn’t create more warming. you kind of need to have a clue about what you are talking about before throwing around accusations.

      • sunshinehours1 | June 13, 2013 at 11:04 am |

        If the SH is cooling (which it is) and the NH is warming (or cooling slower) and they only add northern stations, then it is cooking the books.

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:2002/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:2002/trend

      • Steven Mosher | June 13, 2013 at 11:52 am |

        “sunshinehours1 | June 12, 2013 at 11:54 pm |
        Bob, they added more northern stations (they claimed) and few if any southern stations. That would be cooking the books.

        #

        When they add more stations their spatial coverage improves. Their previous sampling was biased. As they add more stations they will warm, regardless of where they add them. That’s because a superior sample shows more warming.

        Second, as they add more stations their uncertainity will decrease.

        They are not cooking the books, they are getting closer to the better answer.

        Pretty simple. their method is known to be bias they have is a biased. Their particular bias is a cold bias. as they add stations they will warm.

        We recently added 2000 new stations. guess what?

      • heinrich | June 13, 2013 at 12:24 pm |

        ”
        We recently added 2000 new stations. guess what?
        ”

        What a waste.

        Clearly, all that is required for perfect data is one good station situated precisely at the intersection of the equator and the prime meridian.

    • Girma | June 12, 2013 at 4:37 pm |

      lolwot

      IPCC:
      Since IPCC’s first report in 1990, assessed projections have suggested global average temperature increases between about 0.15°C and 0.3°C per decade for 1990 to 2005. This can now be compared with observed values of about 0.2°C per decade, strengthening confidence in near-term projections. {1.2, 3.2}

      http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html

      What the observation shows is only a warming of 0.05 deg C/decade for the 15 years period from 1997 to 2012, which is under IPCC’s lower estimate of 0.15 deg C per decade warming.

      IPCC projection has been falsified by the observation.

    • CMS | June 12, 2013 at 5:19 pm |

      You know lolwot if you compare the warming periods 1910 – 1940 to 1970 – 1997 using HadCrut 4. It sure looks like it warmed faster or certainly as fast in the earlier period.
      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:1997/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:1997 or more simply http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/to:1997/trend

    • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 8:18 pm |

      lolwot

      The pause is real.

      But it did not start in 1995.

      Nor did it start in 1998, the record hot year in several records, now attributed primarily to an extreme El Nino.

      It started around 2001.

      How long it will last is anyone’s guess.

      Some say for “a decade or three”.

      Past multi-decadal cycles of slight cooling lasted around 30 years, so some predict this one will also last another 20 years or so.

      Others expect it to stop imminently.

      Who knows?

      And, although we have heard many rationalizations, no one has a very good explanation for why it is occurring.

      Max

      • lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 9:35 pm |

        “But it did not start in 1995.
        Nor did it start in 1998, the record hot year in several records, now attributed primarily to an extreme El Nino.
        It started around 2001.”

        The fact none of you can agree when it started kind of hints you all don’t know what you are talking about.

      • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 9:48 pm |

        lolwot

        I can agree the current pause in global warming started in 2001.

        Others may say it started in 1998, but that was a record year for other reasons, so I think it is best not to start the trend then.

        I don’t know how 1995 even got into the discussion -certainly not by me.

        I’ll stick with January 2001, the official beginning of the new century and millennium.

        Now let’s see how long it lasts.

        Max

      • Beth Cooper | June 12, 2013 at 9:55 pm |

        The pause
        ain’t helpin;
        the cause
        and that’s a
        travuh-stee
        that’s causin’
        anxiety an’
        angst ter
        the pro-gress-if
        science-con-sensus
        com-munne-itee.
        Oh mon dieu,
        qu’est-ce que
        se passe?

      • heinrich | June 13, 2013 at 12:20 pm |

        Remember folks:
        Global warming has often paused before!

        Dr. Bob Carter, (James Cook University, Queensland), warming “stopped in 1998″.

        David Whitehouse, 2001: “global warming has ceased.” and “The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001.”

        Not to be outdone, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley: “warming stopped in 2002″. And he had a graph to “prove it”.

        2005. Hottest year on record. Bloggers everywhere celebrated the end of global warming as of 2006.

        2007 was pretty warm – But then 2008 was slightly cooler than 2007.
        Blog-scientist Michael Asher: “So we saw global warming not just stop, but actually ‘reverse’ itself in 2008.”

        But then: 2009 and 2010 were both slightly warmer than 2008. The pause paused.

        Pat Michaels 2011: “Why Hasn’t The Earth Warmed In Nearly 15 Years?” – so the warming paused starting in 1996, then.

        Steve Goddard seems convinced the pause began in 2002.

        And yet 2010 was the warmest year on record.

        So much uncertainty. Puzzling, no?

        Not really.

        If you rank DECADES by temperature, guess what happens?
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record#Warmest_decades

      • Bob Droege | June 13, 2013 at 1:24 pm |

        Anyone remember in Jan 2008 when Dr Spencers update came out and wiped out 50 years of global warming?

  42. DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 12:58 pm |

    “Memo to Times: We ain’t at a flat highpoint. We aren’t anywhere near the highpoint and we’re not even close to flat on any scale of time relevant to human civilization.”

    I looked at the HADCRU4 monthly, GLOBAL, dataset. I took the rate of change over 97 months, 8 years and a month, as we can get a feel for changes at the moment.

    http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/HADCRUT4monthly_zps575cf5ba.png

    It is quite clear that global temperature have been falling since 2005, even the pike in two months of 2010 can hid the decline.

    Using the annual data, and ling at the rate over 31 years we see that the rate of temperature increase observed from the 70’s to the 90’s is falling

    http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/HADCRUT4Global_zps5c19cb37.jpg

    Joe Romm cannot look at the data and write what he does and yet be an honest man.

    • lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 1:07 pm |

      Using your bogus methods we’d conclude we had reached the highpoint of global temperature in the 80s. Then in the 90s.

      Your method is proven wrong by past data.

      Romm is correct in this case.

      • pokerguy | June 12, 2013 at 1:20 pm |

        Of course, your prior extreme climate alarmism has nothing to do with your inability to see what even the NYT’s can no longer deny.

        Your objectivity is an absolute given.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 1:36 pm |

        “All the news that’s fit to print”
        Doesn’t mean it’s true

        I prefer my climate science from The Rolling Stone when it comes to the popular press.

      • DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 2:50 pm |

        ‘bogus’? That is a very serious accusation for an analysis.
        You think that there is a fault or lie in my measurement of a freely available dataset?
        If I have made a mistake I will gladly acknowledge it and exchange the document for a correct version. However, there is no mistake in the two plots. They show the RATE of temperature change using monthly or annual data.
        You state “Your method is proven wrong by past data”

        The first figure shows the data from the first month in the HADCRUT4 record to the last. There is no dataset prior to this.

        Support that statement or retract it.

      • climatereason | June 12, 2013 at 3:08 pm |

        Hi iolwot

        Have you managed to find that graphic from the Salby lecture where you believed he gave a false representation of projections? Thanks
        Tonyb

      • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 7:08 pm |

        Bob Droege

        It’s more like:

        “All the news that left to print”

        See William McGowan’s Gray Lady Down.

        Max

      • manacker | June 12, 2013 at 8:22 pm |

        lolwot

        Just saying something absurd or repeating it ad nauseam doesn’t make it true.

        Get used to the fact that there is a current pause in the global warming that was seen in the late 20th C.

        Max

      • lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 9:32 pm |

        Your bogus method is to assume a dip in your graph means we are at a flat highpoint.

        The reason it’s bogus is demonstrated by the fact your graph shows a dip in the 80s and another in the 90s. Wasn’t a flat highpoint in either case.

      • DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 10:58 pm |

        “Your bogus method is to assume a dip in your graph means we are at a flat highpoint.

        The reason it’s bogus is demonstrated by the fact your graph shows a dip in the 80s and another in the 90s. Wasn’t a flat highpoint in either case.”

        lolwat, alas I do not speak gibberish, so can you try it again in English.
        ‘assume a dip in your graph means we are at a flat highpoint’
        I take it that you mean just because the rate of temperature change is falling from positive to negative, this doesn’t mean that temperatures have ceased to rise and have instead begun to fall. Classically, when a rate goes from positive to negative, we know that the descriptor is falling after rising. It is just maths.
        “The reason it’s bogus is demonstrated by the fact your graph shows a dip in the 80s and another in the 90s”

        The temperature series is ‘wobbly’, thus the rate plot is ‘wobbly’. Logic.

        ‘Wasn’t a flat highpoint in either case’
        Is the word you are looking for ‘plateau’? You see I have never stated that the plots give rise to a ‘ flat highpoint’. All I can tell you is that over the last 12 years temperatures have fallen slightly. Thats the data talking, not me.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 11:39 pm |

        Max says

        “Just saying something absurd or repeating it ad nauseam doesn’t make it true.”

        My irony meter just asploded

  44. GaryM | June 12, 2013 at 1:46 pm |

    Proof that if people repeat a lie often enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

    http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/350872/msnbc-george-wallace-republican-ian-tuttle

    Progressives have been trying to take their long history of institutional racism and transplant it to the Republican Party. In their own minds (which is no different from reality to them) they have succeeded.

    Lifetime Democrat and progressive George Wallace now identified as a Republican by those objective journalists at MSBNC,

    • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 2:05 pm |

      Liberal Hubert Humphrey, the Democrat party presidential nomination in 1968, would be considered a right-winger today.

      • DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 2:53 pm |

        The destruction of the Soviet Union and the conditions in Cuba and North Korea have obviously made people rethink what left wing positions mean when applied to societies. The idea that rational thinkers shouldn’t reject many left wing ideas of the 60’s after 50 years of evidence is the sign of an intellectual void.

      • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 3:37 pm |

        True, true, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Khmer Rouge, Nadolf Nitler — who fits in somewhere between Lenin and Stalin — EPA, Al Gore — seeing today’s liberal fascism in historical perspective we cannot avoid seeing the secular, socialism of the Left and it’s horrible record of atrocities measured in millions of deaths.

  45. Cees de Valk | June 12, 2013 at 2:06 pm |

    So far, the discussion about the reality of a pause in warming is not much more than a Rorschach test (see the pictures in this post). No one can tell with any certainty what will happen after this.

    Its main significance to me is that it highlights the fluctuating nature of climate; it is foolish to turn a relatively steep rise in temperature over just two decades into a big issue. Let alone that one could claim to be able to explain it.

  46. Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 2:10 pm |

    There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd. Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?

    ~Michael Crichton

  47. Max_OK | June 12, 2013 at 2:29 pm |

    According to the article by Justin Gillis in the NYTimes, “The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that”

    I was surprised to find fitting an OLS line to UAH data on average global temperature shows the rise in the last 15 years has been slightly faster than the rise in the previous 20 years. This is the case regardless of whether I start with the latest data (May 2013) and go back in 12-month periods ( i.e., from June 1998 to June 2013) or start with the last complete year of data (i.e., from 1998 to 20130).

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1978/to:1998/plot/uah/from:1978/to:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2013/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2013/trend

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1978.42/to:1998.42/plot/uah/from:1978.42/to:1998.42/trend/plot/uah/from:1998.42/to:2013.42/plot/uah/from:1998.42/to:2013.42/trend

    I should examine three other global temperature metrics( RSS, GISTEMP, and HADCRUT) for support of the statement Justin Gillis made. I don’t believe data from UAH and RSS are available for the early part of 1978, so I hope using these sources is fair to Gillis. Does anyone know the month in 1978 when UAH and RSS data became available?

  48. Ron O'Daniels | June 12, 2013 at 3:20 pm |

    When I look at the graph it appears the previous plateaus appear to be equally spaced. The graph looks like something I would see if I was charting a currency pair (a wave), and attempting to gauge where or when the next up or down will be. As the science is not yet clear on what is causing the pause, what is known about the probability of the warming trend continuing? Is that something that should be considered or measured? Is it possible that when (if) whatever it is that is causing this plateau ends, or reverses, that because of increased levels of GHG the warming trend would begin at a faster rate? Did the resumption of the trend previously, after plateau, begin at a steeper trajectory with added GHG? Thanks

  49. Joshua | June 12, 2013 at 3:27 pm |

    blockquote>I’ve always wondered why Michael Oppenheimer, a political scientist, gets to be called a climate scientist, whereby Freeman Dyson, a famous physicist does not. They are both from Princeton, both have studied the climate change problem, but neither has published primary research on climate change detection and attribution.

    I’ve always wondered why Judith has such a contradictory attitude about “authority,” whereby appealing to authorities she agrees with is not fallacious whereas appealing to authorities she doesn’t agree with is fallacious.

    Indeed, it seems that like Romm, Judith’s “concern” about valid reference to “authority” is….er….selective.

    Same ol’ same ol’.

  50. vukcevic | June 12, 2013 at 3:42 pm |

    If you are in the NW Europe, the pause will not last long, major cooling of at least two possibly three decades is on the way:
    http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NVa.htm

    • climatereason | June 12, 2013 at 3:46 pm |

      Vuk

      I sincerely hope you are wrong. My tomatoes are already suffering from the cold and the slugs are getting so fat on my vegetables that they have to take a taxi to their next appointment at my strawberries

      tonyb

      • Joshua | June 12, 2013 at 4:10 pm |

        tony –

        Because I have such confidence in Wags, and because you’re such a nice fella:

        Prevention and control

        […] There are many ways to reduce the numbers of these resilient and destructive pests. …

        …Key factors in successful control are not to rely on only one method and to accept that some damage is inevitable. The canny gardener should always be prepared to re-sow or keep back some extra module grown plants to replace losses and to learn which plants and under what circumstances losses occur, taking action to avoid a repeat. Slugs and snails particularly feed on seedlings and young soft growth, plants under stress, and leaves that are high in nitrogen especially when ‘overfed’ (always follow organic guidelines on feeding and soil management…).

        The following list of methods will all help to either reduce the pest population in your garden or protect vulnerable plants. Aim to use several and follow a strategy that tackles the problems in your garden:

        Choose resistant vegetable varieties:

        Some varieties of potato tuber are particularly resistant to soil dwelling slugs. Examples are: Ambo, Cara, Desiree, Romano, Sante and Valor.

        http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/factsheets/pc20.php

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 4:11 pm |

        Turn over a leaf and you’ll find a fat Lord finagling for ‘Smart Taxis’.
        ======================

      • vukcevic | June 12, 2013 at 4:57 pm |

        Hi Tony
        I had enough of the English summers during last three years, and may not get much better soon, might be putting my money where my mouth is. Although I fancy the old David Niven’s pad in Cap-Ferrat, sadly long out of my range, but a cheep summer/winter bolt hole will do.
        Just managed to get down here before the flight controllers strike, I hope it does last long time!!

      • Tonyb | June 12, 2013 at 5:07 pm |

        Joshua

        Thanks for the advice. I generally reckon that out of every three lettuce planted one will be as Danegeld to the slugs and I will keep back some replacements. However as every historian should know the Danes will be back for more and I am invariably left with the one out of the three.

        Replacement plants are taken in equal measure by slugs who by this time are so big that they leave furrows in the soil and terrify the local cats. still let’s look on the bright side, the way the temperature has dropped during the last decade soon it will be too cold to grow lettuce.

        It’s 10 pm and I’m just going out for a slug hunt. If I’m not back in half an hour alert the police and my next of kin.
        Tony

      • Max_OK | June 12, 2013 at 6:07 pm |

        RESILIENCE, tonyb, RESILIENCE ! Or is it adaptation or both? Anyway, you need it with those tomatoes. Why not just switch to growing some vegetable that’s not so finicky?

        Or you could get a greenhouse. If you do, air-condition it, so your tomatoes plants won’t suffer if it gets too warm.

      • Tonyb | June 12, 2013 at 6:14 pm |

        Maxok

        It’s a demonstration that we need a plan b to cope with cooling,which we have here in the uk, and not just a plan ‘A’ to deal with warming, which is no longer happening in the uk.

        As regards growing things it would be much cheaper to pay my slugs to go in a taxi to the nearest green grocers and collect tomatoes on my behalf for which they would get a good celery …
        Tonyb

      • Max_OK | June 12, 2013 at 6:34 pm |

        tonyb, besides the celery, the slugs might want some money.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 6:43 pm |

        So? Put salt on the celery. Kill two worms with one stun.
        ==================

      • Kent Draper | June 12, 2013 at 7:26 pm |

        One of my worst memories in stepping barefoot on one of the nasty
        slugs in the middle of the night whilst I was getting after my dog, still
        haunts me :)…..

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:57 pm |

        I get a frightful kick out of stepping on chundered hairballs.
        ==============

    • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 3:51 pm |

      Sure, sure it could be 2-3 decades or perhaps 7 decades or even 300 years.

  51. Don B | June 12, 2013 at 3:49 pm |

    In 2005 Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev bet James Annan $10,000 that 2012 through 2017 would be cooler than 1998-2003. At the time of the bet, at least by press reports, Annan was arrogantly confident the outcome would be in his favor.

    More recently, Annan seems to be leading the fight for lower sensitivity. The wheel turns.

    The wheel the NYT and The Economist have been on has moved several degrees. Progress.

    • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 3:57 pm |

      More people should have read the Old Farmers Almanac: “It remains to be seen, said Editor-in-Chief Jud Hale, whether the human impact on global temperatures will cancel out or override any cooling trend. ‘We say that if human beings were not contributing to global warming, it would become real cold in the next 50 years,’ Hale said.” (USA Today, September, 2008)

  52. DocMartyn | June 12, 2013 at 3:53 pm |

    I did a version of Tamino’s figure using the skeptical science graphing program

    http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php

    http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/GISS1976-2012_zps34ac440b.png

    Trend: 0.173 ±0.043 °C/decade (2σ)

    Notice it doesn’t look like Tamino’s.

    • Girma | June 12, 2013 at 4:26 pm |

      Note that the oceans have enormous heat capacity and inertia. As a result, the global mean temperature pattern that is determined by the oceans must continue for several decades.

  54. RiHo08 | June 12, 2013 at 4:50 pm |

    “if past is prologue… ” Didn’t Tomas Milanovic state several years ago…”Never twice the same phase-space.”? Which I interpreted as meaning: we won’t see the exact same climate as we have had. We can get information on how weather and its long term iteration climate may have behaved and might behave in the future, but not a copy and certainly with the tools currently available to us, can’t predict future climate. Tsonis and Swanson put in play surface temperature cycles like PDO, AMO etc which give provided a different perspective as to what to look for in studying climate change. And the just released (6/10/2013) BEST paper of which our hostess is a co-author, looks at the association of surface temperatures and AMO. The above suggests not only that the science is not settled in a growing number of climate scientists’ minds, with the recent assault on climate sensitivity, being scaled lower than speculated upon even just a few years ago, there may be a rethinkng of the impact of the CO2 radiant transfer model as being even relevant to climate change. So….as past is not prologue, this means to me that new systems for understanding our weather/climate need to be considered.

    • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 12, 2013 at 5:29 pm |

      RiH008, “never in the same phase space.” Pretty much, but which phase space is a major question. The AMO has a high correlation with “surface” temperature and is a slower moving target. So while it would have all the basic uncertainties associated with a chaotic system, moving slow and not having as large of a variation should make it a better “climate” metric. Then you could use the oceans as the “phase space”.

      So by picking a better phase space or thermodynamic frame of reference if you are old school, you can simplify the problem. But then you are required to actually use specific heat capacities to figure out how much the change in energy of the slow reference impacts the other layers or “shells” .

      Climate scientists don’t seem to like looking at alternatives that simplify the solution.

    • Chief Hydrologist | June 12, 2013 at 7:01 pm |

      ‘In mathematics and physics, a phase space is a space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space.’ Wikipedia

      In simple system the topology of the phase space is simple – in complex systems it is bifurcated.

      Here the simplest of complex systems is represented – http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbplrd/Lorenz/Lorenz_page.htm

      The trajectory is never repeated exactly but the phase space of a complex system consists of multiple lobes on the topology of a strange attractor into which trajectories of solutions fall.

      In a system as complex as Earth’s climate there are multiple lobes on the topology of the strange attractor – but it is not true that just any outcome is possible. The outcome is constrained by the dimensions of the phase space – in the case of climate past behaviours are clues as to the topology of the space. The behaviour is the result of changes in control variables feeding into multiple negative and positive feedbacks. The definition of a complex system into which both weather and climate neatly fall. One then has a workable paradigm and marshals evidence.

      Edward Palle’s new cloud record is of great interest – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandLaken2013_zps73c516f9.png.html?sort=3&o=2 – as the reason for the pause.

      • RiHo08 | June 12, 2013 at 9:23 pm |

        Thank you Capt’nDallas and Chief.

        My intent in part was to think out loud and raise to consideration that the CO2 radiant transfer model was a bit player in the grand theater of climate.

        Capt’nDallas says to look to the oceans as a slow moving phase-space in which to calculate specific heat capacity incremental impacts on thermodynamic layers.

        Chief says to look at Lorenz’s strange attractors to observe chaotic behavior bounded by internal & external control variables to study climate.

        Again I ask: what keeps global temperatures in bounds over 3 billion years? clouds serving as a window shade opening and closing from hydrodynamic internal variables? earth’s majority surface as water? earth’s course moving around our sun in its none symmetrical course? Chief invokes “Goldie Locks” circumstances for our good fortune. Is the mathematical handling of these internal and boundary conditions that complex? Apparently so.

        Still, my mind can’t wrap itself around the IPCC declaration that CO2 is the control knob for climate change, even to be a tiny weeny bit to be concerned about.

        Observations seem to trump models as these are currently configured.

        Let’s acknowledge that CO2 and its impacts has not panned out as something to study directly. Develop new models, predominately ocean based, that do not in corporate CO2 3.6 W/m2 forcing; i.e., non CO2 radiant transfer models, seem to be an appropriate area to pursue.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 12, 2013 at 10:32 pm |

        RiH008, “Is the mathematical handling of these internal and boundary conditions that complex? Apparently so.”

        You betcha. It takes quite a few references to just to figure out what references are needed when. The ocean reference I recommend just gives you a good estimate of the CO2 impact and the major strange attractors, -1.9 C and 0 C, the freezing points of salt and fresh water and a reference temperature of 4C for the average oceans. The 4 C which has an average equivalent energy of 334.5 Wm-2 which is approximately equal to the DWLR estimated. Adjusting for area of the oceans versus the area of the troposphere radiant “shell”, a rough estimate of the average OLR. With OLR referenced to 4C, “sensitivity” is ~ 0.8 C per 3.6 Wm-2 of atmospheric forcing. That is a little lower than most estimates, but growing more popular. Even though that is based on the radiant “black body” and “shell” model, it is very difficult to convince anyone that it has merit because of all the other goofiness like thinking cloud albedo is “fixed” for some odd reason.

        The IPCC over reaction is because of the use of “ideal” modeling. Hansen produced the absolute worse case instead of a reasonable estimate like Manabe. Hansen’s estimate was so high it doubled the “risk” of CO2 diminishing the “other” impacts that can be dealt with more cost effectively like black carbon, soil carbon and moisture retention.

        As far as expanding the phase space without having a kick butt ocean model first, there is always job security to consider.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 12, 2013 at 11:29 pm |

        The climate is what it is because the planet is of a certain size in proximity to the sun. The phase space is bounded we can see because the states – in the Quaternary – shift between glacials and interglacials.

        Data is always trumps.

  55. RiHo08 | June 12, 2013 at 4:52 pm |

    “… computer forecasts of climate change suggest that pauses in warming lasting a couple of decades should not surprise us.”

    I need help here. Did any of the IPCC models used in AR4 project a couple of decades pause?

    • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 5:15 pm |

      To properly understand the plateau in ‘ground-based warming’ we need to factor in what actually do know –e.g.,

      …if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979… (Richard Courtney)

      • Max_OK | June 12, 2013 at 5:58 pm |

        OK, Waggy, I’ll factor in what you, Waggy, actually do know.

        I’ll start with …

        Let me see there’s …

        Then theres …

        OK, how about …

        HELP! Waggy, I need some help here !

      • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 6:41 pm |

        You are here to learn what we know? Okay… we know of two natural components of the currently progressing climate change. The first one is an almost linear global temperature increase of about 0.5°C/100 years. The second one is oscillatory (positive/negative) changes, which are superposed on the linear change. One of them is the multi-decadal oscillation… There you go. Now you know something too courtesy of Syun-Ichi Akasofu. Once you identify and factor in natural changes we know about then perhaps you are ready identify alleged man-made causes. In fact, only then can you hope to do anything constructive for humanity instead of simply leaching off the blood, sweat and sacrifice of the productive.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 6:45 pm |

        Who will lick up the tears and ravioli on the sleeve of care?
        ==================

      • Max_OK | June 12, 2013 at 6:53 pm |

        Waggy’s theory is temperature change is a function of time. Well, nothing can change without some time passing, at least nothing I can think of, so Waggy’s theory is pretty sound.

        Waggy you are a hoot !

      • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 7:01 pm |

        Imagine climate being a function of time too. Amazing?

  57. David Springer | June 12, 2013 at 5:15 pm |

    With an as yet undetermined appendage Dr. Paul Pukite writes (about the graph below):

    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:101/mean:103/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/plot/best/mean:191/mean:193/to:1867/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/from:1988/to:1994/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2006/to:2008

    You really ought to look at what Bart is trying to teach you. To be careful on how you apply windows to filter and smooth your data. To watch what happens when you take too short a section of data. Etc. etc.

    It looks like what Bart is doing is madness, but there is a reason. If you were intellectually curious you woul pursue it. But alas you are not.

    Paul, I agree. I think you should take the image of the referenced graph and drop it into your photobucket collection. It’ll fit right in. In the future you can produce it without explanation or source information to buttress a point. Any point. It’s an exceedingly versatile work. I admire your ability to recognize talent when you see it. Bravo. BAE is very lucky to have you.

    • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 5:20 pm |

      Yup… If he was intellectually curious he would be more skeptical. But alas he is a tool.

    • CMS | June 12, 2013 at 5:41 pm |

      I really don’t understand the purpose of this graph. You take a bunch of series and display their mean. Then take one series and display it with its variability. What is the point. Sure you are going to get a lot seeming movement, but it is only the variability showing. Why not just. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/plot/best/mean:191/mean:193/to:1867/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/last:90/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:29/mean:31/from:1988/to:1994/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2006/to:2008 then at least you can see the variability and tell that it was even greater in the earlier part of the series.

      • Bart R | June 12, 2013 at 10:46 pm |

        CMS | June 12, 2013 at 5:41 pm |

        Finally! A decently intelligent question.

        Variability isn’t always the point of graphs. When it isn’t, while it’s inappropriate to deny it, it can be de-emphasized to clarify the main focus.

        In this case, we know there’s plenty of variability. We ought be aware of that from the 384 month smoothing and the 204 month smoothing.

        The short span showing the 2007-2008 spike and ~0.7C drop is the trendologists’ way of asking the question, “why this?”

        Why this particular variation at this particular time?

        Is it due an El Nino accompanying a flip in the PDO to a negative phase? Due volcanic plumes penetrating the tropopause and depositing aerosols? A combination of the two? Is it like the Mt. Pinatubo-linked similar spike/drop of 1991? Well, that sort of fingoism isn’t very scientific, so it ill-becomes me to distract with such specious proposition. We can get there, but not from this graph alone, with only the information contained in it.

        If you’re asking about Uncertainty, when asking about variability, that’s amply captured in the high degree of smoothing, and the splicing in of a different dataset at the early part of the curve just to extend it speculatively.

  58. Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 5:36 pm |

    What is it the Left hates about people who work for a living without asking the government for permission?

  59. Eliza | June 12, 2013 at 6:50 pm |

    Pope: But temperatures especially in the poles are NOT rising they are FALLING!
    http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
    (as are world temps)
    http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_May_2013_v5.5.png

    • lolwot | June 12, 2013 at 9:47 pm |

      you probably look outside your window at the rain and assume the whole world is raining.

      • Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 11:51 pm |

        Naw, you got it wrong,
        based on Eliza’s graphs and the conclusion made,
        Eliza would look outside at the rain and conclude that the sun is shining.

  60. Eliza | June 12, 2013 at 6:51 pm |

    And by the way the sun is now in free fall
    http://www.solarham.net/

  61. Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 7:13 pm |

    Maybe we should start giving names to sunspots — either that or, maybe we simply number all manner of natural phenomena–e.g., Hurricane 1765?

  62. John Reid | June 12, 2013 at 7:33 pm |

    The “Pause” indicates one thing – the models have no predictive power and have failed. This is hardly surprising considering that THE major forcing of ocean circulation, benthic volcanism, has been ignored. Sea floor heating accounts for tens of terawatts and far outweighs forcing due to wind, tidal friction and thermohaline circulation combined. Furthermore it is sporadic in both time and space. Maybe this is the source of the mysterious multi-decadal oscillation.

  63. Alexander Biggs | June 12, 2013 at 7:59 pm |

    “The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace”

    Precisly. But not the complete story. The earth’s average climate depebs on both the oceans ans the atmosphere. The ocean influence tends to be a lagged version of the atmosphere and the lag can be decades long because of the transport delay and the poor conductivity of water.

    The Gillis article appears to havr ignored that this is the second time in history that a so-called ‘pause’ has occured. The first time was 1940 to 1970 when the temperature actually fell. The IPCC missed this because their arbitrary starting point for global warming was about 1961. All of this is explainrd in my paper on climate change underlinrd above.

  64. Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 8:03 pm |

    What does a society do when it learns it’s been taken to the cleaners? Who do they blame? How nasty will they get?

    Headline: “Solar Industry Anxious Over Defective Panels”

    1st paragraph: “LOS ANGELES — The solar panels covering a vast warehouse roof in the sun-soaked Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles were only two years into their expected 25-year life span when they began to fail.”

    (NYT)

  65. jim2 | June 12, 2013 at 8:05 pm |

    I can’t believe Obama is doing this, but he increased the “cost” of carbon based on … you guessed it … models. Models have been shown to be fraught with difficulties. And these models attempt to predict both global warming and damages from it. I mean after all, if you are going to model damage from global warming, you have to have something in the model that represents the change in temperature, sea level, etc. So now we have one guess stacked upon another, and we already know the climate models don’t predict global temp, so what do these models use for climate prediction.

    And, true to form, Obama tried to hide it from us, just like he hid his spying on us (us in the US … oh, yeah … and the UK and …)

    The number for carbon damage price is worse than useless.

    From the article:
    “Buried in a little-noticed rule on microwave ovens is a change in the U.S. government’s accounting for carbon emissions that could have wide-ranging implications for everything from power plants to the Keystone XL pipeline.

    The increase of the so-called social cost of carbon, to $38 a metric ton in 2015 from $23.80, adjusts the calculation the government uses to weigh costs and benefits of proposed regulations. The figure is meant to approximate losses from global warming such as flood damage and diminished crops.

    For example, the administration’s vehicle fuel-efficiency standards would cost industry $350 billion over the next 40 years, while benefits in energy security, less congestion and lower pollution totaled $278 billion. Photographer: Reed Saxon/AP Photo

    With the change, government actions that lead to cuts in emissions — anything from new mileage standards to clean-energy loans — will appear more valuable in its cost-benefit analyses. On the flip side, environmentalists urge that it be used to judge projects that could lead to more carbon pollution, such as TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone pipeline or coal-mining by companies such as Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU) on public lands, which would be viewed as more costly.”
    …
    “Even supporters questioned the way the administration slipped the policy out without first opening it for public comment. The change was buried in an afternoon announcement on May 31 about efficiency standards for microwave ovens, a rule not seen as groundbreaking. ”
    …
    “The administration first arrived at this calculation in 2010 using “leading expert models” and updated it “applying the same methods and assumptions,” Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman Ari Isaacman Astles said in an e-mail. ”
    …
    ““We recommend using monetized estimates of the social cost of the (greenhouse gas) emissions from a barrel of oil sands crude compared to average U.S. crude,” the EPA said in its submission to the State Department. It made a similar request in 2011, and the State Department didn’t include it in its draft assessment.

    And if Obama approves the pipeline, the higher carbon-cost estimate could to be a part of any lawsuit challenging the decision, according to Bill Snape, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. ”

    Bastard.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-12/tougher-regulations-seen-from-obama-change-in-carbon-cost.html

    A discussion of the models.
    http://www.epa.gov/otaq/climate/regulations/scc-tsd.pdf

    • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 11:10 pm |

      Everything is according to Plan… which is to destroy America’ s free enterprise economy. A majority of voters elected a ham sandwich. The Republican party is worthless. That is why the Left afraid of the Tea party — because, it’s not a party: it’s a movement and that is something that cannot be controlled except with police power.

      • kim | June 12, 2013 at 11:27 pm |

        The problem is that six to ten trillion dollars extra debt increases the urge to movement. It’s kinda like gas, or spastic colon. You know, unpleasant.
        ==================

      • Wagathon | June 12, 2013 at 11:38 pm |

        We need a small enough government that ten trillion sounds like big money and the people responsible for paying it have a say it how it is to be used.

  66. Myrrh | June 12, 2013 at 8:33 pm |

    For an interesting take on the ‘power’ of the climate blogosphere, see also this recent essay by Pointman entitled How to run a really bad infowar campaign.

    Astute observer, Pointman. That is exactly how I came in to the arguments..

    Someone set up a discussion on an unrelated subject board, ‘to finally put all the arguments against to rout’ – and this immediately piqued my interest because I didn’t know there were any arguments about it. Actually, I hadn’t taken much notice of the scaremongering either, busy living doing other things. But I was interested in finding out what the argument was all about.

    As I did know something about graphs I wondered why they’d chosen the LIA as a starting point for the claimed ‘previous normal climate’, and was directed to look at the Hockey Stick …

  67. manacker | June 12, 2013 at 8:36 pm |

    Judith Curry

    This may be slightly OT here, but is this program (“TRUTH”) on hold for now and what exactly is it supposed to tell us?
    http://www.npl.co.uk/TRUTHS

    Just curious.

    Max

    • jim2 | June 12, 2013 at 9:32 pm |

      Here is a somewhat cynical post on the current state of the TSI history.

      “The most remarkable [but not surprising] aspect of these three TSI Composites is how they all [somehow] manage to converge upon the published “solar constant” of 1,366 W/m2 which is so effectively embedded within the original Wikipedia graphic.

      Arguably, data compositing is the greatest achievement of the TSI satellite age.

      Let’s try to understand this mess a little better. Let’s scrape back another layer.”

      http://malagabay.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/1366-and-all-that-the-secret-history-of-total-solar-irradiance/

      • Myrrh | June 13, 2013 at 7:57 am |

        I’ve just been discussing this elsewhere, or rather hoping somone would interact with what I was saying..

        “The third problem is that the Solar Constant measurement has to include all “solar electromagnetic radiation” which is taken from the wiki definition you posted.

        I at first used this definition in my analysis of Trenberth’s and ilk energy budget when showing that their claim of “backradiation from the atmosphere by greenhouse gases” was using real world measurements of thermal infrared direct from the Sun which they had excised from their GHE claiming it didn’t reach us and given its watts/sqm to “shortwave in”.

        During the course of my what turned out to be a monologue, I remembered what the solar constant actually is, it does not include all solar magnetic radiation because it is calculated on how much the Earth is heated.

        This is by the property of heat from the Sun, not light from the Sun. So it is in effect the amount of longwave infrared direct from the Sun, not the mixture as wiki states it, nor is it the claim of the GHE that the solar constant is only shortwave in.

        The AGWGreenhouse Effect has taken out the direct heat from the Sun, thermal infrared, aka longwave infrared, and replaced it by “shortwave in”, mainly visible light.

        I came across some measurements which I couldn’t understand during this monologue:

        http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/10/dr-murray-salby-on-model-world-vs-real-world/#comment-1333343

        From “So, back to my question, what exactly is happening here?”

        Linking to some pages from the NASA Surface Radiation Budget Project on PhysicalGeography.net.

        I should be grateful if you would take a look at my questions.

        Here a way to measure solar constant: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Curric_7-12/Activity_3.pdf

      • jim2 | June 13, 2013 at 11:15 pm |

        The black water used in the experiment converts visible light to heat. That’s my take on it.

  68. Jim D | June 12, 2013 at 9:37 pm |

    While “skeptics” are correct when they say natural variation due to the Sun and PDO are large enough to cause these types of pause, oh wait… they haven’t said this. Clearly they don’t think it could have been caused by natural variation like the Sun or PDO despite these being in the right phase for it, otherwise they would have said so by now. Where do they stand on natural variation as a possible cause? Too small? No debate on this? Ruled out?

    • Jim D | June 12, 2013 at 10:06 pm |

      A simple way to remove natural variations is a 60-year running average. What is left? Hmmm. This will take some ‘splainin’. What could have caused that? It seems to be increasing too, whatever it is.
      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720

      • Jim D | June 12, 2013 at 10:28 pm |

        Even with this level of smoothing, we see the land is doing something different. There is a divergence as it warms faster at the end.
        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720/plot/crutem4vgl/mean:720

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 12, 2013 at 10:49 pm |

        JimD, the land starting point was lower. It overshot going down and will overshoot going up reverting to the mean, which in this case is curving to an asymptote, i.e. the meridional OHC imbalance is reducing.

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/from:1960/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1960/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4tr/from:1960/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1960/to:2013/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1960/plot/esrl-amo/from:1960

        The brown one is AMO which I hear has some influence on “average” surface temperature.

        .

      • maksimovich | June 12, 2013 at 10:58 pm |

        The problem is the so called pause in MST where we have a divergence ie a planet of 2 halves,the SH meeting the criteria for Santer,which does need a physical explanation.

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1996.6/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1996.6/mean:12/trend/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1990/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3nh/from:1990/mean:12

      • Jim D | June 12, 2013 at 11:01 pm |

        The zero is arbitrary, so I see that as having two periods of more rapid external forcing where the land responded faster. The first one was 1900-1930, which I think was at least partly solar. When the forcing is stronger, the ocean simply can’t keep up, and we have been in that mode again since 1960 for obvious reasons.

      • Jim D | June 12, 2013 at 11:13 pm |

        maksimovich, the SH parallels the global.
        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720/plot/hadcrut4sh/mean:720
        These plots end in 2013, but are displayed with the middle date of the 60-year period, so they include all the pause years, which make no dent.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 12, 2013 at 11:33 pm |

        Yes, the ocean surface temperature can’t keep up, yet the amount it can’t keep up is accurately compensated by the rise in the ocean heat content measure.

        Energy is conserved so that however much the sea surface temperature isn’t rising to match the land temperature increase, the excess thermal energy is being dispersed in the ocean volume.

        Presto, no missing heat.

      • lolwot | June 13, 2013 at 6:06 am |

        Ultimately the surface must heat up in order to radiate enough energy to solve the energy imbalance

      • Jim Cripwell | June 13, 2013 at 7:06 am |

        lolwot writes “Ultimately the surface must heat up in order to radiate enough energy to solve the energy imbalance”

        This worries me. I thought that the response of the earth to an energy imbalance was to counter this imbalance by a combination of conduction, convection, the latent heat of water, and radiaiton; not radiation alone. Is this wrong

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 7:31 am |

        “This worries me. I thought that the response of the earth to an energy imbalance was to counter this imbalance by a combination of conduction, convection, the latent heat of water, and radiaiton; not radiation alone. Is this wrong”

        Give it up cripkeeper. As lolwot said, eventually the only way for the earth to shed energy gained is through radiation loss. If you haven’t learned that by now there is no hope for you. This is pretty sad and reveals your lack of being able to learn anything new.

      • Jim Cripwell | June 13, 2013 at 7:46 am |

        WHT, you write “As lolwot said, eventually the only way for the earth to shed energy gained is through radiation loss.”

        Sorry, that is NOT what lolwot said. The earth loses heat only by radiation, but this radiation does not eminate from the surface. It eminates from the vaguely defined TOA. Read what lolwot wrote. I quote “the surface must heat up in order to radiate“. “the surface“ is specicifly singled out as the place from which the radiation eminates.

        This is the sort of wooly thinking that worries me.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 8:23 am |

        Lolwot is still correct. The top of the atmosphere will heat up, but then there is the atmospheric lapse rate property of every known planetary body which will force the surface to rise in temperature. Give it up, you lose this time and every time. Stick with the cross-stitch or whatever you do to pass the time.

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 8:59 am |

        @cripwell

        Actually some energy loss by radiation does come directly from the surface. There’s something called the atmospheric window which is primarily between 8 and 14 micrometers.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png

        15-30% of surface IR emission escapes unmolested through this window. This is particularly important for the recent “CFC caused my global warming” paper in a very prestigious physics journal last month:

        http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979213500732

        CFCs absorb IR in the atmospheric window and Lu’s paper correlates anthropogenic CFC emission (and outlawing of same) with troposphere warming (and the pause after the outlawing) with a nearly perfect R-factor. Even WHUT a.k.a. Dr. Paul Pukite at BAE in Minnesota is disturbed by this paper mostly due to the prestige of the International Journal of Physics B where it was published but secondarily (perhaps in primarily if he was more honest) because there’s a sound physical basis and unassailable correlation. WHUT made a lame protest about a 12 delay between CFC peak and warming peak and that was the best he could do. Maybe the ocean caused teh delay. God knows WHUT is ready and willing to use the ocean for any manner of delay needed to support the quickly collapsing CO2 boogeyman narrative.

      • Jim Cripwell | June 13, 2013 at 9:08 am |

        WHT, you write “Lolwot is still correct.“

        I never said lolwot was wrong. I said what he wrote worried me. He seems to claim that the response of the SURFACE to an energy imbalance is ONLY radiative. I dont think that this is correct. The response of the surface to an energy imbalance is conduction, convection, latent heat of water, and radiation. This combination cause more energy to get to the TOA where it is radiated out into space. It is important to make sure statements we make on science are scientificly accurate. I dont think what lolwot wrote was accurate.

        Yes, I intend to continue with my cross-stitch. It is a thoroughly enjoyable pasttime, and why more men dont have the sense to enjoy it I have no idea. But I will also battle the hoax of CAGW until the emnpirical data shows we deniers/skeptics have the science correct.

      • Jim Cripwell | June 13, 2013 at 9:12 am |

        David, you write “Actually some energy loss by radiation does come directly from the surface.”

        Thanks; I knew that of course. However, writing on blogs needs to be kept simple and short. The point I am trying to make is that the response of the surface of the earth to an energy imbalance is EVERYTHING; not just radiation. It is that implication that worries me in lolwot’s original statement

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:35 am |

        15-30% is a significant fraction. I have to bitch slap Mosher once in a while when he forgets about it too. You are correct of course that outgoing surface flux is not dominated by radiation. By a ratio of almost 2:1 average across the earth’s surface energy leaves it insensibly in latent heat of vaporization which drills through greenhouse gases like they weren’t there to deposit the energy high in the atmosphere as warm clouds where the energy has a more open path to space via radiation and a more restricted path back to the surface by greenhouse gases which, instead of restricting upwelling longwave instead restrict downwelling from warm cloud bottoms. Over perenially wet surfaces like the ocean it’s all about latent heat and very little about radiation.

    • Chief Hydrologist | June 12, 2013 at 10:57 pm |

      ‘The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming,
      the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates. Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.’ http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/Tung_and_Zhou_2013_PNAS.pdf

      So this is one way of doing it – you get a steady rate of warming that is not at all alarming. I have seen it done half a dozen ways with similar results.

      I am far from convinced for 2 reasons.

      Firstly – the data shows it was clouds wot done it. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=1

      Second – there is no reason to think that the pattern of the 20th century will persist into the 21st.

      It is all certainly natural and caused by changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation. The current cool pattern seems set to persist for a decade to three more.

    • Myrrh | June 13, 2013 at 9:18 am |

      Jim D | June 12, 2013 at 9:37 pm | While “skeptics” are correct when they say natural variation due to the Sun and PDO are large enough to cause these types of pause, oh wait… they haven’t said this. Clearly they don’t think it could have been caused by natural variation like the Sun or PDO despite these being in the right phase for it, otherwise they would have said so by now. Where do they stand on natural variation as a possible cause? Too small? No debate on this? Ruled out?

      That’s just silly. Still trying to pretend that the null hypothesis doesn’t exist?

      Now by the disingenuous wording you employ here, to lie that we haven’t been arguing from it?

      http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/03/trenberth-null-and-void/

      “Dr. Kevin Trenberth advocates reversing the ‘null hypothesis’”

      “Currently the null hypothesis for climate change attribution research is that humans have no influence.”

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:28 am |

        A marvelous null, in some ways analogous to the purported Heisenberg’s Cat, but in principle I’m uncertain. Thanks to the spatio-temporal chaos we have statistical thermodynamic solutions, too. Who could ask for anything more, or dare to keep on tickin’?
        ===========

  69. Girma | June 12, 2013 at 9:50 pm |

    The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system

    There is no gap in our knowledge. The problem was because IPCC assumed the 30-years warming trend from 1974 to 2004 of 0.2 deg C per decade as a secular climate signal instead of a transient climate signal. The IPCC models do not take into account the multidecadal oscillation.

    In a paper that includes Mann as a coauthor the above has been explicitly stated:
    http://lightning.sbs.ohio-state.edu/indices/amo_reference/knight2005.pdf

    … the AMO is a genuine quasi-periodic cycle of internal climate
    variability persisting for many centuries, and is related to
    variability in the oceanic thermohaline circulation (THC).
    This relationship suggests we can attempt to reconstruct
    past THC changes, and we infer an increase in THC
    strength over the last 25 years. Potential predictability
    associated with the mode implies natural THC and
    AMO decreases over the next few decades independent
    of anthropogenic climate change
    ….
    The quasi-periodic nature of the model’s AMO
    suggests that in the absence of external forcings at least,
    there is some predictability of the THC, AMO and global
    and Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures for several
    decades into the future. We utilise this to forecast decreasing
    THC strength in the next few decades. This natural
    reduction would accelerate anticipated anthropogenic THC
    weakening, and the associated AMO change would partially
    offset expected Northern Hemisphere warming. This effect
    needs to be taken into account in producing more realistic
    predictions of future climate change.

    So they knew about the current plateau but it was not included in the fourth assessment report.

  70. Steven Sullivan | June 12, 2013 at 11:57 pm |

    So *something* of you to not quote this part of Gillis’s article, JC
    “The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.”

  71. Wagathon | June 13, 2013 at 12:26 am |

    There will be a global warming problem until the productive come to realize they’re throwing a big piece of their lives away working for Leftist bureaucrats and academics with lifetime tenure in ivory towers. When that time comes, the problem of global warming stops, PDQ.

  72. Faustino | June 13, 2013 at 12:31 am |

    Dr Herman A Pope, your posts are succinct, clear, based on real-world data and observation and provide a simple and convincing explanation for a world of bounded temperatures.

    The problem with such posts is that they do not provide any basis for interminable debate, argument, claim and counter-claim, abuse and all the other factors which allow a group of people to fill endless reams of cyber-space day after day.

    So your approach won’t do. If everyone adopted it, the flow of material on CE and many other blogs would slow to a trickle. And then where would we go for our entertainment?

    • Beth Cooper | June 13, 2013 at 3:41 am |

      Modus operandi ever intervenes
      regardless of in-convienient data.
      ‘Twas ever thus with us. The upside
      is that fallible – as – we – are,
      – we – see – the- humor-of-
      the – human -condishun – hey,
      wot about-kim? … And-we –
      are -adap – table ter –
      periods-of-feast-and -famine
      – Amen.
      Serfi.

      • jim2 | June 14, 2013 at 1:30 pm |

        “In the old Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and today’s North Korea, they tried to move toward the ideal Communist system. Combined, they killed about 100 million of their own people. That’s a hefty moral distinction right there: When freedom-lovers move society toward their ideal, mistakes may be made, but people tend to flourish. When the hard Left is given free rein, millions are murdered and enslaved. Which ideal would you like to move toward?”
        …
        “That phrase, “the wave of the future,” became famous thanks to a 1940 essay by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. She argued that the time of liberal democratic capitalism was drawing to a close and the smart money was on statism of one flavor or another — fascism, Communism, socialism, etc. What was lost on her, and millions of others, was that this wasn’t progress toward the new, but regression to the past. These “waves of the future” were simply gussied-up tribalisms, anachronisms made gaudy with the trappings of modernity, like a gibbon in a spacesuit.”
        …
        “ndeed, what’s remarkable about all of the states Lind identifies as proof that libertarianism doesn’t work is that they are in fact proof that it does. What made the American experiment new were its libertarian innovations, broadly speaking. Moreover, those innovations made us prosper. Even Sweden — the liberal Best in Show — owes its successes to its libertarian concessions. ”

        http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351021/freedom-unfolding-revolution-jonah-goldberg

    • tonyb | June 13, 2013 at 4:23 am |

      Faustino

      Even worse is if AGW was definitively proven or disproven thereby having the same net effect.

      With the raison d’etre of our entertainment taken away would we all wander about in a zombie like trance? Fortunately I am a part of the Big Oil funded conspiracy to ensure the show stays on the road.

      Must go as I need to order a new gas guzzling car-the latest Oil pay cheque has just arrived
      tonyb

      • mosomoso | June 13, 2013 at 7:10 am |

        Yeah, I used to be all green-and-meaningful…but MoveOn and GetUp just couldn’t match the offers from Big Coal. Not even close.

    • lolwot | June 13, 2013 at 7:28 am |

      “Dr Herman A Pope, your posts are succinct, clear, based on real-world data and observation and provide a simple and convincing explanation for a world of bounded temperatures.”

      Nevermind it doesn’t actually make sense (warmer = more snow = colder…!!!) and is contradicted by warmer periods of the past.

      • lolwot | June 13, 2013 at 7:28 am |

        Also snow cover is shrinking in the spring and summer months

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 12:58 am |

        ‘While the Arctic region has been warming strongly in recent decades,
        anomalously large snowfall in recent winters has affected large parts of North America, Europe, and east Asia. Here we demonstrate that the decrease in autumn Arctic sea ice area is linked to changes in the winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation that have some resemblance to the negative phase of the winter Arctic oscillation. However, the atmospheric circulation change linked to the reduction of sea ice shows much broader meridional meanders in midlatitudes and clearly different interannual variability than the classical Arctic oscillation. This circulation change results in more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents. Moreover, the increase in atmospheric water vapor content
        in the Arctic region during late autumn and winter driven locally by the reduction of sea ice provides enhanced moisture sources, supporting increased heavy snowfall in Europe during early winter and the northeastern and midwestern United States during winter. We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.’ http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/pnas.pdf

        The mechanism itself is not problematic. The over simplified narrative is eminently ignorable and the certainly in which it is held ridiculous.

  73. dp | June 13, 2013 at 12:50 am |

    Maybe temperature is a poor proxy for the state of the climate. Given the capacity of the oceans to consume energy, and given our inability to find any significant change in the global ocean, and that the energy that needs to get to the deep ocean is not seen passing through the shallow depths of the ocean, maybe we need to examine our instrumentation.

    What, besides temperature changes that are lost in the noise, act as signatures of energy imbalance in the Earth system? Forget you ever heard of global warming and start looking for global energy sinks. If we are truly taking on more energy than we’re emitting to space we owe it to those we plan to impoverish or to hold in continuing poverty with punitive and debilitating regulations to show if and when the poverty will end.

    It should be obvious that a significant amount of the incoming energy is not being converted to heat. It may be converted to daffodils or krill, but it isn’t becoming heat. Quit looking.

    Or maybe there’s really no positively trending imbalance of incoming and outgoing energy.

    • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 1:35 am |

      This is all garbage without any citations to back it up. You are just repeating talking points. Show me an analysis or research paper where ” the energy that needs to get to the deep ocean is not seen passing through the shallow depths of the ocean”

      Do daffodils and krill not eventually decompose, thereby releasing their embodied energy ?

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:25 am |

        Daffodills yes but in terrestrial gardens not the ocean floor. Krill yes and no. Krill are a staple food for other marine organisms and about half of their total biomass (500 million tons) is digested. The other half sinks and decays. But this misses the point. Nothing changed that would suddenly make more krill pass die and decompose on the ocean floor and thereby insensibly transport energy through the upper layer of the ocean. I question whether there’s enough biomass of krill in the first place to move that much energy. Your ideas are generally flawed Pukite but that little nugget of imbecility exceeds your average but a good deal.

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:30 am |

        Think jellyfish and peanut butter sandwich. I believe you can fabricate dinosaurs, and balmy Tyger gardens from them.
        =================

  74. mwgrant | June 13, 2013 at 1:32 am |

    hash

    Noun

    1. A dish of cooked meat cut into small pieces and recooked, usually with potatoes.

    2. A climo-hash graphic or hash-graph. An climate graphics prototype commonly constructed using global surface temperature anomaly ‘data’ plotted against time. A tell-tale characteristic of these line scatterplots of anomaly versus time (year) is the inclusion of one or more linear regression lines, moving average lines, etc., purported to support some scientific ‘thingy’. The distinguishing characteristic is the absence of any specified statistical or structural context. This is in contrast to scientific graphics. Hash graphics are primarily used to induce much strutting on the part of the provider and even more stress in targeted individuals. Beyond that, no scientific application has been found. To date no deaths as a result of exposure to hash graphs has been reported. Recent studies, not likely to be published, suggest distant links with phrenology and 1950’s vintage television test patterns. Hash graphics, unfortunately, contain no potatoes.

  75. D Cotton | June 13, 2013 at 1:46 am |

    The pause (which I predicted the year before last would continue until 2028) is caused by the 60 year natural cycle countering the effect of the still rising 1,000 year cycle. It’s all natural climate change. Carbon dioxide has no effect (well I calculate 0.002 C degree of cooling actually) because the whole paradigm of radiative forcing and greenhouse effects is wrong.

    So the models are wrong because the paradigm is wrong. Loschmidt was right after all. Anthony Watts tried to rebut the gravity effect with a thought experiment that assumed there would be a continuous energy flow if a wire were run up the outside of a cylinder of air which exhibited the gravity gradient, such as in Roderich Graeff’s experiments. But it would not, because the gravity gradient also occurs in the wire itself, just as it does in Earth’s solid crust and mantle – and in all planetary atmospheres. Surface temperatures are determined by this gradient and the need for radiative balance.

    That leaves one thing to be explained – how the energy actually goes up the temperature gradient, because it has nothing to do with pressure which does not supply energy. The answer to this dilemma has been published in a comprehensive paper which I’ll discuss in my next comment if anyone asks.

    • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 1:56 am |

      Can I ask you not to?

      • D Cotton | June 13, 2013 at 5:09 am |

        You wouldn’t have a hope of explaining how the necessary thermal energy gets down into the depths of the Uranus atmosphere, Chief H, and it’s not to do with pressure which is not a source of energy. Try me.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 7:41 am |

        I can’t tell the two Aussies Chief and Cotton apart. Tell me again who is the one with an ounce of scientific integrity?

      • D Cotton | June 13, 2013 at 7:50 am |

        And what integrity is there in trying to quell the truth about the mechanism which determines all planetary atmospheric, surface, crust, mantle and core temperatures? What integrity is there in misleading the world with the blatant claim that radiation from the cold Venus atmosphere can supply the necessary radiative input of 16,100W/m^2 in order to increase the temperature by 5 degrees – as happens every Venus day – especially when there is far less than that even reaching the planet?

        As a matter of scientific integrity I refused point blank to change my paper to fit in with a reviewer’s belief system, even though it meant it stays in the PROM (Peer Review in Open Media) menu at PSI, perhaps for months. You are welcome to try to submit a valid rebuttal to the CEO of PSI and you will be guaranteed a reply, pointing out your errors no doubt.

    • Bob Droege | June 13, 2013 at 1:47 pm |

      Doug,
      Can you explain the Deuterium in the atmosphere of Venus?

      • D Cotton | June 13, 2013 at 5:32 pm |

        It is irrelevant to the issue of Venus surface temperatures which, as my paper explains, are dependent upon the gravity effect.

        I HAVE PROVED BEYOND REASONABLE DOUBT that it is the gravity effect which, in conjunction with natural variations in Solar flux reaching a planet’s atmosphere, determines that planet’s atmospheric, surface, crust, mantle and core temperatures. This is based on valid physics and is explained in my 20 page paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” which so far no one in the world has successfully rebutted, because when they study it they realise it is correct.

  76. Peter Lang | June 13, 2013 at 5:57 am |

    A question for the Denizens: Now that CAGW is in it’s death throes, what is the next scare campaign going to be based on?

    • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 7:37 am |

      ”
      Peter Lang | June 13, 2013 at 5:57 am | Reply

      A question for the Denizens: Now that CAGW is in it’s death throes, what is the next scare campaign going to be based on?
      “

      It is a never-ending struggle to correct misinformation of clueless Aussies such as Murry Salby who think that the excess atmospheric CO2 is not caused by man. Can’t give an inch to the anti-science contingent.

      You have a problem with that?

      • D Cotton | June 13, 2013 at 7:53 am |

        Maybe the excess carbon dioxide is caused by man. So what? By my estimates all the carbon dioxide already there has a net cooling effect of about 0.002 C degree, and I defy you to prove otherwise. My proof extends over 20 pages in my paper.

      • Edim | June 13, 2013 at 7:56 am |

        Salby is doing science. Yours and the warmists’ is anti-science (cargo cult, dogma, paradigm paralysis…).

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 8:32 am |

        ”
        Edim | June 13, 2013 at 7:56 am |

        Salby is doing science. Yours and the warmists’ is anti-science (cargo cult, dogma, paradigm paralysis…).
        “

        Let’s keep the pressure on Salby. He is the deniers’ true flag-bearer, not the lukewarmers such as Watts and Spencer. The deniers lack any credibility so they latch on to Salby.

        It doesn’t pay to attack clueless contrarians such as Edim but if you bring Salby down, he will go the way of the Sky Dragons. It will be fun to watch this first-hand, a real climate scientist shredding his cred.

      • Edim | June 13, 2013 at 8:44 am |

        Webby, you don’t understand it, I think Salby is right, but even if wrong he’s doing science. That’s how science progresses, by challenging the paradigm/dogma.

      • Peter Lang | June 13, 2013 at 9:53 am |

        WHT,

        Are you on another planet? Have you lost touch with what is happening on Earth? Don’t you realise that the CAGW Doomsayers’ scare campaign is on it’s last legs? Don’t you know the UNFCC climate talks in Bonn have collapsed? http://www.cfact.org/2013/06/12/climate-talks-collapse/?utm_source=CFACT+Updates&utm_campaign=7248de8360-UN_climate_talks_collapse_6_12_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a28eaedb56-7248de8360-260112761

        Don’t you know that interest in the CAGW scare campaign has been waning since Copenhagen? Can you interpret the activity chart?: http://climatechange.carboncapturereport.org/cgi-bin/topic?

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:55 am |

        A shade macabre, these Green Dancers.
        ============

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 13, 2013 at 10:13 am |

        So Edim is challenging dogma. I will act like Edim and challenge Ohm’s Law. According to him, that is okay because I am doing science. While I am at it, I will find flaws in Boolean Logic because that is what a skeptic such as Edim would do.

        Salby is mocking science and the scientific establishment, whatever that is. Watch his video and see him referencing Feynman and challenging authority. One should not have to resort to such rhetoric unless it is borne out of desperation.

      • Edim | June 13, 2013 at 10:22 am |

        Yes Webby, challenging even Ohm’s law is science and no harm is done. It’s futile though. Defending the paradigm and dogma on the other side is very harmful to science. I think you will understand it one day, I used to think like you – I was ignorant.

      • Edim | June 13, 2013 at 10:15 am |

        But, I don’t think there will be time and interest for it – there will be some kind of world war, I don’t see how it can be avoided. The chickens are coming home to roost.

    • SUT | June 14, 2013 at 11:35 am |

      There was a guest post on WUWT about Africa being a noticeable carbon source due to low development and thus high wildlife and insects, and this carbon dominates Anthro contribution. The post-AGW scare will go:

      A. Man alters landsettlement -> B. changes outcomes for “natural” organisms -> C. changes some macro metric (probably genetic diversity), which brings down the wrath of God

      Basically, the next scare won’t feature a man-made direct pollutant directly affecting the outcome, but will use a natural system (B) between the man’s interference and his retribution. This will allow give enough plausible deniability – “Mother Nature ended up responding in a way that rescued us” or the evaluation of the situation won’t have an agreed upon means of measurement, like the uncooperative GMT in AGW.

  77. angech | June 13, 2013 at 6:20 am |

    “You can do this simply by selecting areas that have no people, no industry, and no waste heat and you will see that the answer doesn’t change. been there done that.”

    Really, been there and done what for heaven’s sake
    “accepted the data”
    For crying out loud. A scientist such as yourself should ask questions
    1. ‘why doesn’t the data change ”
    2. “shouldn’t the data change”
    3. “why hasn’t the data changed”

    Got it?

    Answers 1 . The data doesn’t change [strange]
    2. The data should change [but it doesn’t]
    333333. It should have changed [you’re being had and you of all people should know it] H/T to WHT

  78. angech | June 13, 2013 at 6:21 am |

    Sorry for Mosher of course

  79. WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 8:42 am |

    It’s always entertaining to open up the comments in the morning. The entire Aussie denier contingent whittle away with preposterous assertions while we sleep, thinking that no one will try to debunk what they say.

    • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:14 am |

      You imagine yourself more qualified to speak on this topic than Murray Salby?

      http://envsci.mq.edu.au/staff/ms/

      ROFLMAO

      It’s always fun to read your inflated opinion of yourself, Pukite.

    • pokerguy | June 13, 2013 at 9:50 am |

      That’s it Web. Down-under denier nation shaking in its boots, dreading the moment when the ministry of climate truth opens its doors promptly at 9 a.m EST.

      On a more serious note, It has to be tough on you hotpocalypse subscribers these days, with the NYT’s conceding the pause and all. Plan on being the last alarmist standing? It’s a worthy ambition and I wish you well.

    • Faustino | June 13, 2013 at 7:47 pm |

      Like the Seven Dwarfs, we whittle while we work.

  80. David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:40 am |

    WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 13, 2013 at 8:23 am |

    “Lolwot is still correct. The top of the atmosphere will heat up, but then there is the atmospheric lapse rate property of every known planetary body which will force the surface to rise in temperature. Give it up, you lose this time and every time. Stick with the cross-stitch or whatever you do to pass the time.”

    That’s a pretty big boner even for you, Dr. PeePee. Atmospheres are not contained by a vessel with a constant volume. They expand and contract with change in temperature. Lapse rate remains constant while distance from surface to TOA changes instead. Like duh.

    • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:42 am |

      I big time blew several opportunities to learn tatting. Gad, what a world of difference it would have made.
      ==============

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:44 am |

        You know, rather like ravelling up the unravelled.
        ===============

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:46 am |

        Oops, dropped perls. ‘ravelling up the ravelled’.
        =============

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:51 am |

        And they sneer at Sisyphus, who want to knit a cap for his pet rock, but keeps letting the matter drop.
        ===============

    • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 10:03 am |

      You’d think someone in your position would be more cognizant of expansion and contraction of earth’s atmosphere because it changes the amount of drag experienced by satellites in LEO which causes all sorts of complications.

      http://www.windows2universe.org/spaceweather/sat_drag.html

      Like double duh.

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 3:56 pm |

        What no response?

        Not knowing the atmosphere expands and contracts in response to heating and cooling is ignorant in the extreme for a principle engineer with a PhD even at a barnyard for has-beens like BAE. I guess that explains why you’re there, in Bumphuck, Minnesota no less, instead of somewhere relevant and happening. Hell even some boring spot like Motorola or Texas Instruments in Austin would be a huge leap upward.

        Clown, clown thyself.

  81. David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 10:27 am |

    WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 13, 2013 at 10:13 am |

    “I will act like Edim and challenge Ohm’s Law.”

    “While I am at it, I will find flaws in Boolean Logic because that is what a skeptic such as Edim would do.”

    Ah, I was wondering what excuse you were using for posting so much nonsense. Perhaps you could put a warning in your sig so it doesn’t take people unawares in the future?

    “Salby is mocking science and the scientific establishment, whatever that is. Watch his video and see him referencing Feynman and challenging authority. One should not have to resort to such rhetoric unless it is borne out of desperation.”

    So Feynman was desperate? Oooooooooooooooooooookay… according to you, Dr. Paul Pukite, Richard Feynman challenged authority out of desperation. Got it. Duly noted. LOL

  82. pochas | June 13, 2013 at 11:10 am |

    JC:

    “So the real question is where all that heat is going, if not to warm the surface. And a prime suspect is the deep ocean. ”

    For any of the three modes of heat transfer (convection, conduction, radiation), moving heat from A to B requires a temperature gradient. Heat moves from hot to cold. Radiation: no, because solar penetrates only the top layer of ocean. Convection: no, because the ocean is stable to convection because of the density gradient. Conduction: yes, the temperature gradient is there but this is a slow, slow process and whatever conduction is taking place now has always been there; no reason to suppose any change. So how would the “heat” get to the deep ocean? This is the same as asking how does less “cold” get to the deep ocean? There is another way to move heat: mass transport. Freeze/thaw in the polar regions generates the cold dense brine that accumulates in the deep ocean basins. There has been less cold deep ocean water produced in the polar regions in the recent past (more thaw than freeze, coincident with all of the “Global Warming”). When the warming is reversed, the deep oceans will be cold again.

    • Chris G | June 13, 2013 at 11:35 am |

      “Convection: no, because the ocean is stable to convection because of the density gradient. ”

      What do you think the thermo-haline circulation is if not large scale convection?

    • Chris G | June 13, 2013 at 11:50 am |

      “When the warming is reversed, the deep oceans will be cold again.”

      What, you mean like in a few thousand years or so after CO2 levels stabilize and begin to decline?

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 4:49 pm |

        CO2 level will decline as soon as human production of it declines. Despite the anthropogenic production having increased exponentially accumulation in the atmosphere increases linearly. That’s because it’s an equilibrium system being driven further and further out of equilibrium and the further out it goes the amount of CO2 needed to drive it out even further increases. If human production ceased it would back to near 280ppm in less than century with most of it coming out of the atmosphere in the first few decades after production stopped.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 12:56 am |

        SpringyBoy, CO2 is a non-condensing substance. In technical terms, it keeps on getting spit back out into the environment. Only when it can randomly walk deep enough does the concentration start to diminish.

        In other words, it has the fat tail of a diffusion-limited process. This means that the concentrations will stay high when the forcing is stopped, and only gradually diminish via Fick’s law of diffusion.

        It’s really OK that you mess up with the physics all the time, because that’s the way we like it. You once again show that denialists have no credible model of their own, so the losing streak stays intact.

    • kim | June 13, 2013 at 12:07 pm |

      Or when the Holocene ends and the deep ‘missing heat’ returns to store.
      ===============

      • pochas | June 13, 2013 at 12:29 pm |

        Next century the next millenial warm period is due and we’ll warm up nicely. This past 50 year temperature excursion was just a blip on the chart.

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 1:49 pm |

        Which century will claim the Modern Warm Period, and whither the Cheshire Sunspots?
        ============

    • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 4:59 pm |

      There isn’t the slightest bit of evidence that the deep oceans have warmed. ARGO buoys do not dive below the average depth of the ocean so we have no clue what the bottom half of it is doing temperature-wise. For all we know thermo-haline circulation has slowed so the upper half is getting warmer while the lower half is getting colder by exactly the same amount. The problem is the same as it ever was – our instrumentation is not able to detect imbalances on such tiny scales over the entire globe. The only notable exception to that is troposphere and statosphere temperature measured since 1979 by satellites and guess what that record has to say so far. I’ll give you 3 chances to say 0.12C/decade warming which is far short of alarming. Adding insult to injury every day longer that “the pause” lasts the measured rate of decadal warming declines even further.

      The jig is up. Catastrophic global warming turned out to be beneficial global warming. Get used to it.’

  83. Chris G | June 13, 2013 at 11:30 am |

    “Even CRU’s Phil Jones admitted in a BBC interview that there had been no “statistically significant” warming since 1995, a point also brought up in 2008 by Dr. Richard Lindzen at WUWT when he said: “Why bother with the arguments about an El Nino anomaly in 1998?””

    Well, because the warming since 1995 has crossed into the 95% confidence interval since Phil and Dick said what they said, and _most_ sceptics have shifted the goalposts to 1998 in order to have a talking point.

    A better question is “Did the laws of physics change in 1998?”, because if that is not the claim, then you have to propose a physical mechanism that explains the historical record (as complete as we have it) from both before and after. Otherwise, if you are claiming that what we think we know is wrong, you might as well be saying we don’t know everything; therefore, we know nothing. Clearly, we know something; so, that proposition is wrong. You can legitimately argue that we don’t know everything, but that is the case for every area of research, and it does not mean that what we think we know is wrong. It only means that our knowledge is incomplete. Knowledge does not advance unless a better explanation is put forth; I have not seen any explanation that both involves real world physics and explains the historical record better than the current consensus.

    • steven | June 13, 2013 at 1:11 pm |

      A physical mechanism isn’t that hard to come up with. Changes in ocean heat transport can explain all the warming. The question is how much does it actually explain.

      http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n6/fig_tab/ncomms1901_F5.html

    • pokerguy | June 13, 2013 at 3:46 pm |

      Hi Chris,
      Alarmists like to toss around phrases like “the laws of physics” because it lends a weightiness to climate science which in my opinion it has yet to earn.
      A lower climate sensitivity than the IPCC;s models assume wouldn’t violate any laws of physics that I know about, If that’s incorrect, please explain as I very much would like to know that.

      At the very least, a 16 year pause…occurring over the same time frame when we’ve added to the atmosphere fully one third of all the Co2 that’s been emitted since 1750 and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution…argues reasonably for less sensitivity. I have yet to hear an alarmist explain to me how we can be so sure that any warming won’t in fact be a net benefit, or at the very least that the societal costs of precautionary mitigation won’t in the end be far more harmful than any warming.

      Guys like Web think all they have to do is invoke the “precautionary principle” as a rationale for taking draconian measure the effectiveness remain in significant doubt.. Not only are we unable to quantify the extent of the problem, we can’t yet prove that there really is a problem.

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:35 pm |

        +1

      • Chris G | June 14, 2013 at 1:39 am |

        Depends on what you mean by lower; how low? If you based your sensitivity on the observations of atmosphere only over the last 15 years, you would end up with a very poor fit with the data prior to 1998.

    • pokerguy | June 13, 2013 at 3:48 pm |

      Sorry, “the effectiveness of which…’

    • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 4:33 pm |

      Model prediction of temperature rise has slowly but surely drifted away from actual temperature since 1990.

      http://www.redstate.com/files/2013/06/CMIP5-73-models-620px.png

      These models were trained to 1975-1990 then following that is predicted warming. Every last one of them is wrong and the error accumulates year after year after year until now, 23 years later, they’ve drifted outside their own 95% confidence bound.

      This is why every honest, objective, informed person on both sides is talking about it and trying to figure out exactly what went wrong with the oh-so-settled consensus bandwagon cargo cult model predictions.

      The models are phucked up. Everyone with a brain knows it. Get a clue.

      • Steven Mosher | June 13, 2013 at 11:25 pm |

        “These models were trained to 1975-1990 then following that is predicted warming. Every last one of them is wrong and the error accumulates year after year after year until now, 23 years later, they’ve drifted outside their own 95% confidence bound.”

        Huh, what makes you think they were all trained to the same period or trained in the same way. One model I’ve been looking at wasn’t trained at all to surface temps but rather parameters were adjusted to get closure at the TOA.

        You should try to make a living being a donor for this proceedure that way somebody would pay you
        for what your full of.

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

      • Howard | June 13, 2013 at 11:35 pm |

        Steven, Steven, Steven.

        How many times do I have to tell you to never argue with a Gin & Tonic. Unfortunately, that’s the only socially acceptable self-medication in Texas.

      • Chris G | June 14, 2013 at 1:41 am |

        And your favorite model is?
        Without some model, you are arguing we know nothing.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 2:18 am |

        Everyone knows that SpringyBoy’s favorite model is that of Intelligent Design. It can explain everything.

      • Bob Droege | June 14, 2013 at 1:40 pm |

        You don’t find apples under 95% of the trees in an orange grove.

        Models should be out of the 95% confidence region 5% of the time.

        I like Dave, he had a fine grasp of the science.

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 2:01 pm |

        Critically it’s outside the 95% confidence zone on the low side. Given equal odds of being outside the high or low side it should be in the low side only 2.5% of the time. I never argued any differently and in fact advocate waiting longer to see if it continues falling farther and farther outside the envelope. What probability would satisfy you that the models are wrong: a million to one? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 2:23 pm |

        I wonder how cavalier you’d be about the odds against falling outside 95% confidence bound if global average temperature exceeded the high bound instead of the low bound.

        I hesitate to declare victory but at this point in time it’s looking bleak for the catastophist theory. Some welcome warming and extra plant food for a net positive benefit without even taking into consideration what abundant electricity and transportation fuel does for industry and making better lives for more people.

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 14, 2013 at 4:35 pm |

        Rationalizing is not science, Spring Chicken.

      • Bob Droege | June 15, 2013 at 10:28 pm |

        Here is one on the catastrophists side

        http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 16, 2013 at 12:39 am |

        Bob, Interesting on the Greenland melt. As I recall, last year Greenland had a day in the summer when the entire land mass was colored red, i.e. everywhere melting. That apparently had not happened before, but is it on track to repeat this year?

    • GaryM | June 13, 2013 at 4:49 pm |

      “A better question is ‘Did the laws of physics change in 1998?’, because if that is not the claim, then you have to propose a physical mechanism that explains the historical record (as complete as we have it) from both before and after.”

      First,. even climate scientists don’t claim to be able to explain “the historical record (as complete as we have it) from … before….” They don’t even know what causes ice ages to begin and end. (Let alone prior recent periods of lesser warming and cooling.) Although they believe “wobbles” in the Earth’s orbit are the cause.

      Second, skeptics don’t have to propose anything. This is one of the oldest, moldiest chestnuts in the climate debate. The debate at issue here is a public policy one. Is the risk of C from AGW sufficiently great to justify decarbonization. No matter what anyone thinks the “rules” should be of the debate, the fact is that CAGWers have to convince enough voters of that the risk of the C is sufficeintly high to convince them to elect politicians who will implement their desired policy.

      “Otherwise, if you are claiming that what we think we know is wrong, you might as well be saying we don’t know everything; therefore, we know nothing.”

      No again. That we “don’t know everything” is a given. The only question that matters in the policy debate is – do we know ENOUGH to justify the policy CAGWers are pushing? You acolytes can try to paint it as a black or white, all or nothing proposition all you want. But it is a question of degree. Certainty. Risk. Cost. All are questions of degree, all involve subjective judgments.

      • Chris G | June 14, 2013 at 1:46 am |

        Ah, the “we won’t know for sure that fire is hot until we have burned our hand” view.

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 2:31 pm |

        Is that what it’s like to you? Seriously?

        Objectively it’s like we have a supply of food and everybody seems to be getting along fine on it but a small group of people believe it causes cancer after 50 years, they have no convincing evidence of any carcinogenic properties, and they have no other source of food to offer so it’s eat that food or surely die of starvation in a lot less than 50 years.

        Seriously, that’s an objective view. It probably startles you because your view is warped beyond what any sane reasonable person would adopt.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | June 14, 2013 at 12:49 am |

        Really? By the broadest measure of Earth’s solar derived energy content, the Earth just blew right past 1998 without much change at all. Everthing still set to “accumulate” as GH gases continue their upward march:

        Focusing on the troposphere is sure a convenient way to ignore the constant upward accumulation of energy overall.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 1:31 am |

        Really. Ocean and atmospheric indices changed after 1998 and this is reflected in cloud cover and therefore cloud radiative forcing. The data shows it was all cloud. I was trying to suggest that what was needed was not new physics but a new appreciation of the complex physics of the Earth system.

        Here’s a graph – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/PalleSST_cloud_zps4b978cca.png.html – although I am far from fitting it into a narrative.

        ‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf

        It certainly does. What matters is science and not the simplistic narratives of space cadets such as you gatesy.

      • Chris G | June 14, 2013 at 1:53 am |

        And?
        Even if it did change, why did it change?

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 2:04 am |

        “Here’s a graph – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/PalleSST_cloud_zps4b978cca.png.html – although I am far from fitting it into a narrative. “

        Translating the Chef: The Chef just grabs random stuff he finds in academic archives and as a prank links to them with no context. In this case he gives it away because he admits that he can’t fit it into a narrative. In other words, he’s got nothing. About par for the course.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 2:05 am |

        Ya what? Not satisfied with data but you want a cute little narrative as well? Idiot.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 2:30 am |

        ”
        Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 2:05 am |

        Ya what? Not satisfied with data but you want a cute little narrative as well? Idiot.
        “

        Such a way with words. I can see Chef’s first peer-reviewed research paper: “You are all idiots. See Figure 1, and then feel my wrath. The End”.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 2:44 am |

        Now that hurts. I have such a way with words. There is a point however where the pointlessness of continuing is such that the only rational decision is to cut it short and call him for the slow witted and ignorant twit he is.

        Do I need to spell out the link between the cloud graph in the Pacific and the quote from Norman Loeb on natural variability at TOA? It is a waste of time. He is either incapable of understanding or is merely playing games. Neither is of any interest to me.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | June 14, 2013 at 1:51 pm |

        Your dismissive dodges only reveal your complete contempt for the truth. Did you check out the latest ocean heat content globally down to 2000 meters? Nearly off the top of the long term chart now. Nothing reveals Earth’s ongoing energy imbalance better than this, but of course, it would be inconvenient to discuss it plainly with so many deniers running their mouths, eh?

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 2:45 pm |

        Oh look a handbag fight between dumb, dumber, and dumbest.

        Carry on gentlemen. Marquess of Queensflaming rules of course.

      • jim2 | June 14, 2013 at 2:49 pm |

        R Gates – the ocean heat content record is WAY too short to draw any conclusion on climate related matters.

      • Wagathon | June 14, 2013 at 3:10 pm |

        There was a change in American politics too and American prosperity plateaued.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 3:34 pm |

        Oh look – an uber twit decides to drop another pile of trivial and irrelevant dung.

        Gatesy – the short term changes in planetary heat content are responses to the ‘noise’ of toa radiant flux. The ‘noise’ is at least one order of magnitude greater than the ‘signal’.

        ‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’

        http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 14, 2013 at 3:56 pm |

        Half our time is spent in trying to sink heat away from where it is not wanted. Why should anyone be dumbfounded that heat is being sequestered into the ocean?

        9e22 joules per year of thermal energy or heat is entering the ocean, which is half the 1.5 w/m^2 excess forcing applied to the ocean. That is also why the ocean temperatures are only rising at half the amount of land temperatures.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 8:37 pm |

        The 9×10^22 Joules is a huge error – 1.5W/m2 is totally stupid – and the rest of it is just bizarre.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 14, 2013 at 8:43 pm |

        Here Chief,

        http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/06/deep-oceans-versus-surface-temperature.html

        Since they have the data in temperature anomaly, that compares that monstrous deep ocean heat gain with SST. Waiting for the deep oceans to gain a full degree would be worse than watch paint dry. I would if that might mess up Webster’s diffusion model?

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | June 14, 2013 at 11:39 pm |

        Jim2,

        False.

      • Chris G | June 15, 2013 at 7:41 pm |

        What I understand; well, let’s see. I point out that the fact that there are additional factors other than CO2 does not disprove that CO2 is a prime driver, and you say, “Look, clouds!” and “Look, changes in ocean circulation!”.

        When I ask what do you think caused these changes, you call me an idiot.
        Thanks Chief, that is a sweet little dish of irony you have served up.

        So, if I understand your (unstated) argument, clouds and ocean circulation are not results of energy fluxes, they are drivers. If that is what you are trying to say, it is obviously silly. Matter (the ocean water) does not spontaneously move, it takes energy to move it. Looking at your graph, it would appear that the changes in the energy in the system caused by changing the radiative properties of the atmosphere are causing changes in ocean circulation. Perhaps that is where some of the “missing” energy has gone.

        From a sociology/psychology perspective, what this exchange means is that people are prone to interpreting the patterns they see in ways that support their existing beliefs. Indeed, they are also prone to only detecting those patterns which support them. I realize that works both ways, but doctors have been studying this patient for over 100 years, and the prognosis by 97% of the doctors hasn’t changed for decades. It isn’t as though many smart people haven’t tried to proclaim the patient to be in recovery; they have tried, but the patient doesn’t seem to be responding to their placebos.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 15, 2013 at 8:08 pm |

        ‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ IPCC 3.4.4.1

        I don’t expect that people lie you are capable of much understanding. I give you data and you respond with silly little nonsense.

        ‘And?
        Even if it did change, why did it change?’

        ‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf

        Come back when you have more smarmily smug but misguided, silly little warminista memes.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 15, 2013 at 8:15 pm |

        And if you are going to attribute statements to me at least ensure that there is some semblance to what I have said.

      • Chris G | June 15, 2013 at 8:24 pm |

        I say CO2 and you say TOA energy budget. Is is completely lost on you that TOA energy budget is affected by CO2, and CO2 is the only major driver changing in the system over the last 150 years?

        “warmist memes”? Really? How about “radiative physics”? You like to refer to them, but apparently you don’t figure them into your calculations. All you are saying is that the waves over the short term are larger than the tides. Yeah, if you ignore the tide, then the waves dominate the pattern.

        Are you capable of rational thought?

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 15, 2013 at 8:35 pm |

        ‘A time-series of these data is presented in Figure 4. A strong correspondence between SST and total cloud cover is expected over the Equatorial Pacific region as ocean temperatures provide a strong influence on the day-to-day formation of convective clouds, but with small impact on the radiation balance.’ http://www.benlaken.com/documents/AIP_PL_13.pdf

        Fig. 4 shows a positive correlation of cloud with SST in the tropical Pacific – but with little impact on the radiative balance. This was discussed with webby a week or so ago – when he quoted this statement. The small impact relates to a narrow region of the tropics. The cloud effects of ENSO are global – and I have no simple narrative to explain the data. The changes are to cloud height and to the regions where clouds and rainfall increase or decrease.

        Does this show that I don’t understand this? Well – duh. What really annoys me is the lack of interest in the topics and the sole objective of making some smarmy little faux superior point in the climate war. These people inevitably understand even less than I do.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 15, 2013 at 8:47 pm |

        ‘With this final correction, the ERBS Nonscanner-observed decadal changes in tropical mean LW, SW, and net radiation between the 1980s and the 1990s now stand at 0.7, -2.1, and 1.4 W m2, respectively, which are similar to the observed decadal changes in the High-Resolution Infrared Radiometer Sounder (HIRS) Pathfinder OLR and the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) version FD record…’

        ‘The overall slight rise (relative heating) of global total net flux at TOA between the 1980’s and 1990’s is confirmed in the tropics by the ERBS measurements and exceeds the estimated climate forcing changes (greenhouse gases and aerosols) for this period. The most obvious explanation is the associated changes in cloudiness during this period.’ http://isccp.giss.nasa.gov/projects/browse_fc.html

        What the data says is that most of the recent warming was due to reductions in cloud cover – until the turn of the century when it turned around somewhat. What to believe? Lucky you don’t have that problem – all your rational thoughts are laid out for you.

      • Beth Cooper | June 15, 2013 at 9:37 pm |

        Clouds influence the amount of
        solar energy entering the Earth.
        Enric Palle recognizes this, so do Chief
        Hydrologist and Kim though I hesitate
        ter call it a consensus.

        Serfs too think clouds
        influence the weather.
        Though in whispery
        corridors of power,
        serfs opinions
        scarcely matter.
        A serf

  84. RobertInAz | June 13, 2013 at 11:43 am |

    One facet of the discourse is that the alarmist narrative is saddled with the defense of the hockey stick team. So all of the discussion about the physics and how the recent warming is mostly anthropogenic, indeed mostly anthropogenic CO2 in origin is frequently drowned out in the latest bit of questionable paleoclimatology.

    A “totally unqualified to make observations about the use of statistics in paleoclimatology” Canadian mining statistician observes that gee – you omitted this data in your reconstruction – in my field I would go to jail if I did that. The response from the paleoclimatologists is that we had good reasons to omit that data having nothing to do with the fact that it does not fit the conclusion of our article. Somebody looked at the trees and said they were unhealthy and sent us an email to that effect. Members of the “unqualified to comment on the validity of the statistics used by the paleoclimatologists” great unwashed masses wonder why these trees were sampled if they are unrepresentative of trees in the region. The great minds of paleoclimatology have apparently not yet deigned to address this question. The great unwashed go on to ask if this type of disqualification of samples might have occurred in the past but was not detected because there was nobody to look at the site and decide whether the trees that showed it was not warm in the past were similarly unhealthy. The great minds are silent.

    One leg of the the current alarmism depends on the paleoclimatologists doing their part to minimize past temperature variation. The nature of the discussion with the paleoclimatologists is accessible to those of us who have do not have time to delve into the details of principle component analysis. It does not help the alarmist cause.

    • kim | June 13, 2013 at 12:08 pm |

      Not to mention creepers reaching for the stars.
      =========

    • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 4:40 pm |

      RobertInAz | June 13, 2013 at 11:43 am | Reply

      “One facet of the discourse is that the alarmist narrative is saddled with the defense of the hockey stick team.”

      Just a nitpick but jackasses are burdened. Horses are saddled.

  85. SlammerBC | June 13, 2013 at 12:24 pm |

    Be nice if we had a factcheck.org for climate science. It is disturbingly hard to believe either side on this issue when so much is devoted to spin.

    • Rob Starkey | June 13, 2013 at 1:36 pm |

      Are there really 2 sides to the issue?

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 4:42 pm |

        Yes. One side is composed of lying little bitches whose livelyhoods are threatened and the other side is skeptical.

        l.

  86. AK | June 13, 2013 at 12:47 pm |

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ROw_cDKwc0&w=614&h=376]

    I observed Salby’s lecture, need to see the paper(s) before I can do anything but comment off the top of my head, but I noticed several points that haven’t been mentioned here.

    1. The relationship between temperature and pCO2 is proposed to be driven by the integral of temperature over time. This makes sense if you assume that it’s the rate of emission (by natural sinks/sources) that depends on temperature. Assuming a constant dependence, there would have to be a “set-point” temp at which the pCO2 remains constant. When global temperatures are below this set-point, pCO2 decreases. When above, increases.

    If the greenhouse effect from CO2 actually tends to drive temperatures as well, this could constitute a “feedback” which would amplify variations.

    2. Basically, he’s deprecating most or all “historical” CO2 measurements, prior to sometime early last century. Ice cores are totally unreliable, because they tend to “flatten out” short-term variations. The last few centuries probably also involve decreasing levels of interchange with ambient air. While it might be possible to calculate the original levels by “backing out” the interchange, the process would be complex, and dependent on hard-to-verify assumptions regarding the nature of compacting snow.

    If we start by assuming his relationship between temps and CO2 is correct, we might be able to calculate the likely pCO2 over the last thousand years, or so, which would no more look like Mann&Co’s hocky stick than temps do. Unfortunately, many of our proxies for temps are based on tree-rings, and CO2 is plant food. If CO2 has been varying as much as Salby suggests, those proxies will require much more calculation to get any sort of temperature.

    3. His analysis of the “model world” is based on composites of a large number of models, most of which have a more varied relationship between changing pCO2 and temperature on a decadal and smaller scale (at least for individual runs). As a top climate scientist, he’s surely aware of that. I’d like to see his analysis of how composites of multiple runs of individual models fit into the scheme.

    4. Most importantly, the fluxes of CO2 between local sinks/sources and the atmosphere are, at best, controlled by local temperatures, not global averages. Terrestrial ecosystems are also highly responsive to changes in local precipitation, many of which are tied to temperature changes in very complex ways.

    Both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems tend (AFAIK) to have a “natural” level of biomass, with short-term changes causing imbalances that produce negative feedbacks WRT carbon flux. When there’s an increase in photosynthesis, biomass increases until increases in respiration balance it. When there’s an increase in respiration, biomass decreases until decreases in respiration bring it back into balance with photosynthesis. Likewise in the other direction.

    Obviously, there are sinks which don’t follow this pattern. Many parts of the ocean provide substantial “carbon pumps” which carry both organic and inorganic carbon into the depths. Swamps and especially (peat) bogs can deposit carbon in growing “piles”, where it’s essentially sequestered for centuries, millennia, or longer. Of course, changes in precipitation, erosion, or human land-use can substantially impact these carbon budgets.

    Moreover, we have the problem of ecosystem “collapse”, a regime change in the local ecology. Such events usually (AFAIK) involve a switch to a new ecosystem with a reduced “natural” level of biomass, sometimes substantially reduced. Such collapses will represent a one-time emission into the atmosphere. (One for each local “collapse”.) Conversion to agriculture can also probably be included in this category.

    re. Refs: I haven’t chased them down, so I’m working from memory here. When I see his thesis on paper, I may do something along those lines.

    • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 3:44 pm |

      When Salby can get that shizznit published in a journal I’ll pay it more mind. CO2 in the atmosphere appears to be largely controlled by the temperature of the ocean with little other natural variation. There’s an equilibrium point of ~200ppm during glacial epochs and ~280ppm during interglacials. Humans are pushing it out of equilibrium with fossil fuel burning no doubt it won’t stick around longer than it took to inject it because the farther from equilibrium it gets the harder the system tries to restore it. That’s why only half anthropogenic CO2 each year is sticky and it’s always 50% despite the amount of annual anthropogenic CO2 growing exponentially – we push harder the system fights back harder. No big mystery. Equilibrium systems aren’t rocket science.

      • AK | June 13, 2013 at 6:51 pm |

        CO2 in the atmosphere appears to be largely controlled by the temperature of the ocean with little other natural variation.

        That seems to be because the process of creating the ice-bound proxy flattens out all the high-frequency noise. Everything faster than century scale. See the discussion at around 30:00.

        No big mystery. Equilibrium systems aren’t rocket science.

        It’s not an equilibrium system. Except averaged over geological periods.

      • manacker | June 13, 2013 at 7:14 pm |

        David Springer

        You are right.

        And it appears that the “system keeps pushing back a bit harder” as CO2 concentrations increase (as you might expect from a “system” that is looking for “equilibrium”).

        Back when Mauna Loa measurements started, ~55% of the CO2 emitted by humans was showing up in the atmosphere. This has decreased to ~50% today (an apparent linear rate of decrease of 1% per decade).
        http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8344/8200196434_ebb7559913_b.jpg

        But nobody likes to talk about this for some reason.

        Max

        PS At the same time, satellite studies are showing that global plant life is increasing.

      • AK | June 13, 2013 at 7:36 pm |

        Bartemis at Tallbloke’s offers a chart comparing global human emissions to measured pCO2. Eyeballing that chart, I’d say CO2 might have almost been leveling off since around 2000. Do you think there’s something wrong with his numbers?

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 13, 2013 at 7:49 pm |

        This might be a better comparison.

        https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-fFSNzXefjT4/UbpYrpJhwMI/AAAAAAAAIlE/ESu8fVTah70/s919/co2%2520comparison.png

        The issue isn’t the outgassing which is simple, If you had a uniform surface area, it is just Henry’s law. With different polar temperatures and variations in sea ice extent along with the biological response, it is not a slam dunk. It is pretty damn complicated really.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 8:09 pm |

        They are graphing the rate of change in atmospheric CO2 rather than total concentrations. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

        The rate peaked in 1998 – along with much else. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.pdf

        It is biologically mediated with some minor solubility effects.

      • AK | June 13, 2013 at 8:21 pm |

        They are graphing the rate of change in atmospheric CO2 rather than total concentrations.

        Yup, I should have looked more closely.

        It is biologically mediated with some minor solubility effects.

        That’s always been my understanding. And most of the photosynthesis is limited by internal processes responding to a variety of ecological factors.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 13, 2013 at 8:37 pm |

        Chief, “It is biologically mediated with some minor solubility effects.”

        Stott doesn’t think solubility is all that minor. With changes in the ocean oscillations there are shifts in the mean depth of the caltrate? layer? Which may be part of the nutrient rich northern ocean upwelling linked to PDO (remember the salmon, sardines, anchovies, cod etc etc.) and possibly the AMO. These layers have supersaturated regions that can change the effective volume of the ocean CO2 sink and the rate of deep ocean sequestration.

        It’s a diapycnal versus isopycnal battle royal. It takes my layered drink mixology analogy to a whole nother level.

      • maksimovich | June 13, 2013 at 9:02 pm |

        There is a north/south divide in the Co2 record,with the observed rate of change in the SH increasing ( ie divergence) in the 21st century.

        if we use the two longest records ML in the NH and Baring head in the SH the difference has increased -2.10 ppm to -3.03 ppm (2000-2009)

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:13 pm |

        The extra percent absorption per decade is as likely to be an error as anything else which is why nobody wants to talk about it. We can’t measure human emission with enough accuracy and precision to talk about a single percentage point. What we can do is note that human emission per annum is 100 times greater than it was in 1913 and atmospheric increase remains about roughly 50% of what we produce whether it’s 1 gigaton or 100 gigatons.

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:21 pm |

        Biology doesn’t tend to sequester CO2 longer than the lifetime of the organism. If there was a massive increase in number of trees of a variety that live for centuries there might be a noticeable effect on the carbon cycle but the fact of the matter is that there is no massive increase in biological sequestration. The earth is greener but there’s also more crap rotting and giving its carbon back to the atmosphere so it’s a wash. Ocean temperature sets the equilibrium point. Biology is the tail not the dog. Humans are an exception if you count our burning of fossil fuels as biological. Technically it’s as biological as a clam sequestering carbon in its shell but large scale fossil fuel consumption is unique to just one organism on the planet whereas a great many species produce calcium carbonate.

      • captdallas 0.8 or less | June 13, 2013 at 9:24 pm |

        David, “Biology doesn’t tend to sequester CO2 longer than the lifetime of the organism.”

        A typo perhaps? Fossil fuels?

      • stefanthedenier | June 13, 2013 at 9:27 pm |

        David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:13 pm SAID: ”The extra percent absorption per decade is as likely to be an error as anything else which is why nobody wants to talk about it”

        I want to talk about it!!! Extra GLOBAL warmings are completely imaginary: http://globalwarmingdenier.wordpress.com/climate/

      • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:33 pm |

        Yeah yeah yeah. I listened to Salby’s latest lecture. It isn’t much different than it was two years ago when I listened to it. There’s another hour of my life I’ll never get back…

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 13, 2013 at 9:40 pm |

        Shell – limestone – charcoal, ash and other forms of recalcitrant soil carbon – dissolved deep oceans stores of carbon below the compensation level – all with different characteristic sequestration periods.

        It was however the annual increase in CO2 under discussion rather than sequestration as such. Respiration increases with temperature.

      • kim | June 13, 2013 at 9:42 pm |

        Likely, the higher the CO2 conc, the higher the percentage of the sequestered CO2 which is permanently so, or practically permanently so.

        The unknown unknown feedbacks recruited as CO2 level rises.

        Hey, my guess is as good as yours is as good as theirs is as good as ours is as good as hers, Gaia that is.
        ====================

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 1:47 am |

        You should really look at the CO2 data from the NOAA station on America Samoa:
        http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/9319/huqk.gif

        It sits right in the middle of the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool and the local sea-surface temperature varies over a season by at most 1C. What this means is that the CO2 seasonal ripple due to outgassing is barely visible. The SST is nearly 30C at Samoa so the signal of the CO2 partial pressure is quite strong. This is quite unlike the Mauna Loa curve, which has a 6PPM seasonal swing.

        Salby is asserting that the CO2 is increasing due to an offset above a set-point temperature as AK pointed out. Amazing that Salby thinks that a 1C offset can generate a 40% partial pressure rise, and that it will keep rising even if the temperature stays constant. That is some honking huge activation energy.

        Salby shares the same mental block that Chef has when it comes to elementary physics.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 1:59 am |

        Bizarre – irrational – irrelevant – about the best that can be said of the webnutcolonoscope.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 2:13 am |

        The Chef is describing Murry Salby of Macquarie , someone who once had the discipline to write a comprehensive textbook on atmospheric and climate physics, but has now descended into a rabbit hole of questionable science. Discuss.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 2:23 am |

        What you are retailing is nonsense – it has nothing whatsoever to do with Salby but is a bizarre narrative of your own invention. It has no correspondence with reality at any point. You are in some fantasy world of your own making.

        Salby is a 1000 times more credible than webby.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 14, 2013 at 2:40 am |

        Keep the heat on Salby.

        Someone out to do some signal processing on the American Samoa CO2 concentration curve. See what kind of demons are hiding in there.
        http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/9319/huqk.gif

        Maybe not.

        Salby may be trying to out-prank The Chef.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 2:48 am |

        Outgassing is a minor component. The major flux by far of CO2 from both land and oceans is biologically mediated. webnutcolonoscope can’t quite get across this concept.

      • WebHubTelescope (@whut) | June 14, 2013 at 7:14 am |

        Explain why Amerocan Samoa shows no seasonal variation if you think biologically mediated seasonal fluxes are important in this case.

        I will answer that. Because that is local and these fluxes cancel over long time intervals.

        Salby does not even mention any of this.

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 8:43 am |

        The biosphere is carbon-neutral. Pay it no mind unless you’re interested in seasonal and hemispheric bi-annual variation. Year-to-year it’s mostly a wash and decade-to-decade even more so. Ocean temperature is the main control knob for atmospheric CO2 and sets the equilibrium point. Anthropogenic burning of fossil fuel has driven it out of equilibrium. The farther out of equilibrium it goes, the higher the partial pressure of CO2 at the ocean surface, the faster the ocean dissolves it to move back towards equilibrium. It’s really not complicated. In order to keep the system out of equilibrium humans have to keep pouring in an excess amount and to keep the linear increase in atmospheric CO2 rising at the same pace the amount of CO2 injected by fossil fuel combustion has to increase logarithmically otherwise the ocean will dissolve it as fast as we emit it. If we emit less the ocean will dissolve more than we emit and atmospheric level will decline. It we stopped emitting altogether the ocean will dissolve it out of the atmosphere at the same rate it was injected into the atmosphere in the first place. It’s NOT complicated unless you try to account for every mole of CO2 at every second of every day and there’s no need for that level of carbon accounting. All we need to know about is how it accumulates in the atmosphere over years and decades and how it is removed over similar periods of time.

      • lolwot | June 14, 2013 at 9:51 am |

        “They are graphing the rate of change in atmospheric CO2 rather than total concentrations. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

        The rate peaked in 1998 – along with much else.”

        There was an excursion in 1998 due to the El Nino but it wasn’t a peak. The rate has been slowly increasing up to present (last year 2nd highest increase..no el nino)

      • David Springer | June 14, 2013 at 10:03 am |

        captdallas 0.8 or less | June 13, 2013 at 9:24 pm |

        David, “Biology doesn’t tend to sequester CO2 longer than the lifetime of the organism.”

        Dallas: A typo perhaps? Fossil fuels?

        It’s a diminishingly small amount annually so it’s not worth considering over timescales of millenia. Give it tens of millions of years to accumulate and burn it off in a few hundred years then there’s enough to increase the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from a trace to a larger trace. Whether that has any net deleterious effects remains to be seen.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 5:05 pm |

        Here is the annual rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.

        http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.pdf

        It peaked in 1998 in the record – as a result of higher temps. Respiration increases with temperature changing the balance of carbon in various stores. Stores in peat moss decrease with increasing temperature for instance.

        Biological carbon fluxes have many pathways. Here is a flow chart from UCLA – http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/carbonflowchart-ucla_zps640921ed.png.html

        In the ocean there are both the chemical and biological pumps.

        http://noc.ac.uk/science-technology/climate-sea-level/carbon-ocean/biological-carbon-pump

        Carbon fluxes from the sea surface into the ocean interior are often described in terms of a solubility pump and a biological pump (6). The abiotic solubility pump is caused by the solubility of CO2 increasing with decreasing temperature. In present climate conditions, deep water forms at high latitudes. As a result, volume-averaged ocean temperatures are lower than average sea-surface temperatures. The solubility pump then ensures that, associated with the mean vertical temperature gradient, there is a vertical gradient of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC). This solubility-driven gradient explains ≈30–40% of today’s ocean surface-to-depth DIC gradient (7).

        A key process responsible for the remaining two thirds of the surface-to-depth DIC gradient is the biological carbon pump. It transports photosynthetically fixed organic carbon from the sunlit surface layer to the deep ocean. Integrated over the global ocean, the biotically mediated oceanic surface-to-depth DIC gradient corresponds to a carbon pool 3.5 times larger than the total amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide (8) and has a mean residence of a few hundred years. Hence, small changes in this pool, caused, for example, by biological responses to ocean change, would have a strong effect on atmospheric CO2. Counteracting the organic carbon pump in terms of its effect on air–sea CO2 exchange is a process termed the carbonate counter pump (9), also known as the alkalinity pump. The formation of CaCO3 shell material by calcifying plankton and its sinking to depth lowers the DIC and alkalinity in the surface ocean, causing an increase in CO2 partial pressure. It is worth noting that the organic and inorganic carbon pumps reinforce each other in terms of maintaining a vertical DIC gradient, whereas they are counteractive with respect to their impact on air–sea CO2 exchange…

        The global carbon cycle is both driven by and a driver of Earth’s climate system. In this system, climate change therefore goes hand in hand with a change in carbon cycling and a redistribution of reactive carbon among the carbon reservoirs in the atmosphere, terrestrial biosphere, and ocean. The distribution of carbon between these reservoirs is the result of a multitude of interconnected physical, chemical, and biological processes, many of which are sensitive to climate change themselves. A major challenge in Earth system science is determining which of these processes act as primary drivers in the natural climate cycle and how they interact in controlling carbon fluxes between the reservoirs.

        The same challenge applies when trying to forecast the system’s response to major perturbations of the carbon cycle, such as the release of CO2 from fossil-fuel burning and land-use changes. At first sight, the ocean’s role in this system appears to be that of a giant buffer, sequestering enormous amounts of CO2 and thereby dampening CO2-induced climate change. A closer look reveals that both the changing climate and the extra load of CO2 sequestered by the ocean alter the oceanic carbon cycle to the extent of modifying its capacity for further uptake of anthropogenic CO2. The net outcome of these modifications is still uncertain, largely due to our limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms. This uncertainty holds true particularly for those processes involving biologically mediated components, which because of the complexity and plasticity of biotic responses and interactions are extremely difficult to untangle. Progress in our understanding of these interacting processes and their sensitivities to ocean change requires the concerted effort of all relevant disciplines, from molecular and ecosystem biology, marine and atmospheric chemistry, physical oceanography and palaeoceanography, to atmosphere–ocean- and Earth-system modeling, and with close interactions between observationalists, experimentalists, and modelers.

        It is complex and simple minded narratives are quite misleading.

      • Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 5:12 pm |

        Link for the quotes. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/49/20602.full

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | June 15, 2013 at 10:01 am |

        ”
        Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 5:05 pm |

        Here is the annual rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.

        http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.pdf

        It peaked in 1998 in the record – as a result of higher temps.
        “

        OK, so you can see that outgassing of CO2 is sensitive to the water temperature.

        Now look at the overall trend. Consider the America Samoa CO2 sensing station, where the local SST variations are minimal, allowing the underlying monotonic increase to be seen without filtering:
        http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/9319/huqk.gif

    • stefanthedenier | June 15, 2013 at 8:27 pm |

      Chief Hydrologist | June 14, 2013 at 5:05 pm said: ”Here is the annual rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere…”

      Chief, do you enjoy molesting the truth? Is it love, or only lust, molesting the truth?!

      How come you are incapable of learning the most important factors: ”ABSORPTION OF HEAT IS ALWAYS ”EQUAL” RELEASE {A=R} because O&N are responsible for regulating same amount of heat to be always in the troposphere. Clean that earwax and start learning, you sod!!!

  87. David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 4:21 pm |

    JC comment: I’ve always wondered why Michael Oppenheimer, a political scientist, gets to be called a climate scientist, whereby Freeman Dyson, a famous physicist does not. They are both from Princeton, both have studied the climate change problem, but neither has published primary research on climate change detection and attribution.

    Maybe because climate change detection and attribution is a three ring circus and they’d rather remain a member of the audience which is safer and more respectable.

  88. Max_OK | June 13, 2013 at 5:37 pm |

    Gillis used investing in gold in an analogy in his NYTimes piece.

    Australian gold fund shuts down as the price of gold drops and investors flee.
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/taurus-goldfund-idUSL3N0EJ1AE20130607

    Are any of the australians who post here running from gold.

  89. D Cotton | June 13, 2013 at 7:30 pm |

    The calculations for the greenhouse warming of 33 degrees are completely fudged in order to coincide with estimated surface temperatures supposedly 288K. (Funny that satellite measurements of mean sea surface temperatures are six degrees warmer.) The calculations assume back radiation warms in the same way that solar radiation warms. They show such a warming effect to be still there even at night. They “forget” that when radiation leaves the surface the temperature of that surface drops. If you get back less radiation, the temperature cannot be raised above what it was. Unless the Sun can raise the temperature to a mean of 288K, and the sea surface to the observed 294K, then there is no point in discussing how oxygen, nitrogen and argon slow non-radiative cooling, and how water vapour etc slow radiative cooling. What determines planetary temperatures is the gravity effect.

    • Wagathon | June 13, 2013 at 7:49 pm |

      …gravity: why not any acceleration–e.g., a greenhouse works by eliminating the movement of air.

    • David Springer | June 13, 2013 at 9:03 pm |

      D Cotton | June 13, 2013 at 7:30 pm | Reply

      “What determines planetary temperatures is the gravity effect.”

      Really? Saturn’s moon Titan has a surface that’s colder than its upper atmosphere. The atmosphere is over 98% nitrogen with a surface pressure of 1.45 bar, almost half again greater than earth’s atmosphere. Its gravity is 0.14g. Do your planetary “equations” predict the correct temperture of the surface (-180C) and higher temperature with increasing altitude?

      One exception is all it takes to falsify your claims, Cotton. Titan is the exception. Now how about taking a hike and pasting your incessant unpublishable crap on some other unmoderated blog and leave us the hell alone?

  90. stefanthedenier | June 13, 2013 at 9:06 pm |

    delay the unavoidable… nobody can con forever that: the imaginary heat is gone on the bottom of the ocean. In the 90’s the phony GLOBAL warming was successfully sold; BECAUSE wasn’t much scrutiny. That warming was phony, same as the today’s ”plateau” only scrutiny by the masses is preventing them of lying – that scrutiny will keep increasing; until one day all the conmen have to spit the dummy.

    THE WHOLE PHONY global WARMING IS JUST A DEVASTATING CON. In the 70’s wasn’t cooling, in the 80’S-90’S wasn’t extra warming.now didn’t stop / what never started, cannot stop!!!!!!!!

  91. Bob Droege | June 13, 2013 at 9:58 pm |

    I’ll take that as a no.
    How does radioactive decay contribute to core temperatures, does your theory address that as well, or is it all due to gravity?

  92. Harold | June 13, 2013 at 10:03 pm |

    FYI –

    Major Askimet fail at the end of the “Week in review 1/20/12” thread. Don’t know how the bots got in there, but bots are not to be encouraged. They’ll come back for more if you don’t whack them.

  93. Arno Arrak | June 13, 2013 at 10:09 pm |

    There is an abundance of material to react to, some of it repetitive. I will content myself with the Justin Gillis story from the Times because it will cover other aspects of the subject as well. Justin Gillis, it seems, just tries to weasel-word his way around the fact that there has been no global warming for the last 15 years. Fact is that atmospheric carbon dioxide level is the highest ever but it is not able to cause any of that greenhouse warming, the alleged cause of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) according to a gaggle of so-called “climate scientists.” I judge this fact to be sufficient to prove the greenhouse warming hypothesis wrong. He denies that the warming is at a standstill and asserts that it has simply slowed down.That is factually wrong. He also complains that critics will rarely mention that most of the warmest years in the historical record have occurred recently. This is true of course and I will come to that. The present standstill is not the only one on record. Gillis mentions the period from the fifties to the seventies as one. The climatists never could fathom that and blamed factory smoke from war production for stopping this warming. Gillis then asks what happened when that “mid-century lull” came to an end and answers that an “extremely rapid warming of the planet” followed. That is not true. That period came to an end in 1976 when the Great Pacific Climate shift raised global temperature by 0.2 degrees. The cause of the climate shift was a phase change of the PDO from its cool to warm phase. That phase shift was over by 1979 and satellite temperature records show that global temperature stayed the same from that point until 1997. But that “extremely rapid warming of the planet” did come true in ground-based temperature curves. They called it “late twentieth century warming” and it took up the eighties and the nineties. But I had compared satellite and ground-based temperature curves for my book “What Warming?” and found that according to satellites there was no warming in the eighties and the nineties for 18 years. To me that warming shown by ground-based temperature curves was phony and I said so in my book. But nothing happened after it came out. Until last fall, that is, when GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC temperature depositories decided in unison to give up this phony warming and to adopt the satellite temperature values for the eighties and the nineties. I regard this joint action as an admission that they knew the warming was false. And that takes care of his “extremely rapid warming of the planet.” This also means that we now have an uncontested no-warming period from 1979 to 1997, plus the entire twenty-first century, as a no-warming territory to be interpreted. Between these two non-warming time segments is only a small window, enough to accommodate the super El Nino of 1998 and its associated step warming. The step warming was caused by the large amount of warm water the super El Nino carried across the ocean. It raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius in only four years and then stopped. The temperature stayed high but there was no further warming. As a result, all temperatures of the twenty-first century are now higher than those of the nineties. Those are the temperatures Gillis talks about. Hansen noticed it too and pointed out that of the ten warmest years, nine happened after 2000. That is not surprising because they all sit on top of that high platform created by the step warming of 1998. Hansen put it all down to greenhouse warming but we already know that this century is greenhouse-free. Putting it all together, this leaves no room for any greenhouse warming since 1979, the start of the satellite era. And this adds up to a total of 34 years without any greenhouse warming. In view of this, can anyone believe that warming prior to 1979 was greenhouse warming? Not likely. This should be the end of the global warming delusion, but no, Gillis is still there. He has no science to back him up so he just resorts to a graduation speech to show that he still has hopes for the future: “…if past is prologue, this current plateau will end at some point, too, and a new era of rapid global warming will begin.” I really feel sorry for him.

  94. Jim D | June 14, 2013 at 12:24 am |

    The 15-year pause was preceded by a little-mentioned 15-year rise of 0.5 C, so the pause is just bringing the average back to what was expected in the 30-year trend. Using a longer perspective makes the pause unsurprising, and just the kind of thing natural variations do, add some here, subtract some there, no long-term net. I think that rise was not noticed at the time because it ended at 1998, which everyone at the time thought was a hot blip, but instead became the new normal.

  95. Myrrh | June 14, 2013 at 4:38 am |

    This is the reason for the pause – because the science behind the models is junk – and those at the top of the science world arguments like Spencer and Singer won’t face that reality, and WUWT sticks its fingers in its ears.

    Am attempting to have this appear without censorship:

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/12/wuwt-150-million-hits-and-counting/

    What hypocricy – Anthony is using the word “slayers” just as CAGWs use the the word “deniers”, to avoid reading the science objections to the AGW The Greenhouse Effect, even from those who have nothing to do with them.

    This isn’t a science blog open to arguments.

    Knowing full well he censors posts against the GHE because he can’t provide any proof of it – Anthony particularly lies here when he feigns false modesty:

    [Note: This is an unsolicited praise by Monckton, and while I appreciate the sentiments expressed, I can still do better in many areas and I will strive to do so. Monckton writes: “It displays a genuine interest in all sides of the debate, and allows them space.” That’s true, I’ll allow guest submissions that are on-topic, within site policy, and courteous, even if they may be on the opposite side of the prevailing thinking here. – Anthony]

    The last couple of guest submissions I recall from those he calls “the slayers” he closed down the discussions. Just closed them down. Snearing just like those CAGWs he rants about censoring his views.

    He didn’t take the time to make any intelligent scientific contribution, just closed them down.

    Hypocrisy.

    Just like the hypocrisy of Monckton who couldn’t stand to be questioned on the GHE claims when asked for proof for his arguments from authority when he waved in the general direction of Arrhenius – these pushers of the unproven AGW GHE concept never provide proof when it is requested of them, and hypocritically censor while claiming they don’t.

    How a meteorogist who should know how we get our winds and weather, so should know the difference between the real world of gases and the pretend world of imaginary ideal gases of the GHE – my argument which I haven’t seen any one else make – can’t see that his mates are ignorant about meteorology because they don’t understand the difference and so are scared of the word convection and have made gravity a taboo word here, is interesting.

    Gosh, a scientist scared of the word gravity…

    Prove the AGW GHE claims, argue from science, don’t censor because you can’t find any damn answers proving it.

    Here is my argument against it, read it. Think about it. Act like a scientist with integrity instead of copying the worse behaviour of SkS et al:

    I make my arguments from traditional up to date science, which knows the difference, which has sound in its world.

    I show why you won’t find the Water Cycle in the AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect models, and why you won’t find rain their fake fisics Carbon Cycle.

    That’s why it is the AGW Greenhouse Effect Models which are junk science.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/13/no-significant-warming-for-17-years-4-months/#comment-1335400

    Radical Rodent says:
    June 13, 2013 at 5:14 am
    Perhaps off-topic, but I am having serious thoughts about why we constantly refer to the “greenhouse effect”. To use a greenhouse is to use a pretty poor analogy; the Earth is not surrounded by a hard shell of “greenhouse gasses”, with air movements and other causes of potential cooling inside strictly regulated. It could be that we are not only barking up the wrong tree, but we are in the wrong garden, in the wrong country – and it is not even a tree!

    About 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere (i.e. 20.9% oxygen and 78% nitrogen) is not composed of “greenhouse gasses.” Why not test the idea: find a greenhouse, and remove 99% of the glass, so as to leave a thin web of glass (let us assume this is possible). I doubt you will be able to measure any difference between the “inside” of the greenhouse and outside; however, to “improve” its effectiveness, add 0.05% more glass. Stand back, and watch in amazement as the temperatures soar!

    You don’t think someone is trying to sell us a load of snake oil, do you?

    Not trying, has already sold and and ponzi scheme which spread from it is still up and running.

    Someone began by re-defining the meaning of “greenhouse” and “greenhouse gases” – in the Earth’s real greenhouse which is its atmosphere, all the gases are greenhouse gases, because all play a part in warming and cooling as in a real greenhouse.

    The AGW Greenhouse Effect’s fake greenhouse only warms, the cooling mechanisms have all been excised in the AGWScienceFiction’s fake fisics created Greenhouse Effect Illusion, and, they have given the warming to the trace gas carbon dioxide when it propertly belongs to the real greenhouse gases nitrogen and oxygen.

    There is real physics, up to date as still taught in traditional science, and there is the fake fisics of the AGW Greenhouse Effect as now taught throughout the general education system.

    The fake fisics of the Greenhouse Effect is built on first misattributing the -18°C to the absence of the fake fisics version of “greenhouse gases”, when it properly refers to the absence of all the gases which comprise our atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen which make up the bulk of it as you say.

    The real comparison is with the Moon without an atmosphere.

    Here the figures from real physics which show that the claimed AGW Greenhouse Effect of “33°C warming by greenhouse gases from the -18°C it would be without them” is a magician’s trick, an illusion, they begin with a lie:

    Real world Earth temperature
    – with all real gas atmosphere in place: 15°C
    – without any atmosphere at all: -18°C

    (compare with the Moon without an atmosphere: -23°C)

    Now here’s the first interesting bit:

    Real world Earth
    – with all atmosphere of real gases in place which is mainly nitrogen and oxygen, but without water: 67°C

    In the real world you see and feel around you, it is our bulk atmosphere of practically 100%nitrogen and oxygen which is the real thermal blanket around the Earth…

    The AGW Greenhouse Effect claims it is “the trace gas carbon dioxide which is the thermal blanket”, which in the real world is practically 100% hole in the atmosphere..

    This huge volume of the real gases nitrogen and oxygen thermal blanket not only warms the Earth from the minus18°C it would be without any atmosphere, but it also prevents temperatures from going into the extremes of heat of the Moon, because, real gases have individual volumes which expand when heated becoming less dense and so lighter than air under gravity they rise taking the heat away from the surface into the colder heights where they release their heat and so condense becoming heavier than air and sink.

    This is heat transfer by convection, and how we get our winds which are convection currents, volumes of the real gas air on the move.

    This is bog standard meteorology in the real world.

    Hot air rises, cold air sinks. Winds flow from high to low.

    And the second interesting bit of the magician’s fake fisics trick, is that the AGW Greenhouse Effect has taken out the whole of the Water Cycle which is even better at cooling than nitrogen and oxygen.

    With its great heat capacity water absorbs much more heat before changing phase into gas and as water vapour lighter than air it rises taking away that heat into the colder heights where it releases the heat and condenses back to liquid water or ice, and precipitates out coming down as cooling rain.

    And because these are real gases with attraction, water in the atmosphere is greatly attracted to carbon dioxide forming carbonic acid, so it brings down with it all the carbon dioxide around; all unpolluted natural rain has a pH of 5.6-8 from the carbonic acid content.

    That’s why you won’t find the Water Cycle in the AGWScienceFiction’s Greenhouse Effect, and why you won’t find rain their fake fisics Carbon Cycle.

    Putting water back into our real gas amosphere of mainly nitrogen and oxygen brings the temperature down to 15°C from the 67°C it would be without it, but with our great thermal blanket of nitrogen and oxygen in place.

    So you can see, there is no mechanism in the real world to get that claimed “33°C warming by greenhouse gases” – it’s an illusion created by magician’s tricks.

    Just as they create the illusion that “there is an invisible barrier at the top of atmosphere (TOA) like the glass of a greenhouse”, by telling you there is, when there is none known to real world science.

    They use this illusion to keep their fake massless ideal gases without properties from flying off to the ends of the universe, and they use it to keep the real heat from the millions of deg;C real Sun, the thermal electromagnetic wavelength of heat longwave infrared, from entering..

    ….

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/13/no-significant-warming-for-17-years-4-months/
    StephenP says:
    June 13, 2013 at 6:28 am
    Rather off-topic, but there are 4 questions that I would like the answer to:
    1. We are told the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.039%, but what is the concentration of CO2 at different heights above the earth’s surface? As CO2 is ‘heavier than air’ one would expect it to be at higher percentages near the earth’s surface.
    2. Do the CO2 molecules rise as they absorb heat during the day from the sun? And how far?
    3. Do the CO2 molecules fall at night when they no longer get any heat input from the sun?
    4. When a CO2 molecule is heated, does it re-radiate equally in all directions, assuming the surroundings are cooler, or does it radiate heat in proportion to the difference in temperaure in any particular direction?
    Any comments gratefully received.

    1. & 2. This information continues to be hidden from us, the AIRS data for top and bottome of troposphere has never been released. Since you know that carbon dioxide is heavier than air, you can ask such a question.

    In the fake fisics of AGW’s Greenhouse Effect carbon dioxide is a massless ideal gas with no properties and so no real processes; it doesn’t have weight or volume or attraction, but “diffuses into the empty space atmosphere [of ideal gas] at great speeds under its own molecular momentum bouncing off the container and each other in elastic collisions, and so thoroughly mixing it cannot be unmixed”.

    In the real world carbon dioxide will not readily rise in air, it takes work to accomplish that, and will always sink in the atmosphere displacing the real gas air.

    A real gas has individual volume which expands when heated or when under less pressure, so becoming lighter than air it will rise, and condenses when cooled or under increased pressure, so becoming heavier than air it will sink. It takes work to change that.

    Water vapour and methane are two gases which are lighter than standard air so will always rise and carbon dioxide at one and half times heavier will always sink. Always = spontaneously, just as water always flows downhill and heat always flows from hotter to colder.

    Carbon dioxide has a lower heat capacity than nitrogen and oxygen, which means it absorbs heat quicker and so quicker releases it, practically instantly.

    On an individual basis this means that carbon dioxide will briefly expand becoming lighter, but will instantly condense again to its own weight relative to air. Sustained heating such as from conduction from the surface of Earth heated by the thermal energy from the Sun will cause carbon dioxide to expand becoming lighter than air it will rise.

    This is how our flora expect to receive it, stomata which capture it are on the underside of leaves.
    3. When it gives up its heat on rising to colder heights it will again condense as do the other real gases nitrogen and oxygen comprising the bulk of our atmosphere, and again sink. So at night without heating from the Sun it will not be spontaneously rising and any cooling off in the atmosphere will be sinking.

    4. Carbon dioxide is not bouncing heat out, it is using the energy of heat to expand after which it returns to its previous weight.

    Real gases transfer heat by convection, as they get heated they expand and become less dense and so lighter than air will rise – this takes the heat away from the surface.

    The “tranferring heat by molecules bumping into each other”, is not real world atmosphere, but a description of the theoretical fiction ideal gas travelling at great speeds miles apart from each other through empty space bouncing off each other” – there is no empty space in our atmosphere because real gases have individual volume, these individual volumes constrain each other.

    That’s how we get sound because these individual volumes form a medium through which sound can travel. Our real world atmosphere is a fluid, gases and liquids are fluids, not empty space.

    Here a description of how sound travels in our real gas atmosphere air:

    http://www.mediacollege.com/audio/01/sound-waves.html

    “In the diagram below, the black dots represent air molecules. As the loudspeaker vibrates, it causes the surrounding molecules to vibrate in a particular pattern represented by the waveform. The vibrating air then causes the listener’s eardrum to vibrate in the same pattern. Voilà — Sound!”

    The individual volumes of real gases constrain each other, that’s how we get our atmosphere’s weight on us, 14lb/sq”, from the combined weight of the individual molecules.

    As gases expand they take up more room which is how we get our areas of low pressure, the individual molecules taking up more room in the fluid gas air, which means their weight is spread further and so weighs down less heavily on us. Conversely when gases condense they take up less room individually and so there will be more in the same space forming areas of high pressure, weighing down more heavily on us.

    So, although real gases are still moving fast on a molecular level, they are going nowhere fast, they are not travelling at great speeds bouncing off each other because there is no space between them. When an energy like sound moves them they vibrate more and that’s when they hit the adjacent, not miles apart, molecules causing them to also move a small distance to hit the next molecule. And then they return to ground state when the sound has passed.

    =====

    Stop being cowards all you AGW GHE promoters, show the the science behind your AGW Greenhouse Effect claims.

    Go on, I dare you, fetch it…

    ============

    • lolwot | June 14, 2013 at 9:47 am |

      I partly sympathize with you. The existence of the greenhouse effect is primarily based on models and theory. It is therefore not something WUWT should accept.

      It does so, I suspect, because they want to appear reasonable. It’s an editorial line. As you say, you trounce them in debate because they can’t handle your attacks. Your weapon is basically their own (doubt, uncertainty) and they know no defence to it, because it’s easy to doubt models and theory.

      They certainly can’t prove the greenhouse effect by experiment and observation (because no experiment is going to mirror the complete atmosphere), even though they try. They shut you down because they can’t handle your arguments and don’t want readers over there to rebel against the editorial line.

      • Myrrh | June 14, 2013 at 9:45 pm |

        I still can’t decide whether my annoyance with Anthony’s blatant hypocrisy of censoring posts disagreeing with the AGW GHE which he keeps telling us he believes, while ranting and raving over any censorship of AGW views by CAGWs outweighs my amusement at his irrational fear of the words ‘convection’ and ‘gravity’ – he’s a meteorologist for pity’s sake.

        But he appears to be under the influence of his friends so would rather take the genius iq’s word that gravity doesn’t exist and must be some new fangled idea dreamt up by some just to vex him, and so flattered by the sheep with big teeth and a coat of arms who argues from authority that Arrhenius proved it even while waxing lyrical that science from such argument automatically discredits itself, that he can’t see he knows more than they do.

        Or, maybe he’s a meteorologist who doesn’t know the difference between real and ideal gases, that doesn’t know how we get winds and weather and the water cycle from the expanding and condensing individual molecules of nitrogen, oxygen and water which have mass and so weight under gravity and have attraction so we have rain in the carbon cycle, that doesn’t understand these properties and processes of real gases is how we get our areas of low and high pressure from the differential heating of volumes of the real gas air..

        He’s a puzzle to me..

        But meanwhile, he’s stolen my posts which rightfully belong to those I addressed, and now I can’t even post to tell them they can find replies here.

        And not just WUWT, there is a least one moderator who sneakily takes out posts which don’t agree with the GHE, not just mine, and appears to have convinced Jo that he is moderating for ad homs, so another fibber for fantasy against science reality.

        Perhaps as some noted early on in this, the belief in the GHE has become a full blown religious movement, so any scientific dismantling of the core dogma can’t be allowed to disturb the certainty of their belief which has been created out of scientific jargon, and so, the only arguments allowed from this position is with others arguing only the nuances of doctrines with them, only with those who share their core value without which neither exists..

        I don’t know if the CAGW and AGW doctrinal differences actually appeared in that sequence, they may have come into being merely as another meme produced by the AGWScienceFiction’s meme producing department to create a controlled opposition, but I noted some time ago that AGWs, Singer said this, considered it was those who denied the existence of the GHE who were the deniers, and they should be distinguished from those such as himself who he claimed were the true sceptiks, that the argument was only of how much warming CO2 created, and variations on that theme.

        It was around the time there was a full blown emotional series of posts from the AGW camp that CAGWs were calling them deniers, with all the nasty conatations, and in the flurry of this highly charged atmosphere of selfless martyrdom to the AGW cause being proclaimed, that little detail that they weren’t the ones being called deniers got sidelined until it disappeared altogether..

        I was surprised at first when Anthony posted Singer’s diatribe without any condemnation of the use of the word when it was being used against those he himself disagreed with. But, after Monckton wanted Anthony to create a ghetto on WUWT where all arguments against GHE would be confined and not allowed any mention elsewhere so not to disturb the AGW arguments against CAGW, it began to fit a pattern or two.

  96. Girma | June 14, 2013 at 9:42 am |

    The radiative forcing dF due to change in CO2 from C1 to C2 is given by

    dF = 5.35*ln(C2/C1)

    Since change in temperature dT is proportional to the change in the forcing, we have from the above equation

    dT = k* ln(C2/C1)

    From the above equation, the final CO2 concentration C2 can be written in terms of the change in temperature and the initial CO2 concentration C1 as

    C2 = C1*e^(dT/k)

    In the above equation, if the change in temperature is positive, the CO2 concentration increases. However, if the change in temperature is negative, the CO2 concentration decreases.

    The bankruptcy in AGW is they claim the above equation only works for positive dT.

    What the above equation shows is that if the temperature drops to the 1970s value, the CO2 also will drop to its value in the 1970s.

    • Steven Mosher | June 14, 2013 at 11:03 am |

      Ding dong. 5.35ln() is a empirical fit to the results of LBL models. nothing more.

  97. angech | June 14, 2013 at 10:22 am |

    Bob Droege | June 12, 2013 at 11:41 am re the pause is really, really biting.
    Looked at your Skeptical science references and I am impressed. Current, factual, up to date proof that the pause is a figment of the imagination. I liked the first one by stefan @ 6 October 2009 and noted the second was “updated in 2010”.
    Dare I ask if the facts that you use are facts that are 4 years out of date is a reflection on how far out of touch you are with current trends, or is it that there is also a pause in global warming at Skeptical science.
    Take your time to answer [pause]

    • Wagathon | June 14, 2013 at 10:52 am |

      The Medium is the message: you know English has become a liars language when the government uses the word “revenue” to describe tax hikes, a blog titles itself “skeptical science,” and the MSM says they are in the “news” business when the only thing they all share in common is using Leftist dogma and propaganda to promote Eurocommunism.

  98. angech | June 14, 2013 at 10:25 am |

    Mr Cook should really pay someone to update his site, but he has been busy on other stuff lately

  99. mwgrant | June 14, 2013 at 11:16 am |

    For those that for one reason or another ever had cause to dig into the basic fundamentals of statistics and in particular aspects of underlying assumptions in methodologies the comment on by rgbatduke

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/13/no-significant-warming-for-17-years-4-months/#comment-1334821

    and reposted here

    http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/6/14/on-the-meaning-of-ensemble-means.html

    is worth a look. As a matter of fact, if you have not ever seriously looked at the topic before, there is no time like the present. It is fundamental stuff that those in a regulatory environment (CERCLA, RCRA) are familiar with, and is germane to the discussion here.

    Practically one can stop just a couple of paragraphs after “For what?”. The many-body discussion may just be distracting. The essence is the requirement of independent observations. [I think ‘representativeness’ can also be taken up, but that’s another day. Then there is GLUE…]

    In any case the first few paragraphs are a good start or refresher on some fundamentals.

    • kim | June 14, 2013 at 5:25 pm |

      All signs indicate they are over the target. Bombs away!
      ===============

    • man in a barrel | June 15, 2013 at 8:29 am |

      Bart – it is just another smokescreen from the Grantham Institute’s pet idiot of a PR officer, Bob Ward. Nothing to see here.

      http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/6/14/gwpf-and-the-charities-commission.html

      • Bart R | June 15, 2013 at 10:50 am |

        man in a barrel | June 15, 2013 at 8:29 am |

        Since I cross-posted, I ought show the same courtesy as on the other thread, and thank you sincerely for providing this link (see
        http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/14/week-in-review-3/#comment-332092 for the other echo.. er, independent reply of an entirely independent thinking respondent who added value to his, erm.. echoing of Montford’s pointy-haired opinion).

      • man in a barrel | June 15, 2013 at 7:29 pm |

        thanks for the “courtesy” Bart. Do you have an informed assessment of where Bishop Hill and his commentators may be wrong? Are you an expert on UK charity law? Are you even more desperate than Bob Ward to denigrate the GWPF by ad hom criticism or do you have a cogent point to make?

      • Bart R | June 16, 2013 at 1:54 am |

        man in a barrel | June 15, 2013 at 7:29 pm |

        You may have missed it, but not that long ago the GWPF’s spokesman, David Rose, threatened legal action against me here in the comments section of Climate Etc.

        Am I informed?

        Am I expert?

        Where it comes to me, I’m informed and expert enough.

        And where the GWPF threatens action against patently true online comments in the blogosphere for the express purpose of chilling criticism and closing debate, they open themselves up to mockery.

        If you have anything valid of your own to say here, by all means. But merely vomitting up a link to some hack, without adding anything of value, how is that to be taken by readers?

        Do you sincerely believe we’re all so dim we can’t Google topics for ourselves to find out what bloggers say?

        BishopHill is fourth on Judith’s Blogroll near the top of the page. We can find it ourselves if we need it. Merely repeating a link to what is after all only a very short, fact-free, insight-free opinionated rant does us no service.

        You are much more interesting than Montford. Dr. Curry has provided this space for us to hear your thoughts. Go for it. Tell us them. Show your expertise and your information. If you have any.

    • lolwot | June 15, 2013 at 8:35 am |

      I could be wrong but I think in the UK it’s perfectly legal for charities such as the GWPF to mislead the public

      • Bart R | June 15, 2013 at 10:41 am |

        lolwot | June 15, 2013 at 8:35 am |

        In America, it’s practically obligatory. If one counts political campaign contributions as charity.

        The lines get so smeared where lobbyists get funded by anonytrusts.

  101. John S. | June 14, 2013 at 8:02 pm |

    “It turns out we had an earlier plateau in global warming, from roughly the 1950s to the 1970s, and scientists do not fully understand that one either.”

    That “plateau” was a strong global cooling, which has been obscured by massive recent data diddling.

  102. Bart R | June 14, 2013 at 10:41 pm |

    And.. interesting sociology here: http://www.climateoutreach.org.uk/coin/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/COIN-A-new-conversation-with-the-centre-right-about-climate-change_FINAL-REPORT.pdf

    Amazing what one can find when one goes drilling down over at willard’s.

  103. Jan P Perlwitz | June 16, 2013 at 10:34 am |

    The alleged “pause” in global warming has certainly become a meme in the public and in the media, due to the relentless propaganda by AGW deniers, but perhaps even more by public statements made by actual climate scientists, e.g., by Judith Curry, even though they haven’t provided the empirical, statistical evidence for this alleged “pause”.

    • Bart R | June 16, 2013 at 3:14 pm |

      Jan P Perlwitz | June 16, 2013 at 10:34 am |

      I long ago shook the dust of WUWT from my sandles, and no more add my tiny contribution to their web traffic counts..

      Which puts me in the majority.

      Join us. You’ll be happier.

      The echo chamber is so extensive, it’s unlikely you’ll miss what’s being said at WUWT in any event. But if you choose websites of sufficient distance from WUWT, I find the cacophony dimmed to so dull a level as one could please.

      By the bye, I seldom poke other blogs than Climate Etc., but I find yours rather laudable.

      Thank you for the efforts you put into communication of science.

    • Willis Eschenbach | June 17, 2013 at 1:50 am |

      Jan P Perlwitz | June 16, 2013 at 10:34 am | Reply

      The alleged “pause” in global warming has certainly become a meme in the public and in the media, due to the relentless propaganda by AGW deniers, but perhaps even more by public statements made by actual climate scientists, e.g., by Judith Curry, even though they haven’t provided the empirical, statistical evidence for this alleged “pause”.

      First, although numerous people have no doubt asked you not to emphasize your jerkishness by using the unpleasant and inaccurate word “denier”, you continue to do so … meanwhile, you are denying the pause in warming is real. However, irony seems to bounce off of you folks …

      Second, everyone from Phil Jones to the New York Times to Science magazine acknowledges the reality of the hiatus in global warming, and has done so for some years. For example, Science Magazine provided “empirical statistical evidence” in their 2009 article entitled “Whatever Happened To Global Warming”. The article says:

      What Happened to Global Warming? Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit
      The blogosphere has been having a field day with global warming’s apparent decade-long stagnation. Negotiators are working toward an international global warming agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December, yet there hasn’t been any warming for a decade. What’s the point, bloggers ask?

      Climate researchers are beginning to answer back in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature. The pause in warming
      is real enough, but it’s just temporary, they argue from their analyses.
      A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don’t last forever. “In the end, global warming will prevail,” says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.

      Note that the “climate researchers” agree that the warming had stopped, and they had already noticed it had stopped four years ago … but of course, they said “just wait a few years” and the warming would resume. Here’s a bit more from the article:

      “Our prediction is that if past is prologue, the solar component will turn around and lead to rapid warming in the next 5 years,” says Rind. Climate modeler David Smith of the Hadley Centre, who was not involved in the State of the Climate analysis, says his group’s climate model forecasts—made much the way weather forecasts are made—are still calling for warming to resume in the next few years as ocean influences reverse (Science, 10 August 2007, p. 746). Whether that’s in time to boost climate negotiations is anyone’s guess.

      Ooops … that was four years ago, Jan, and nothing has changed. There has been absolutely no “rapid warming” as predicted by Rind.

      Third, your claim is provably false. A large number of people over the last few years have indeed provided empirical, statistical evidence for the pause in warming. For example, no less than four years ago Lubos Motl provided the complete code in R to do the calculations, it’s here. You sure you’ve actually looked for such “empirical statistical evidence”? Because it’s easy to find. Lubos has even provided the code to assist you.

      But you don’t need to know R computer language, heck, if you have the statistical know-how, you can determine that warming has paused for yourself using nothing but Excel, the calculations are simple, I and many others have done them ourselves …

      And if you don’t have the statistical chops, then why are bothering us with your uninformed opinion? If you can’t run the numbers yourself, why should we pay the slightest attention to your opinion about a statistical question?

      It does seem like your claim impresses Bart R … but then it also seems like Bart R can’t spell “sandals”, and it also appears he also believes, like you, that Gavin Schmidt and Science Magazine and Lubos Motl and our host Judith are all just making it up about the pause … yeah, that’s the ticket …

      You seem to have convinced Bart R that there’s no pause in the warming, Jan, but I fear all that does is impresses the rubes. Come back when you’ve convinced Science Magazine and the New York Times and Gavin Schmidt there’s no pause, then I’ll believe you’re on to something …

      w.

      • Jan P Perlwitz | June 17, 2013 at 12:52 pm |

        Willis Eschenbach writes:

        First, although numerous people have no doubt asked you not to emphasize your jerkishness by using the unpleasant and inaccurate word “denier”, you continue to do so …

        You don’t like my use of the word “denier”, and I can’t help you with that, because I am going to continue to use this word for those, for whom I think it is appropriate. These are the ones who argue against the results from a whole body of research in climate science about the workings of Earth’s climate system and about AGW, not on scientific grounds with scientific arguments, but because they don’t like those results on political, ideological, or religious grounds, who again and again misrepresent the science, who lie, who viciously attack climate scientists, who resort to smear and libelous accusations against scientists, or who claim AGW was just a gigantic “hoax” created by an omnipotent global conspiracy for sinister reasons.

        My experience, for instance I have made at the anti-science blog of AGW-denial cult leader Anthony Watts, is that “denier” is exactly the correct description for those people, because they don’t want to hear any scientific arguments that are in contradiction to their views. Junk science is being promoted there over and over, but comments by people who bring scientific arguments, based on empirical evidence, logic and reason are being systematically censored, or one is just being declared “persona non grata”. They see someone like me and my colleagues as enemies in a war, because of our involvement in scientific research that produces results, published in the scientific literature, which are not liked by the deniers.

        Second, everyone from Phil Jones to the New York Times to Science magazine acknowledges the reality of the hiatus in global warming, and has done so for some years.

        You start right away with resorting to an argument that is just a logical fallacy: Appeal to majority allegedly in support of the “pause”. Even more, you use this fallacy in reply to my comment, in which I actually said the so called “pause” has become a meme in public and in the media, also supported by statements made by climate scientists. Are you trying to refute what I said by repeating what I said, using different words? BTW: When someone from your side asserts that scientists like Phil Jones allegedly said something one should always be extremely careful with that, because it often turns out the scientist actually said something different.

        For example, Science Magazine provided “empirical statistical evidence” in their 2009 article entitled “Whatever Happened To Global Warming”. The article says:

        You mean this article?

        John Kerr, “What Happened to Global Warming? Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit”, 2009, Science, 326(5949), pp. 28-29, doi:10.1126/science.326_28a
        (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.326_28a)

        Next time when you quote something, please could you make an effort to provide the proper bibliographic information, at least the doi key, and/or the url to the source of the quote as proof of source? It’s usually the job of the one who provides a quote, not the job of the one to whom the quote is provided.

        The Science article does not present empirical evidence for the alleged “global warming stop”. It is not a research article. Instead, it presents the perception and opinion of a magazine staff member about this question. I think the author actually misrepresents what is said in the report “State of the Climate in 2008” (http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf). Nowhere in the report it is said there was a “stop” in global warming. On the contrary, the question is addressed whether the lack of statistical significance of the surface temperature over a relatively short time period was in contradiction to climate model simulations, and the answer in the report is it wasn’t. The author of the Science article acknowledges this later in the article. Insofar, the article is self-contradictory, because the assertions made in the article in the first paragraphs are later refuted in the same article.

        Third, your claim is provably false. A large number of people over the last few years have indeed provided empirical, statistical evidence for the pause in warming. For example, no less than four years ago Lubos Motl provided the complete code in R to do the calculations, it’s here. You sure you’ve actually looked for such “empirical statistical evidence”? Because it’s easy to find. Lubos has even provided the code to assist you.

        No, a large number of people has only done what you apparently do as well. It is claimed that a failure of the temperature trend to exceed some statistical significance level of y% probability over x years (x varies according to convenience) would “prove” the “stop/pause” of global warming. Sometimes, it is even claimed a failure to exceed the 95% significance threshold would prove the “global warming stop/pause” (e.g., the notorious Monckton endorsed by Watts does this). Thus, consequently, if the warming trend was statistically significant with “only” 94%, this allegedly would prove “no warming”. Really. Sigh. I already have replied to this logically flawed, statistically invalid line of argument a number of times, e.g., here:

        http://climateconomysociety.blogspot.com/2013/01/how-to-create-false-global-warming.html

        or just a couple of days ago in a reply to assertions by Mr. Monckton he made at WUWT:

        http://climateconomysociety.blogspot.com/2013/06/declared-persona-non-grata-at.html

        Lack of statistical significance of the temperature trend over x number of years is not sufficient evidence for a “global warming stop/pause”. For every time series, which is composed of trend and fluctuations, one can always find time periods for which the trend is not statistically significant, if one chooses the time interval only short enough, because then the trend is dominated by the fluctuations. This does not prove logically or statistically the absence of the trend. On the other hand, the statistical significance (with more than eight sigma for the globally averaged surface temperature data) of the temperature trend since about the mid 1970s, is empirical, statistical evidence for the global warming over recent decades. To provide the evidence that global warming of the troposphere/surface, which had been prevalent since the mid 1970s, has “stopped”, made a “pause”, at least from a purely diagnostic point of view, you would have to show that the recent temperature trend is not just an insignificant wobble in statistical terms. Show me that the temperature trend since 1998 or since whenever the global warming “pause” is supposed to have started is statistically significantly different from the multi-decadal, statistically significant warming trend since the mid 1970s. That would be empirical, statistical evidence for something has indeed been different in recent years. I don’t see anyone who claims this alleged “pause” has delivered so far. I go with the evidence. If the evidence arises I will accept it.

        Ultimately, evidence is provided in science by publishing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature anyway, not in opinion blogs. Where are the scientific publications that deliver the empirical, statistical evidence for the alleged “stop/pause” in global warming?

        The rest of your comment consisted only of ad hominem arguments and more appeal to the alleged majority. I am not going to dignify this.

    • Chief Hydrologist | June 17, 2013 at 3:19 am |

      http://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/guidance/ocean-heat-content-10-1500m-depth-based-argo

      While you are perfectly entitled to claim the oceans are warmed last decade -not asking why leaves me unimpressed.

      http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=107

      – the y axis is in W/m2 of course.

      ‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf

    • Bart R | June 17, 2013 at 9:35 am |

      See what I was saying about the dull level? ;)

      Alas that Willis isn’t impressed by obscure wordplay. Oh, well. If a joke needs explaining, it can’t have been that good.

      Still, “Bayesian Additive Regression Trees in R” (BART R) and .. you know, I ought have gone with ‘scandals’ over ‘sandles’ on reflection.. ancient greek footwear aside, you’ve addressed everything in Willis’ straw manned, cherry-picked argumentum ad populam even before he echoed WUWT’s position, and nothing in his answer seems to move the discourse forward.

      GCMs project pauses. There can be pauses. On the time scale meaningful to climate kinetics, there isn’t anything that could be called a pause. If temperatures continue to be among the hottest temperatures ever recorded and no higher for another few years, it may turn out we’re actually in a pause.

      But that’s being paused at the hottest temperatures ever recorded, while the Arctic melts and Greenland thaws and glaciers recede and the jet stream settles into — sorry ‘pauses at’ — the conformation that led to the first two frankenstorms ever seen in the span of one year.

  104. Willis Eschenbach | June 17, 2013 at 1:23 pm |

    Bart R | June 17, 2013 at 9:35 am | Reply

    See what I was saying about the dull level? ;)

    Alas that Willis isn’t impressed by obscure wordplay. Oh, well. If a joke needs explaining, it can’t have been that good.

    Still, “Bayesian Additive Regression Trees in R” (BART R) and .. you know, I ought have gone with ‘scandals’ over ‘sandles’ on reflection.. ancient greek footwear aside, you’ve addressed everything in Willis’ straw manned, cherry-picked argumentum ad populam even before he echoed WUWT’s position, and nothing in his answer seems to move the discourse forward.

    Jeez, Bart, if that was supposed to be humor, don’t quit your day job for a spot doing standup … you desperately need a [joke] tag. Although upon explanation, the “Bayesian Additive Regression Trees in R” works, without that explanation, it just sounds like your usual lack of logic.

    In any case, four years ago, Science magazine noted the pause that you and Jan say doesn’t exist. At that time, it quoted folks like you about the pause, and what they said was, wait a few years and the warming will start again.

    Now, I’ve waited a few years since then, four to be exact, and the pause continues. And after the failure of their claim, you pop up to tell me to have patience, wait a few years and the warming will start again?

    Sorry. I fell for that line last time, and the scientists claiming that turned out to be full of BS. The warming didn’t resume.

    This time, if you want me to wait, give me a number. If there is no warming for another 3 years, will you agree that there is a pause? Five years? Seven years? At what point does your global warming panic meme pass its use-by date?

    Jan claims he wants science, but he, like you, is making no scientific statements. Because if it’s not falsifiable, it’s not science … and to date, the claims have been “wait a few years”, a most unfalsifiable notion.

    w.

    PS—Will the warming start again? Well, we have to consider that the world has been generally warming in fits and starts, at something like a half-degree per century since the Little Ice Age, for reasons that neither you, I, Jan nor anyone else on this planet can explain.

    So the wise money would have to bet that that gradual rise would continue, for the same unknown reasons. However, that’s just the human addiction to thinking the future is like the past. My brother used to say “It’s easy to predict the future … as long as it’s like the past”.

    But it’s not always like the past. For example, at some point during the Medieval Warm Period, temperatures stopped gradually rising, and started the slide towards the cold time of the Little Ice Age … and then at some point during the Little Ice Age we hit the local nadir and starting warming again … and since no one can explain why that centuries-long cooling or the succeeding warming happened, your confidence that you understand it all well enough to predict the future climate is … well … I’ll just call it “optimistic” and leave it at that.

    But claiming that you have some inside scientific information that if we wait a few years the warming will resume? Naw, that’s just your hope and your bet and your fervent prayer. That’s not science, because sadly, no one knows which way that frog will jump.

    • Bart R | June 17, 2013 at 10:13 pm |

      Willis Eschenbach | June 17, 2013 at 1:23 pm |

      .. And after the failure of their claim, you pop up to tell me to have patience, wait a few years and the warming will start again?

      Nope. Sorry. I don’t prescribe patience.

      Why would I?

      There’s nothing to wait for, the thing you say you’re waiting for is still happening.

      So the number we have to wait for depends on who we are and what we believe about priors, because at this point it’s a very Bayesian question as to what results would lead a reasonable person — or really anyone resorting to Bayes’ Theorem — to have lower confidence in a rising unnatural normalized trend.

      The rest of what you claim?

      Sounds like you’re expressing enormous confidence in unproven assertions.. so perhaps you might want to not use the phrase “wise money”. The “human addition” to fossil fuel ought be the focus of discussion, and why are you dragging your brother into this?

      • maksimovich | June 17, 2013 at 10:41 pm |

        But we can resurrect dead vicars,and apply said theory to the climate sensitivity problem and find that said sensitivity is still uncertain and will remain uncertain in the future eg Hannart

        This paper presents a stochastic model for the evolution
        in time of the probability distribution of climate sensitivity.
        The analysis of this model shows that the future trajectory
        of climate uncertainty may itself be highly uncertain, even
        when assuming steady progress in climate research. Uncer-
        tainties in climate model feedbacks play a key role in these
        considerations.

  105. Willis Eschenbach | June 17, 2013 at 4:33 pm |

    Jan P Perlwitz | June 17, 2013 at 12:52 pm |

    (my emphasis)

    …Lack of statistical significance of the temperature trend over x number of years is not sufficient evidence for a “global warming stop/pause”. For every time series, which is composed of trend and fluctuations, one can always find time periods for which the trend is not statistically significant, if one chooses the time interval only short enough, because then the trend is dominated by the fluctuations. This does not prove logically or statistically the absence of the trend. On the other hand, the statistical significance (with more than eight sigma for the globally averaged surface temperature data) of the temperature trend since about the mid 1970s, is empirical, statistical evidence for the global warming over recent decades.

    Thanks, Jan. So your claim, if I understand that, is that lack of statistical significance doesn’t say anything about “the trend” … but what I don’t understand is, what is “the trend”?

    If “the trend” is the trend since the Little Ice Age of about half a degree per century, you are right. The recent pause says nothing about that trend. Or if “the trend” is the trend since 1850 in the instrumental record, then the recent pause says nothing about that either.

    But if “the trend” is the trend during the period under consideration, the period of the pause, then it does say something important—it says that there is no statistically significant significant trend during that period. Which is what everyone, from the New York Times to Phil Jones has been saying, and that’s why it has been called a “pause”.

    To provide the evidence that global warming of the troposphere/surface, which had been prevalent since the mid 1970s, has “stopped”, made a “pause”, at least from a purely diagnostic point of view, you would have to show that the recent temperature trend is not just an insignificant wobble in statistical terms. Show me that the temperature trend since 1998 or since whenever the global warming “pause” is supposed to have started is statistically significantly different from the multi-decadal, statistically significant warming trend since the mid 1970s. That would be empirical, statistical evidence for something has indeed been different in recent years.

    Glad to. For compatibility, I downloaded the RSS dataset you show in your graph.

    From January 1995 to their latest data (May 2013), the trend is .037 ± .022 degrees C per decade. The p-value of the trend is .09, meaning not significant. That’s 18 years without a statistically significant trend.

    From the start of the record to the latest data the trend is 0.13 ± 0.01°C per decade, p-value less than 0.0001, That is your “multi-decadal, statistically significant warming trend”.

    But since the error bars on those two trends are far from overlapping, that also shows that in addition to the post-1995 trend being statistically indistinguishable from zero (the “pause”), the two trends are statistically significantly different from each other.

    So I have shown exactly what you asked me to show … and in the process determined that according to the RSS, at this point the pause is 18 years and counting.

    That took me about fifteen minutes to do … you sure you understand this “statistics” thingie?

    w.

    • Jan P Perlwitz | June 17, 2013 at 8:33 pm |

      Willis Eschenbach wrote:

      there is no statistically significant significant trend during that period. Which is what everyone, from the New York Times to Phil Jones has been saying, and that’s why it has been called a “pause”.

      So, I have laid out my arguments why the mere absence of statistical significance, at some y% significance threshold, of a trend in a time series over x years is not sufficient to conclude a “pause” in global warming. I also have given you two links where I have brought my arguments about this. And what do you do? Instead of addressing my arguments, instead of showing where the logical mistakes in my arguments are, if you believe they are in there, you just recursively repeat the same assertion from before, which I already had addressed. This is what Bart R said. You have not brought anything that moves the discussion forward.

      If the mere absence of statistical significance of the temperature trend over x number of years was sufficient to claim a “pause” in global warming, then there always would be a recent “pause”, because you always can find a recent period of x years, for which the trend is not statistically significant, even if there is a statistically significant trend in the time series over a longer time period. It is in the Nature of any time series, which is composed of trend and fluctuations that you need sufficient data for the signal to be detectable. Applying your flawed logic, one could partition a temperature time series with a known statistically significant trend, let’s take the UAH lower troposphere temperature data from 1979, in small pieces, let’s take 5 year intervals, and the trend within each single one of the 5 year intervals, without exception, would not be statistically significant. Thus, consequently, nothing else than “pauses”, no global warming in any of the 5 year intervals since 1979. You would have to conclude there has never been any global warming in those data since 1979, consequently. However, since the trend over the total of the data from 1979 to present is statistically significant, this would lead to the logical contradiction that you have global warming and no global warming over the same time period. A statement and its negation can’t be both true at the same time.

      With respect to your statistical-significance argument, you don’t even seem to acknowledge following, which is actually something basic in reasoning in statistics: The failure to reject a Null-hypothesis (in this case a Zero temperature trend), when a statistical significance test is done, does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (in this case, that there is a global warming trend), because you don’t know whether the failure occurred due to the sample size of the data, which may just have been too small to detect the signal. Actually, in my example above with the 5-year intervals, we know exactly that the failure to detect the signal in the short intervals results from too small sample size of the data for each of the five years.

      As for Phil Jones. Since, by now, you have referenced alleged statements by Phil Jones repeatedly without being specific, and you don’t seem to have got the hint in my previous comment, I explicitly ask you to tell me what statements by Phil Jones you are referencing, specifically, and to provide a proof of source for those statements. Because I don’t believe you.

      Glad to. For compatibility, I downloaded the RSS dataset you show in your graph.

      From January 1995 to their latest data (May 2013), the trend is .037 ± .022 degrees C per decade. The p-value of the trend is .09, meaning not significant. That’s 18 years without a statistically significant trend.

      And why should I believe your alleged numbers? Anyone can just make up some numbers in a blog comment. Please show your formulas and tell what data exactly have gone into your calculation, so that your methodology becomes transparent. Your trend number looks about right. However, the variability you assert here looks way too small for the RSS data set over this short time period. What is the “+/-0.022” supposed to be? One standard deviation? Two standard deviations?

      If the +/-0.022 were two standard deviations, the trend of 0.037 Kelvin/decade since 1995 would be highly statistically significant with more than 99.9% probability, assuming normal distribution. If the +/-0.022 were one standard deviation (StD), the ratio, trend/StD would be about 1.68, i.e., the trend would still be statistically significant with more than 90% probability, assuming normal distribution. So, your assertion that the warming trend in the RSS data set since 1995 was not statistically significant could be falsified with your own numbers you give here, if your numbers were correct. I doubt this is what you wanted. I don’t believe your number for the variability is correct. Are you sure, it’s not +/-0.22 instead? That would sound more like it. Only, in this case, your claim that the trend since 1995 was different from the trend since 1979 would fall apart, since the latter trend would lie well within the uncertainty range of the trend since 1995, i.e., the two trends could not be statistically distinguished with sufficient probability of significance.

      Please also explain to me, why the RSS data alone would be sufficient as evidence of the alleged “pause” in global warming of the surface/lower troposphere, and why the other four of the major temperature data sets can just be dismissed for it. Or is this a nice example for “skeptic” cherry-picking, where only such information is selectively considered, which seems to be in support to the pre-conceived view? Because I know that the trend in the RSS data deviates to the cool side from all the other data sets over the time period since 1995.

      That took me about fifteen minutes to do … you sure you understand this “statistics” thingie?

      You should be careful with your repeated tries to belittle me regarding knowledge in statistics. It could easily fall back on you. You currently don’t look so good here.

    • Chief Hydrologist | June 17, 2013 at 8:57 pm |

      Willis

      ‘To the second objection, we might say that it is not up to us to tell the universe what to do. The universe just is. It is up to us to make sense of it. For scientists, this means finding theories and laws whose predictions are in agreement with what we observe in the universe.’ http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module3_M&M.htm

      I maintain that trendology is not all it’s cracked up to be. Unless there is a theory that predicts – the future is another country in which one can hold out hope for a return to warming. It is seems a matter of semantics. The pause is not long enough to be meaningful – therefore there is no pause?

      Superimposed on the alternation of La Niña and El Niño are longer term variations in the frequency and intensity of El Niño and La Niña. A period of more frequent and intense La Niña between the mid forties and 1975 followed by more frequent and intense El Niño between 1976 and 1998. The pattern appears in centuries of proxy data – that is in tree and coral rings, sedimentation and rainfall and flood records.

      Global surface temperatures have a similar trajectory. Falling from 1946 to 1975, rising between 1976 and 1998 and declining since.

      ENSO determines rainfall in Australia, Asia and America, and influences rainfall in Africa and the Indian monsoon. The beginning of the hydrological cycle here appears to be the vast heat sink over the Pacific during an El Niño and warm, moist air rising in the western Pacific in a La Niña.

      The longer term variation of ENSO in frequency and intensity has not been explained either as a result of internal feedback or external forcing. Even so, it is difficult to explain how ENSO variations have been neglected by so many for so long. ENSO involves 97% of greenhouse gases. The surface temperature impacts are significant. Note the 0.25 0C difference between 1998 and 2000.

      ENSO variation goes in both directions. The indications are that ENSO variation added to global surface temperatures between 1976 and 1998. It has been almost 10 years since temperatures peaked in1998. The planet may continue to be cooler over the next few decades as a multi-decadal cool La Niña phase of ENSO emerges.’ http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/enso_variation_and_global_warm.html

      2007 and counting – it was only that late because I anticipated that natural variations would get a bigger role in AR4 than it did. We were talking about this in 2003.

  106. stevepostrel | June 17, 2013 at 6:47 pm |

    These time-series tests of “statistical significance” are of little significance. If somebody goes on a winning streak in Vegas it does no good to say that the streak is “not statistically significant” and that on average a player should lose money. The streak is a fact, just like the pause in temperature increases. Asking about statistical significance of the streak is a category error–data do not have significance levels. (The only exception is if winnings, like temperature, are measured with error and we’re worried that an apparent trend is just random measurement error. Then the “data” are really a model. No one on either side is asserting that measurement error matters in the temperature-pause case, so I’m ignoring that issue.)

    Now, if you want to ask about what to expect in the future if the gambler keeps playing, then you’d have to have some hypotheses about the data-generating process. You could compare different hypotheses against each other using your data record, including the streak. The problem is that a lot of different things that we are not observing could be going on–the gambler could be switching between games (including ones like poker where he isn’t playing against the house); using card-counting strategies at blackjack before getting caught and ejected; the casino could be (temporarily or permanently) deliberately losing so as to launder money to the gambler; and so on. All of these processes might be happening at different times.

    Different ARIMA models may be fit to time series with this kind of causal ambiguity, but statistical tests of them always depend on the alternative being considered and most of the tests are simple in that non-stationarity or break points are not considered. The claim that the pause “isn’t significant” really means that an AR(1) with drift can’t be rejected at the 95% level. Whoopdie-doo–Keenan shows that an AR(3) without drift fits even better. And then the Met Office shows that some other model with drift can top Keenan’s model.

    These are sophisticated curve-fitting exercises and nothing more and they do not deal with the real issues that Prof. Curry, for example, is worried about–the alternative of multidecadal natural fluctuations. We need to learn a lot more about what is going on in the casino before drawing conclusions about the gambler’s fate.

  107. GaryM | June 18, 2013 at 12:21 am |

    I think the whole debate about statistical significance misses the point of the effect of the “pause” on the debate.

    People bought into CAGW, and the decarbonization freight train got really rolling through Kyoto, because the voters and politicians in the west were experiencing what seemed like increasingly warm summers and mild winters. The expectation that things would continue to get warmer was natural. People always expect things to continue as they are. That’s why you get tulip and real estate bubbles, fears of coming ice ages and thermageddons.

    Now that they are experiencing what seem like milder summers and colder winters, if that continues, it won’t matter what scientists and mathematicians say. People will expect that to continue.

    Frankly, the data and the “statistical significance” thereof are only talking points in the political debate. Which is of course why the CAGWers are trying so desperately to contradict the reported trends of their own temperature products.

    If we had three really hot summers in a row, the statistics and science wouldn’t matter a damn. The movement politicians would be able to scare voters into approving all manner of new restrictions on CO2 emissions. By the same token, if the summers stay mild, and winters stay cold, the coming CAGW regs from the US EPA will likely cause a huge backlash against the Democrats in the US, and progressives throughout the west will have to retrench.

    CAGW is, and always has been a political debate. Climate sensitivity, statistical significance, the definition of consensus are all fine debating points. But the future of decarbonization depends more on the weather reports of the next few years than on any statistical analysis.

    • kim | June 18, 2013 at 12:33 am |

      Much to agree with here, but your last sentence reveals the fragility of the construct. Yes, the warming of the last quarter of the last century fed the madness, there was a perfect storm of fear, guilt, greed and the seizing and exercising of power. But now the storm has passed and we are left to pick up the pieces and hope they can help us learn to form a safer habitat in this fierce climate of the present.

      If your last sentence comes true we will have built a fragile dwelling.
      ==============

      • GaryM | June 18, 2013 at 12:54 am |

        kim.

        I am not one who thinks the CAGW debate has been won. There are progressives in power in virtually every western country. Obama’s EPA is on the verge of killing the coal industry; is continuing the slow strangulation of the oil industry; and will only accelerate decarbonization if the opportunity presents itself. Those who started the happy dance after the collapse of Copenhagen may regret their premature celebration if reported temps turn sharply higher in the near future.

        I think the pause in the CAGW political freight train is fragile indeed.

      • kim | June 18, 2013 at 1:04 am |

        Oh, sure, the train is still rolling down the track, but trestles of summers shift on the sand.

        We’ve survived a quarter of a century of warming, and mountains of guilt and hype piled on top of that. With our present consciousness, both of climate and politics, I believe it will take longer than that to reproduce the panic conditions that led to this fiasco.

        Nonetheless, I really do hope some warming returns. It would be better for all of us. I say this knowing fully as well as you do that the only cure for the madness is cooling, or an unlikely extended prolongation of this apparent pause.
        =======================

    • Tom | June 18, 2013 at 12:34 am |

      Want to raise Polar Bears… it’s your bet.

      • kim | June 18, 2013 at 12:38 am |

        OK, if a hypothetical bear walks out of his tent, walks south a mile, then east a mile, and then north a mile to return to his tent, how many places on earth could this moveable structure be placed?
        =============

      • kim | June 18, 2013 at 12:38 am |

        Bet you can’t count ’em all.
        =======

  108. Pingback: The New Republic on the ‘pause’ | Climate Etc.

  109. Dan Aldridge | September 17, 2013 at 4:23 am |

    The following was said in the IPCC 1990 Policy-makers’ Summary:

    // When the radiative forcing on the earth-atmosphere system is changed, for example by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, the atmosphere will try to respond (by warming) immediately. But the atmosphere is closely coupled to the oceans, so in order for the air to be warmed by the greenhouse effect, the oceans also have to be warmed; because of their thermal capacity this takes decades or centuries This exchange of heat between atmosphere and ocean will act to slow down the temperature rise forced by the greenhouse effect. //

    But mainstream predictions of exactly what’s currently happening go back further. Here’s a quote from the the Climate Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences, circa 1979:

    // If carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible. The conclusions of prior studies have been generally reaffirmed. However, the study group points out that the ocean, the great and ponderous flywheel of the global climate system, may be expected to slow the course of observable climatic change. A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late…

    …One of the major uncertainties has to do with the transfer of the increased heat into the oceans. It is well known that the oceans are a thermal regulator, warming the air in winter and cooling it in summer. The standard assumption has been that, while heat is transferred rapidly into a relatively thin, well- mixed surface layer of the ocean (averaging about 70 m in depth), the trans­fer into the deeper waters is so slow that the atmospheric temperature reaches effective equilibrium with the mixed layer in a decade or so…It seems to us quite possible that the capacity of the deeper oceans to absorb heat has been seriously underestimated, especially that of the intermediate waters of the subtropical gyres lying below the mixed layer and above the main thermo­cline. If this is so, warming will proceed at a slower rate until these inter­mediate waters are brought to a temperature at which they can no longer absorb heat.

    Our estimates of the rates of vertical exchange of mass between the mixed and intermediate layers and the volumes of water involved give a delay of the order of decades in the time at which thermal equilibrium will be reached. This delay implies that the actual warming at any given time will be appre­ciably less than that calculated on the assumption that thermal equilibrium is reached quickly. One consequence may be that perceptible temperature changes may not become apparent nearly so soon as has been anticipated. We may not be given a warning until the CO2 loading is such that an appreciable climate change is inevitable. The equilibrium warming will eventually occur; it will merely have been postponed.//

    So folks are kidding themselves if they think climate skeptics are now vindicated. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    • Chief Hydrologist | September 17, 2013 at 4:58 am |

      Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”

      Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”

      You’re positive it is warming over the next decade, two or three? You’re sure about the rate of warming?

      • Dan Aldridge | September 17, 2013 at 5:28 am |

        No, never said either of those things. But uncertainty about specifics and the inferences people in the AGW skeptic blogosphere about “the pause” are two different things. I believe it is pretty wrong-headed to assume uncertainty works in our favor. Silly ongoing cries of “recovery!” aside, the trend in the Arctic is a perfect example.

      • Chief Hydrologist | September 17, 2013 at 5:38 am |

        No I think this is exactly the point that has been made for a decade.

      • Dan Aldridge | September 17, 2013 at 5:45 am |

        Um, I can refer you to plenty of articles in the “skeptical” blogosphere crying “Global cooling has begun!” and “The jig is up!”. So no, I don’t think mere ~uncertainty~ has been “exactly the point”.

        Even if it were, as I said, uncertainty most definitely is not guaranteed to work in our favor. Consider the methane question.

  110. Dan Aldridge | September 18, 2013 at 5:26 am |

    PS: I recommend Hansen’s new paper “Climate sensitivity, sea level and atmospheric carbon dioxide” if one wishes to know what kind of risks we are courting when we assume uncertainty will work in our favor.