Sunday’s climate ‘logic’

by Judith Curry

Some interesting tweets this morning on my twitter feed.

Several tweets led me to look at an article in the Guardian, entitled Climate change:  IPCC cites global temperature rise over the last century.  Excerpts:

In the past, these climate change deniers have insisted that variations in the sun’s energy or fluctuations in cosmic rays could be behind the global warming that has been observed in recent decades. Both suggestions are dismissed out of hand by the new report.

“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”

This point was backed by Professor Myles Allen at Oxford University. “We have examined the forecasts made by climate scientists over the past three decades and they have been absolutely spot on in terms of predicting subsequent levels of global warming,” he said. “Our climate models are robust and working well.”

Well, that is sure to shut up the climate ‘deniers.’

Latif and von Storch

NoTricksZone has translated an article from the German German online Spektrum.de science magazine that conducted an in-depth interview with two leading international climate scientists, Professor Mojib Latif and Professor Hans von Storch.  Quotes:

“It hasn’t gotten as warm as we expected. […] We really have to think about whether or not our models can really project the future development.”  (HvS)

There are uncertainties regarding CO2 climate sensitivity. This is stated in the upcoming IPCC report, which summarizes the latest of science and looks at at a very broad range. Here it is not appropriate to boil the whole problem down to a single magnitude: the global mean temperature. Rather it is necessary to understand exactly what is happening regionally, how the temperature develops at a location. But we are not yet that far, and perhaps we will never get that far because it is far too complex. This is why I’d prefer not to stay stuck on climate sensitivity.” (ML)

The most recent decades contain a strong contribution from the AMO (MOC) even on a global scale. This raises questions about the average climate sensitivity of the IPCC models.” (ML)

We should not declare this discussion over too soon. When we look at the 20th century, the climate fluctuations cannot be exclusively attributed to CO2 alone or to internal factors. Also the sun naturally played a role. The question is whether or not we correctly quantified it.”  (HvS)

I wouldn’t be surprised if the temperatures remain at a high level until 2020 or 2025.” (ML)

I would get nervous if the temperature continues to pause more than 5 years more. The we would really need to question our climate models. But I also do not expect a cooling.”  (ML)

JC comment:  Well wouldn’t it be great to start focusing on how long the pause will last.  The IPCC seems to think that pause is nearly finished, just waiting for the next El Nino.  MJ’s analysis seems much more reasonable to me, but this raises the question as to how long can the pause go?  I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040; this seems at least as likely as the the CMIP5 predictions that have already failed for the last decade.

794 responses to “Sunday’s climate ‘logic’

  1. JC: “how long can the pause go? I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040”. Or even longer.
    Indeed. This paper suggests the closing of the Ozone hole may “delay in summer-time (DJF) Southern Hemisphere climate change, between now and 2045.”
    http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00246.1

    • I wouldn’t rule out a cooling given the sun’s apparent exit from the Modern Maximum recently. The 1998 El Nino was like a grand finale to it.

      • large el ninos tend to arise at solar minimum,during volcanic singularities (enhanced persistence) and bi polar o3 holes.

      • Earlier in September NASA suggested that the current solar cycle 24 is likely to be the weakest in more than 100 years. At least one commentator has suggested that the cycle bears a striking resemblance to the onset of the Dalton Minimum.
        http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/Rare-solar-cycle-has-cold-implications-for-UK-climate
        Only time will tell.

      • It’s not a pause, it’s a peak.

      • A funny thing happened on the way to solar cycle 25. Solar cycle 24 was a 100-year low and global accumulated cyclone energy is following along like a dog on a leash.

        It could be coincidence. Then again maybe not. That big ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky may have some detectable influence on earth’s climate after all. LOL

      • John Silver | September 22, 2013 at 9:21 am |

        “It’s not a pause, it’s a peak.”

        Quite. +1

      • Springer, “It could be coincidence. Then again maybe not. That big ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky may have some detectable influence on earth’s climate after all. LOL”

        Has to be a coincidence. You know all forcing is the same, Webster says so.

      • maksimovich | September 22, 2013 at 8:00 am |

        “large el ninos tend to arise at solar minimum,during volcanic singularities (enhanced persistence) and bi polar o3 holes.”

        Not this time, evidently.

        1975 – 1995 was marked by a steep increase in El Nino frequency to the highest level on record (since 1880) and the 20 years since then were a climbout just as steep and the climbout hasn’t ended.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soi.svg

        My guess is the sun and ocean controls the climate and CO2 does comparatively little to nothing in interglacial periods when water vapor is the dominant player. In this regime it gets as warm as clouds allow it to get which appears to be about 30C. As the ocean accumulates energy the cap temperature doesn’t rise the latitudinal extent of it does such that the poles eventually become temperate climate zones and polar climate zones disappear altogether. I doubt that will happen but it’s the most stable climate state by a long shot and the one in which most life on this planet evolved. In case anyone doesn’t know, ice and life aren’t on friendly terms.

      • Global GHG radiative forcing is now increasing at about 0.03-0.04 W/m2 per year:
        http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/

        Unless solar irridance decreases by 0.3-0.4 W/m2 in a decade — unlikely, based on the data of the past few centuries — GHGs will dominate.

      • David Apell, I trust you’ve at least tried to comprehend Svensmark. Solar irradiance doesn’t have to change at all, if he’s right. Oh, but maybe you’ve already falsified Svensmark by way of something more than an ignorant personal opinion?

      • Extreme weather from increased CO2 could be larger areas of warmer water leading to more hurricanes or tracks further north. Another consequence is more winters like the UK has been getting due to weaker westerlies that allow cold easterlies from the continent more often. In summer this could also lead to more heatwaves. This might be the references to Emanuel and Francis.

    • Global cyclone energy was lowest on record (since 1970) in 2012.

      It’s shaping up to be as low or lower this year which is uber unprecedented. Something is happening and whatever it is it’s not following the Chicken Little predictions of climate modelers. Hyperbolic alarmism is SO 1990’s…

      • If oceanic storms are created by the equatorial-polar temperature gradient, wouldn’t one expect a decrease in storminess?

      • David,

        Perhaps you should tell that to the extreme weather folks. They apparently haven’t gotten the message.

      • David A. “If oceanic storms are created by the equatorial-polar temperature gradient, wouldn’t one expect a decrease in storminess?”

        Yes one would. However, Katrina was a poster child for “Global Warming”. More hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, painful rectal itch, everything bad is supposed to be due to “Global Warming” That would be the “Chicken Little” part of the act.

      • Cptn: Do you have any science, or just personal speculation?

      • David,

        Is your ass that good looking you have to show it?

        I recall Kerry Emmanuel & Jennifer Francis as only two of many claiming more extreme weather just in the past couple of months.

      • Ting56: why do they say extreme weather can increase if the equatorial-polar gradient is decreasing? They must have a reason. What is it?

      • David

        Ask them. You are the journalist.

      • David Appell, “Cptn: Do you have any science, or just personal speculation?”

        http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurricane-warming.html

        http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/04/29/175007/tornadoes-irresponsible-denial/

        I think there is a link limit, but I can personally attest to the last item :)

      • ting56: If you can’t refrain from personal insults, I will ignore you in the future. Last warming.

        I recall Kerry Emmanuel & Jennifer Francis as only two of many claiming more extreme weather just in the past couple of months.

        What did they say, and where? And why?

      • Ooh, my last warning.

        Pointing out that you are showing your ass could be considered helpful advice. If you want to take it as an insult, feel free.

        Here is another piece of advice that will likely insult you. Play the arrogant card as often as you do here and people will think you an ass.

      • timg56 wrote:
        Ask them. You are the journalist.

        So you don’t have any reasons.

        Just as I thought. Typical.

      • The only thing typical is your arrogance.

        You asked Springer if a reduction in the gradient wasn’t expected to result in few storms (a paraphrase). When I referred you to two scientists – not politicians, bloggers or media folks – you respond with crap and then point the finger at the other person.

      • Cptn: Thanks. It is my understanding, from data on Ryan Maue’s site, that tropical storms are indeed increasing.

      • Not arrogance — just pointing out your complete failure to answer a simple question.

      • David’s caught a hint of the cognitive dissonance in ‘a warmer world is one with worse extremes’. I’ve still not figured out if that is true or that a system with more energy in it will have greater extremes.
        ====================

      • David Appell, “Cptn: Thanks. It is my understanding, from data on Ryan Maue’s site, that tropical storms are indeed increasing.”

        I believe Dr. Maue would disagree with you and mention things like mirco-canes and name happy A$$holes etc. etc. With satellite coverage such as it is, there are quite a few storms that never would have been noticed much less named.

        But, believe what you wish David, after all there is four percent more water vapor than really is latent heat :)

      • Ting56: I asked you a simple question.
        You responded angrily and insultingly.
        That’s all I need to know to filter you out from the conversation.

      • Well, I expressed that poorly. The two tangling thoughts are a decreased equator/polar gradient will decrease extremes and a system with greater energy will increase extremes.
        ===============

      • Maue’s focus has been global hurricane statistics, particularly Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), which has been taking a nosedive since 2005.

      • Angry?

        David, you are the one issuing warnings. I am enjoying watching you act as if you are the holder of all things knowledgeable.

      • But ACE is known to be a poor metric, since it doesn’t account for size of storms.

      • ACE combines frequency (#), intensity and duration. No one accounts for horizontal extent of storms in climatologies; in fact I was one of the first people to bring up the issue of size. I’ve looked at it, doesn’t add much to our climatological info.

      • It does if David says it does.

      • David Appell, “Maue would disagree?”

        I believe he would. You obvious have some logical block, but a minimal TC which is the majority so far this year would not have been named as little as ten years ago. Now that satellite can estimate wind speeds better, micro storms get named, it doesn’t require a fly through or surface observation. So you are comparing Appells with oranges.

        Then again he may fawn over your every word.

      • The number of named storms in the Atlantic has been 15 or more in the last three successive years. In the 20th century it only did this less than once per decade on average. Up to 9 so far this year, so this inactive season could keep that streak going.

      • JimD, “The number of named storms in the Atlantic has been 15 or more in the last three successive years. In the 20th century it only did this less than once per decade on average. Up to 9 so far this year, so this inactive season could keep that streak going”

        OMG! You have discovered a statistically significant red herring!

      • We have had satellites since the last 70s. Data shows an increasing in storm over that time period.

      • And the only conclusion one can reasonably come to is that a warming climate is leading to more storms.

        No possibility of satellites improving our capability to identify storms.

        What if it is satellites that cause more storms?

      • ACE combines frequency (#), intensity and duration. No one accounts for horizontal extent of storms in climatologies;

        Exactly — ACE does not account for a storm’s size, and hence does not come close to measuring energy. It’s like measuring the kinetic energy of something by only measuring its velocity and ignoring its mass.

      • JC wrote:
        …in fact I was one of the first people to bring up the issue of size. I’ve looked at it, doesn’t add much to our climatological info.

        On the contrary, the new metric TIKE, which does include storm size, does so an upward trend over the last 20-25 years:
        http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-new-hurricane-metric.html

      • captd, is that your denial reflex kicking in again? Funny how it always works in the same direction with observed data.

      • JimD, “captd, is that your denial reflex kicking in again? Funny how it always works in the same direction with observed data.”

        No denial. I even agree with Leif Svalgaard the sunspot numbers are totally FUBAR. See, there is an issue with the short bus scientists not being able to comprehend how improved data acquisition can impact standard metrics. Such is the world we live in.

      • Calculating the total energy of the storm makes sense.

      • captd, you say that but then don’t give any numbers. What’s that worth? People have made estimates of missed storms, I know, and it doesn’t affect the stat I gave.

      • David Appell, “On the contrary, the new metric TIKE, which does include storm size, does so an upward trend over the last 20-25 years:”
        uh huh, you betcha. Did you know that QuikScat was launched in 1999? Not terribly accurate but better than holding up your finger.

      • In the N Atl, TIKE for the last 20 years just tracks the AMO. In the analysis one of my students did there was a huge jump in 1995

      • JimD, “captd, you say that but then don’t give any numbers. What’s that worth? People have made estimates of missed storms, I know, and it doesn’t affect the stat I gave.”

        Instead of the linky dink thing, try a little logic. For a tropical storm to get a name, it has to have a minimum sustained wind speed. If there is no surface station, ship or local Doppler radar, there was only visual satellite data to determine rotation and estimate wind speed. Low and behold, in 1999, NASA launched a cloud penetrating radar satellite called QuikSCAT which included a SeaWinds package.

        http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Seawinds/

        Now no one has done research or continued the “old” way to determine a baseline for impact of the new satellite on named storms. Pretty much like surface stations didn’t maintain the old cotton shelters to have an over lap to compare with the newer digital stations and the Royal Navy didn’t keep measuring SST with buckets. You end up with a discontinuity in the data. The invention of Catscan for more cancer cases. Before X-ray, there was very few cancer cases. Every time there is a new method for acquiring data there is a new leap in some trend that just has to get published without checking why first.

        I am sure you and David should fell comfortable that you can now better prepare the world for some disaster that will be replaced by a new disaster in the near future. Since y’all are linear no threshold kinda guys.

      • captd, so you think people haven’t looked at current tropical storms on satellite pictures to see their characteristics and compared them with old satellite pictures, or done statistical studies that estimate how many of today’s storms would have been missed by past techniques.

      • JimD, “captd, so you think people haven’t looked at current tropical storms on satellite pictures to see their characteristics and compared them with old satellite pictures, or done statistical studies that estimate how many of today’s storms would have been missed by past techniques.”

        Yes.

        Ryan Maue event had a post at one time on how ridiculous it was. Leif Svalgaard has the same issue with sunspots. There needs to be some realistic work done cleaning up some of these issues. James Annan is also just a bit miffed that no one seems to care about getting the climate models not to diverge. It is like herding cats. Some scientists need nannies to help clean up their messes.

      • In the N Atl, TIKE for the last 20 years just tracks the AMO.

        Perhaps, or perhaps not, we’l see, but TIKE is clearly a superior metric to ACE or PDI, since if you’re going to track energy you ought to, you know, use the energy content of storms and not just their velocity content….

      • David Appell:

        […] but TIKE is clearly a superior metric to ACE or PDI, since if you’re going to track energy you ought to, you know, use the energy content of storms and not just their velocity content…

        If you actually had a meter that measured energy content of storms, that would be the way to go. I think, though, you underestimate the difficulties in reliably estimating kinetic energy, given the uncertainties in the vector wind field associated with hurricanes.

        It’s a new metric and IMO a long way from being establish as a reliable metric, let alone a “clearly superior” one.

    • I’m still waiting for someone to show how a warming ‘pause’ can happen while NOAA and NASA state that 2012 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.???

      http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2013/20130806_stateoftheclimate.html

      • Matthew R Marler

        Walter Carlson: I’m still waiting for someone to show how a warming ‘pause’ can happen while NOAA and NASA state that 2012 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.???

        Whether it’s a pause, peak, plateau won’t be known for another decade or more, but having reached “the warmest year on record” the temperature record has displayed random fluctuation, rather than sustaining the previously observed increase. The mechanism (“how” of your post) is not fully characterized.

    • Mickey: What trend in cosmic rays shows Svensmark can account for 0.3-0.4 W/m2/yr?

      Data please.

      • Your know clue… so?

      • “What trend in cosmic rays shows Svensmark can account for 0.3-0.4 W/m2/yr?”

        What makes you think a trend is needed? The heliosphere went to a high energy state in the early 20th century and stayed there until the middle of the last decade. Solanki had it pegged (his letter to nature, “Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years”, Oct 2004) considering strength and duration, at about a 8000 year maximum.

        It doesn’t take a trend in decreasing GCR flux to make things warmer any more than it takes a increasing flame to heat a pot of water to boiling on a stove. A step function from off to on does a fine job.

      • David Appell: So many tacit implications in your short reply. Quite impressive, if unresponsive.

        Your side, the side that says human emitted CO2 is the primary driver of climate change, and which (hubristically) says that natural variation cannot explain all the warming we’ve seen, cannot explain why the warming has apparently stopped for almost two decades. This discredits your hypothesis. I’m talking about one possible hypothesis about a mechanism that COULD explain natural variation in solar insolation (and the climate it drives). Again I ask you, have you (has anyone) falsified Svensmark?

        I’m not talking about data or proof or convincing evidence. I’m quite comfortable with ambiguity. I’m willing to wait for the correct answer. I’m not worried about impending disaster. You, on the other hand, appear to need a story, even a flawed, incomplete, or totally false one, to take the place of the correct answer, until (if?) the correct answer eventually arrives.

    • Stolen from Zeke(?): “Global Warming is what the Earth does between Ice Ages.”

    • hummmm

      seems to…
      …but we can’t measure it….

      so the evidence for the ‘seems to’ came from where?

      LOL

      scientists should not be given expensive computer toys.. until they know limitations, computers and their own..

  2. So how long do we have to wait until:

    lolwot posts graphs showing there is no “pause”?

    Josh posts a long post on how Dr Curry has once again shown her biased, tribal outlook and lack of integrity?

    • Josh posts a long post on how Dr Curry has once again shown her biased, tribal outlook and lack of integrity?

      I hear that Peter Lang and Don Monford are forming a group to discuss their fantasies about me. You should join them.

      You have never read me question Judith’s “integrity.” Not once.

      I have questioned the selectivity of her reasoning within a context of noting how motivated reasoning biases all of our analysis because of known cognitive and psychological attributes, and saying that what’s most important that we acknowledge our biases and try to control for them.

      When smart people attribute arguments to others that they never made, it is a “tell” for “skepticism,” tim.

      After all, selective reasoning is selective.

      (And BTW, I have said many times that in this whole mess, Latif is the one person whose views make the most sense to me.)

      • yes it’s a shame they have to misrepresent us, although I would wager it isn’t deliberate, but an inability to accurately recollect past events.

      • Interesting. The main difference between myself and Latif is not scientific, but rather social. Latif is operating within the ‘system’ of the institutions surrounding climate science and science-policy interface. I’ve stepped outside the system, in the interests of seeing the ‘system’ reformed and opened up consider scientific disagreement and debate, i.e. so that Latif’s perspective can receive serious consideration.

      • And I don’t often question your reasoning w/r/t the science, per se, but on your arguments w/r/t the social aspects of the debate and on a few occasions, the rhetoric of your scientific arguments (such as your acceptance of arguments about a “pause” in “global warming.” With reference to that last point, I think that Latif’s rhetoric is much better: “Here it is not appropriate to boil the whole problem down to a single magnitude: the global mean temperature. Rather it is necessary to understand exactly what is happening regionally, how the temperature develops at a location. “ Compare and contrast with Rose’s rhetoric of -paraphrasing- “Climate scientist admits that global warming has stopped.”)

      • Well, Latif doesn’t get much attention in the public debate on climate change, whereas Rose does. Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.

        My position in all this sits between Latif and Rose: lets have some dialogue and debate about these issues, and given the points raised by Latif (and Tsonis, myself, etc), the IPCC’s high confidence isn’t justified.

        The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.

        p.s. HvS plays an interesting role here, arguably somewhere between myself and ML; HvS is much more willing to criticize the ‘system’ than ML.

      • Joshua | September 22, 2013 at 8:53 am | Reply

        “I hear that Peter Lang and Don Monford are forming a group to discuss their fantasies about me. You should join them.”

        I’m already in a club that discusses train wrecks so joining your fang club would be redundant.

      • Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.

        Sorry, but I just don’t think that “Mommy, mommy, they did it fiiiirrrsssst (or do it toooouuuu)” is scientific or even effective. Never have. Never will. All it does is feed into the same ol’ same ol’ paradigm.

      • @Dr Curry
        The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.

        Western Europe is ‘inexpensive fossil fuel challeged’…I.E…no one in the US would burn coal if we had to pay what the Europeans pays.

        It’s is therefore in Western Europe’s and Japan’s interest to convince their main economic competitors not to utilize their inexpensively ex-tractable fossil fuels.

        It’s not an accident that a substantial portion of ‘climate doom propaganda’ is originating in Bonn and London rather then Washington and New York.

        Europe created a Carbon Tax which is for all intents and purposes an ‘import tax’ that would otherwise violate WTO rules. Without a scientific consensus on ‘Climate Change’ blessed by the UN, Peabody Coal, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom would be able to get the Carbon Import Tax nullified via the WTO.

        Climate change is real because fossil fuel importers want to be able to tax imported fuel without violating WTO trade rules.

        Whether or not the science supports the concept of CAGW is a question for academics to discuss among themselves.

      • “Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.” – JC

        Poor Judith.

        You gotta be kidding!

        On what basis did you get invited to write an op-ed for The Oz? It wasn’t your ‘consensus science’ output – just the opposite.

        Someone looked at the reporting in The Oz on climate change and the non-consensus POV was far more common than the reporting of what’s in the IPCC. Not just proportionally more, but more, far more, in absolute terms.

        I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case in other similar newspapers that are pursuing a political objective in their ‘reporting’ on climate change.

      • “Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.” – JC

        Regular op-eds in the WSJ? Hannity, Limbaugh, O’Reily, Savage, Bennett, Ingraham, Miller, The Washington Times, Forbes, The Economist, The Financial Times, etc., etc.

        They don’t exist. The only thing that exists are the big bad “mainstream media,” which, in the selective reasoning of “skeptics” excludes all of the entities listed above.

        Why?

        Because when you’re bound and determined to be a victim, the “mainstream media” becomes a very effective victimizer, and so you have to define the term of “mainstream media” in a way that is convenient for your narrative.

        What’s funny is that while tribe members on both sides blame the “mainstream media” for their victimhood, no one actually has validated evidence to quantify the influence of the media:

        http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/8/8/partisan-media-are-not-destroying-america.html

      • So 20+ years of non-stop alarmist propaganda, gatekeeping, consensus-‘building’, …, all at taxpayer expense ($Billions?), is equivalent to one privately funded op-ed, Michael would have us believe.

      • Gail,

        The number of op-eds in The Oz for a ‘consensus’ scientist to explain AGW or the IPCC reports -nil, zero, zilch. Will never happen.

        Cry me a river.

      • “I have questioned the selectivity of her reasoning within a context of noting how motivated reasoning biases all of our analysis because of known cognitive and psychological attributes, and saying that what’s most important that we acknowledge our biases and try to control for them.”

        Ya, thats not questioning her integrity, A true scottsman would use the word integrity when he questions someones integrity. Slime like Joshua do the same thing using other words.

      • Michael, must have followed Forbes investment advice very carefully…

      • Ya, thats not questioning her integrity, A true scottsman would use the word integrity when he questions someones integrity. Slime like Joshua do the same thing using other word

        Heh.

        So, saying that Judith does the same thing that everyone does makes me “slime.”

        And calling me “slime” (as opposed to an actual explanation for how I “do the same thing” as questioning her integrity), suffices for an argument, makes a difference, will change what I do?

        Nope, nope, and nope.

        I admire your loyalty, steven. It’s cute.

      • Michael
        I’m not familiar with oz media. But number of op-eds, broadcasts plugging CAGW, slanted ‘news’ by the BBC in the UK over the last 15-20 years, probably outnumber sceptic ones by three orders of magnitude.

      • Little joshie quickly ran out of examples of non-mainstream media outlets and had to resort to etc, etc. Then comes the mommy, mommy BS and Judith’s selective reasoning blah…blah…blah. The usual tedious broken record yammerings of a little troll.

      • ” harrywr2 | September 22, 2013 at 10:07 am |

        Western Europe is ‘inexpensive fossil fuel challeged’…I.E…no one in the US would burn coal if we had to pay what the Europeans pays.”

        I swear the comments here are so easy to counter, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

        The Europeans pay through the nose because they have essentially burned the majority of their coal reserves and are running on fumes. They are now paying the economic scarcity penalty and see rising prices due to coal transportation costs from elsewhere.

        What did you expect? Ponies descending from the skies? The earth has a finite amount of non-renewable resources and we are burning through that. You would half-expect that a chair of an Earth Sciences department at a major SciTech university would acknowledge some of these principles every once in a while.

        Joshua is only touching on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sheer hypocrisy of the denialist spiel.

        spiel —

        “a long or fast speech or story, typically one intended as a means of persuasion or as an excuse but regarded with skepticism or contempt by those who hear it.”

      • As always, Don – thanks for reading.

        I can’t tell you how much it means to me.

        Oh, and BTW – a few other folks have expressed interest in joining you and Peter Lang in your group to discuss your fantasies about me. Mosher, Gail, and tim are interested as well. Springer would interested too – except apparently he’s already in one.

      • I swear Webhubman is getting dumber.

        “The Europeans pay through the nose because they have essentially burned the majority of their coal reserves and are running on fumes. They are now paying the economic scarcity penalty and see rising prices due to coal transportation costs from elsewhere.”

        You are ‘forgetting’ green taxes, stubborn holding out against gas.

      • That’s an interesting point, harrywr2.

      • @ “slime like Joshua.”

        To be called “slime” by the likes of Steve Mosher…a respected voice of moderation and intellectual heft, is I would say a new low for you Joshy boy.

        Are you that hard up for attention? I’d be more inclined to just call you pathetic. But slime is unarguably accurate as well….

      • Matthew R Marler

        Joshua: Sorry, but I just don’t think that “Mommy, mommy, they did it fiiiirrrsssst (or do it toooouuuu)” is scientific or even effective.

        You miss the whole point of debate.

        Just how would you recommend someone to alert the public that “they” (IPCC in this case) are not uniformly accurate, well-reasoned and correct? If anyone took your comments here seriously there would be no debate.

      • I think Harry’s on the right track. The carbon tax as back door trade barrier makes a lot of sense. The problem is, they picked the wrong alternatives. The ‘renewables’ were a disaster for Europe’s economy, and then Germany compounded the stupid by going no-nuke after Fukashima.

        This is why the train is off the tracks and over on its side. This was supposed to be beyond clever. It ended up being beyond clever.

      • Matt –

        You miss the whole point of debate.

        Just how would you recommend someone to alert the public that “they” (IPCC in this case) are not uniformly accurate, well-reasoned and correct? .

        First, I think that you and I may have a different perspective on constructive debate. I don’t think that justifying Rose’s inaccuracies, hyperbole, and misrepresentations by making an unsubstantiated argument by assertion about the difficulty of being heard above the “din” of the IPCC constitutes constructive debate. In fact, I’m not sure I’d call it debate, period, let alone constructive debate.

        Second, I as far as I am concerned, the point should be discussion, and not debate. Debate has a inherent quality of a competitive scenario – where someone wins and someone loses. It is a zero sum game format. It encourages scorched earth strategies and tactics. It does not lead to “bridge building,” IMO.

        If anyone took your comments here seriously there would be no debate

        First, I think that there are some folks who take my comments here seriously. So I suspect that your assumption that none do is inaccurate. And your statement also raises an interesting question: why would you have written that comment if you don’t take my comments seriously? What purpose would be served, what would be advanced, by writing that comment to explain that you don’t take my comments seriously? What makes it even more interesting is that you’ve written similar comments in the past. Odd enough that you’d interact in that way once, what becomes even harder for me to understand is why you’d do it repeatedly.

        Second – where do you see “debate” here? Sure, it does happen on rare occasion – and I would say that generally, the prevalence of your comments taking place in a context of “debate” is higher than with most commenters here – but even still I’d say that the difference is only relative, and that in absolute terms your comments, like those of most commenters here, do not take place in a context of debate, let alone constructive debate.

      • Oh, and Matt –

        Just how would you recommend someone to alert the public that “they” (IPCC in this case) are not uniformly accurate, well-reasoned and correct? .

        I’d say pretty much the way that you just did it – although obviously in a more detailed and substantiated manner.

        There is no reason to assume that the brand of rhetoric you used there is inextricably linked to the hyperbole, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of someone like Rose. And saying that opposing voices create a “din,” in no way, justifies Rose’s kind of rhetoric, IMO. I don’t see Mommymommyism as being effective.

        You seem to imply that you can’t get one without the other. I would suggest the opposite, actually. The presence of one inherently undermines the presence of the other.

      • Matthew R Marler

        Joshua: Second, I as far as I am concerned, the point should be discussion, and not debate.

        In that case, you have missed the role of debate in the history of science. In that case, you do miss the point of debate.

      • In that case, you have missed the role of debate in the history of science

        So science has advanced through “debate” by way of misrepresentation, hyperbole, and inaccuracies, justified by saying that “they to it tooo.”

        OK. I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.

      • Matthew R Marler

        Joshua: And your statement also raises an interesting question: why would you have written that comment if you don’t take my comments seriously? What purpose would be served, what would be advanced, by writing that comment to explain that you don’t take my comments seriously?

        Except for tracking down links, my time here is a form of entertainment, like watching football. I skip most of your posts, read a few, and comment on fewer.

      • hmmm . . . like watching football . . .

      • Yeah. And probably those you read, you read by “accident.”

      • Gail: “You are ‘forgetting’ green taxes, stubborn holding out against gas.”

        What gas? You mean that the natural gas that is depleting just as fast as the crude oil being pumped out of the North Sea by the UK?

        Did you know that the UK is importing wood chips from the USA to burn as a heating fuel?

        The greens are a convenient whipping boy for your war against reality.

      • Web

        The reason that drax is being forced to burn wood chips is entirely due to green measures to reduce co2 in accordance with govt policy.

        Here is a link to the least incredulous reference I could find

        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22630815

        If you want to know what even the greens think about this just google ‘drax wood chips’

        Tonyb

      • Tony, You believe in that rationale?

        Your home country is rapidly depleting their reserve of fossil fuels and yet you want to blame the greens for the gyrations that your energy infrastructure has to go through to make up for that ever increasing deficit?

        In the desert regions of the world, no one blames the greens for how expensive an unlimited supply of fresh water is, but when the time comes to discuss non-renewable energy sources, you will stoop to the most ridiculous rationalizations and blame the greens for anything and everything.

      • Web, do you realize how thick Great Britain’s frackable formations are? This is supposed to be one of your fields of expertise, and you come off with ‘rapidly depleting their fossil fuel reserves’.

        Be honest, at least with yourself.
        =============

      • Web

        When even the directors of drax cite sustainability and low carbon as reasons for their change you tend to believe them

        http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2263887/drax-secures-gbp75m-treasury-loan-guarantee-to-switch-from-coal-to-biomass

        I’ve no idea why you are pursuing this line. They are doing it for green reasons which even greenpeace disagree with.

        As for renewable energy I am not against it at all, just that we should pursue a horses for courses policy.

        Britain is a Barmy place to have solar farms for example but an excellent location for wave/tidal power as nowhere here is further than 70 miles from the sea.

        I also think the west should get together to create an Apollo or CERN type project in order to develop sustainable energy sources as there are many reasons not to want to rely on fossil fuel for ever.
        Tonyb

      • Josh,

        You say you have never questioned Judith’s integrity. I’ll bet there are folks here who will attest to your walking right up to that line and spitting over it.

        PS – unless you are an extremely attractive female travel guide, with access to the worlds’ greatest wine cellars, you don’t get within a thousand miles of my fantasies.

      • WebHubTelescope

        Gail: “You are ‘forgetting’ green taxes, stubborn holding out against gas.”

        >> What gas? You mean that the natural gas that is depleting just as fast as the crude oil being pumped out of the North Sea by the UK?

        The gas from frakking for which the UK has hundreds of year’s worth.

        >> Did you know that the UK is importing wood chips from the USA to burn as a heating fuel?

        Yes, because of the green subsidies to prop up renewables.

        >> The greens are a convenient whipping boy for your war against reality.

        I think it’s very clear who’s waging war against reality here.

      • “The gas from frakking for which the UK has hundreds of year’s worth.”

        Are you “certain” of that?

        The problem with you deniers is that you are fighting a war against phantoms. Climate science is saying the world is getting warmer, but that is merely a compounding issue when you realize that we need energy from something other than fossil fuels to keep our standard of living going, and our global economy growing.

        These assertions from Gail are just bizarre thoughts from people that have never studied systems science and have never done any systems engineering. You don’t do systems engineering simply by making assertions that “The gas from frakking for which the UK has hundreds of year’s worth.” without looking at the supporting evidence.

        That’s why we call you neo-Luddites. You aren’t exactly Luddites, but you refuse to use high-tech scientific analysis to pursue a forward-looking strategy.

      • Web enters never never land here. Why does he depend upon bald assertions about Great Britain’s fossil reserves, and in the low power density of renewable energy? Well, vivid imagination is sometimes a plus.
        ===================

      • Web is way out in lala-land here, deluded as he always is that all fossil reserves are close to depletion.

        See eg even the leftwing Independent
        http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/get-fracking-mps-back-the-dash-for-uks-shale-gas-8676040.html

        “If only 10 per cent of the 1,300 trillion cubic feet that the British Geological Society (BGS) believe lies under the North of England could be extracted it would be enough to supply the country with gas for 25 years.”

      • tim –

        You say you have never questioned Judith’s integrity. I’ll bet there are folks here who will attest to your walking right up to that line and spitting over it.

        Of course I know that there are quite a few here that feel that way – just as there are quite a few here that substitute their fantasies of what I say and believe for what I actually say and believe.

        I am often critical of Judith’s reasoning. I have always said that I assume her motivations to be as she states – to build bridges. However, I often don’t think that he bridge building is effective. Seems that folks, out of sense of loyalty or chivalry want to throw down the gauntlet at the slightest provocation – (perhaps because they think that Judith isn’t quite capable of taking care of herself?). That’s all part of the medium, as far as I am concerned. If folks are stuck in a recursive reasoning loop, where their confirmation bias leads them to misinterpreting what I say, there is little I can do about it. If folks are interested in engaging me to have a conversation about our beliefs, respectively, I’m always game. If someone is interested in what I say and I’m not clear, or they have a simple misinterpretation, or they have something to say by way of helping me to see where I was wrong about something, I’m always game.

        Here’s the bottom line. I don’t know Judith. I have no basis on which to judge her integrity. I do have a basis on which to judge her arguments, whether my judgements are correct or biased or not. That I might disagree with her reasoning or logic does not mean that I make negative judgements of her integrity. So I have the inside track, and I happen to know that anyone who thinks that they know that I question Judith’s integrity is just wrong. When smart people are absolutely confident about things that are absolutely wrong, subjective determinations that take place in a very “motivated” context (motivated in the sense of reasoning – I’m not judging their motivations either).

        Here’s a little secret for you. When I visit “realist” websites, and I see people passing judgement on Judith’s integrity, I feel the exact same way about their reasoning process as I do about people who presume, entirely unskeptically, to say that I have negatively judged Judith’s integrity when, in fact, I haven’t.

        This reminds me of yesterday when John Carpenter, it seemed to me, formulated an incorrect conclusion about my view of Judith (that I have a “problem” with her discussing different views). Even though I respect John’s reasoning process, I also knew that he was flat out wrong – so I engaged him on the topic in good faith. When someone habitually reasons in a “skeptical” fashion (as opposed to skeptical), there is little point for me to engage with them. Of course, there is little point to ridiculing them either – but it’s a bad habit I haven’t yet kicked.

      • To summarize,

        We are a bunch of knights errant ready to ride to the defense of Dame Judith, but due to our circular and biased reasoning we misunderstand you and misrepresent you. For you are but an honest monk in quest of the true skeptic, be it here or at “realist” sites.

        And you are a good dancer. RE the part about you not knowing Curry, which somehow proves you couldn’t possibly question her integrity.

        All in a quarter of the 400+ words you needed.

      • Oh, the humility.

      • Tom –

        It’s not my fault that people are motivated (in the sense of motivated reasoning) to fantasize about what I say or believe.

        On the issue of humility vis a vis their fantasies – they fantasize about me because they can’t incorporate what I actually say into their system of beliefs. Therefore, they have to transform what I say into something that confirms their beliefs.

        – in a sense, I have little to do with it, so I can’t attribute it to myself. It’s about them, not me.

      • tim –

        RE the part about you not knowing Curry, which somehow proves you couldn’t possibly question her integrity.

        You see?

        That isn’t what I said. I didn’t say that it “proves” that I couldn’t possibly question my integrity. Of course not.

        There are many folks here that judge my integrity even though they don’t know me. Not knowing someone, in no way, prevents people from making that judgement.

        But just like how people who don’t know me have no basis to judge my integrity, so do I have no basis to judge Judith’s integrity. This is something that I know as well as I know anything. I consider it to be an established fact. When I feel inclined to judge Judith’s integrity, I have to catch myself and be more introspective. When I feel so inclined, my more objective self tells my more “motivated’ (in the sense of reasoning) self, that he is wrong. When I catch myself inclined to judge Judith’s integrity, I realize that it is a sign of how I, just like everyone else, is prone to biased reasoning. When I read someone who doesn’t know Judith judging her integrity, I know the same. When I see someone who doesn’t know me judging my integrity, I know the same.

        See how you thought that you could say the same as I said with fewer words? Well, you were wrong. You missed a very key point.

        Maybe you should consider thinking things through more clearly. Sometimes that means that you need more words to thoroughly explain the concepts.

      • Josh,

        pay attention to the good dancer part.

        You said your not knowing Dr Curry means you have no basis to judge her integrity, but you do have a basis for judging her arguments. That others might see your negative judgments of said arguments as an attack on her integrity is their fault, as you know what you mean better than anyone.

        It’s called dancing Josh. You waltz around the dance floor with beautiful verbiage, thinking no one notices your fly is open and your breath stinks.

        You tell us you go into introspective mode whenever you feel you may be close to the line of an integrity attack. Consider staying there longer, as it appears to many that it isn’t stopping you from questioning her integrity.

      • tim –

        as it appears to many that it isn’t stopping you from questioning her integrity.

        They (or you) are certainly entitled to think it “seems” to be whatever they (or you) want to think it “seems” like. As far as I am concerned, their confidence serves as evidence that they (or you) are “skeptics.”

        My guess is that everyone here is just fine, integrity-wise. It’s kind of a baseline assumption – but it isn’t a judgement, and it certainly isn’t a judgement based on a sufficient body of evidence.

        But maybe I’m wrong, tim. Maybe those folks here who like to tell me of their assessments of my integrity (character, intelligence, political ideology, views on climate change, etc.), are entirely correct. Could be, tim. Maybe I’m “scum,” a low-life, a “coward,” etc. – just like my much beloved “skeptics” tell me. Of course, the fact that they disagree with me must be purely coincidence – as would be their near categorical association of their assessment of integrity, character, bravery, etc., with perspectives on climate change and political ideology.

        Yeah. That’s the ticket. Pure coincidence. You’re probably right. No doubt because your integrity is so much greater than mine.

      • Josh,

        I have never called you any of those names nor anything remotely close. If you would get away from being so self absorbed, you might recall my calling people out from time to time when they did so.

        If people are acting negative towards you Josh, it could be you stumbled into a nasty bunch. Or it could have something to do with you.

      • Joshua

        “So, saying that Judith does the same thing that everyone does makes me “slime.””

        1. your assuming that everyone does it makes you slime. You might practice skepticism
        2. If everyone does it it rather UNREMARKABLE and really not important

        It only becomes important if people can avoid it, which, you seem to argue, is impossible.

      • More certainty from Joshua

        ” I do have a basis on which to judge her arguments, whether my judgements are correct or biased or not. That I might disagree with her reasoning or logic does not mean that I make negative judgements of her integrity. So I have the inside track, and I happen to know that anyone who thinks that they know that I question Judith’s integrity is just wrong.”

        Joshua, you assume that you have a PRIVILEDGED access, an inside track, to your own beliefs. That is something you ought to question,
        You of course understand the basis of Freudian psychology says just the opposite. You might consider that you employ motivated reasoning when it comes to interpreting your own belief states.

        In short, our evidence about your beliefs comes through your actions.
        Your actions, your words, your behavior, is evidence for us that you question judiths integrity. Now, you make a report about your internal states. And you report that you dont question her integrity. This is just another piece of evidence. Looking at all the evidence I would say that

        A) you dont understand your own beliefs
        or
        B) you have a biased view of your own beliefs

        C) you are making a false report to save face.

        In short, we have to look at all the evidence. All the evidence points toward you being slime. The fact that slime denies being slime is consistent with slimehood.

      • Heh.

        It only becomes important if people can avoid it, which, you seem to argue, is impossible.

        Yet more of what I “seem” to argue, eh?

        You study what I say pretty closely, mosher. No doubt you have read me say, many times, that what’s important is how people deal with their inherent inclination towards “motivated reasoning,” confirmation bias, etc.

        I have always said that it cannot be avoided. So it “seems” that I argue whatever you want me to argue – in spite of my having argued something completely different.

        And for that, I’m “slime.” You know this, even though you don’t know me. Even though you have no idea how I’ve led my life, what I’ve accomplished in my life, Yes, I’m “slime” and I have no integrity. I’m a coward, and dumb. I have a “problem” when Judith discusses different views. I have “blind faith” that catastrophic climate change is a certainty. I’m a Eco-Nazi who wants to destroy capitalism. I’m a totalitarian who hates freedom. I want the government to run everything, preferably by stealing money from “producers” by way of taxes. What matters most is that children die so that the statists can enforce the banning of fossil fuels. My desire for children to die is only second to my hope that billions of poor adults die also.

        Yes, steven, just like my much beloved “skeptics,” you know that I “seem” to argue whatever you want me to argue.

        Brandon would be proud.

      • steven –

        You of course understand the basis of Freudian psychology says just the opposite.

        Freudian theory has contributed some fundamentally important concepts to our understanding of cognition and human psychology. And it was stunningly wrong in many respects.

        Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, steven.

        I happen to know that I have no basis for judging Judith’s integrity.

        I happen to know that you have no basis for judging my integrity. And part of my proof of that is that you step into crap, so often, when you go beyond what you actually know about me to formulate judgements about me based on insufficient evidence.

        This is particularly hilarious given that you’ve claimed that you have a “window into my soul” to judge me. What nonsense, steven.

      • steven –

        This is just stunningly bad:

        In short, our evidence about your beliefs comes through your actions.
        Your actions, your words, your behavior, is evidence for us that you question judiths integrity.

        No, your beliefs about me come through your judgements of my actions. It’s hilarious that you would make that argument backed up to your argument about Freudian psychology telling us that we are not good judges of our own beliefs.

        And you report that you dont question her integrity.

        I also said that when I feel inclined to judge her integrity, with some introspection I realize that I have no basis in doing so. You see, mosher, you wouldn’t make this kind of mistake if you weren’t so prone to motivated reasoning.

      • “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” or today, you might say that, ‘Political power grows out of a the rotunda’. B Frank.

      • If people are acting negative towards you Josh, it could be you stumbled into a nasty bunch. Or it could have something to do with you.

        It’s possible, but my belief is that it is neither.

        It could be that they think that they can judge me, personally, without having sufficient evidence – and they think so because they are “motivated” in their reasoning. Because they disagree with me, on various issues, they think they are completely justified in making assessments of my character, my intelligence, my integrity, my bravery, etc.

        They are “skeptics,” tim. Anyone who fails, so completely, to exercise due skeptical diligence deserves that label.

      • Josh

        A saying I heard in the service – “Sometimes you have to call a spade a f,ing shovel.”. No judgment or deep analysis required.

        Note that up thread I gave you the benefit if doubt. Accepting that you may have never intentionally questioned Judith’s integrity, only noting that in appearance you come very close. Rather than the long soliloquies, how about a simple “it was not my intent. I will try better next time.”

      • JC wrote:
        Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.

        Oh please! You get far, far more quotations than the average climate scientists. At this point, you are a go-to source for the contrarian point of view. That is very telling (and, IMO, should be worrying).

      • Judith, one of the letter-writers responding to your Australian article asked “Where has Judith Curry been all these years?” I’ve taken the liberty of replying. I posted the letters on the thread “The IPCC’s inconvenient truth.”

      • Lets try to make this a bit sharper for Joshua.

        Here is his claim

        “I do have a basis on which to judge her arguments, whether my judgements are correct or biased or not. That I might disagree with her reasoning or logic does not mean that I make negative judgements of her integrity. So I have the inside track, and I happen to know that anyone who thinks that they know that I question Judith’s integrity is just wrong.”

        What All of us see is Joshua continually attacking Judith’s integrity.
        When called on that he pleads “special inside access” to his own beliefs
        He “knows” that we are wrong about his beliefs because he has an inside track. In short, he thinks he cant be wrong about his own beliefs. He thinks he knows what he believes. But does he?

        This belief, the belief that he knows his beliefs is part of the cartesian dream. How could Joshua possibly be wrong about what he believes?
        The answer lies in the very theory he ascribes to. That is, the account he gives of human reasoning is grounded in a supposition that we dont have priviledged access to our own mental states. We can, in fact, see Joshua searching out evidence to confirm his belief that he does not believe he questions Judith’s integrity. Faced with the evidence that we all see in his behavior, rather than look at that he seeks out evidence to confirm his belief. He retreats into the privacy of his own mind to declare, as it were,
        ” I looked through all my beliefs and didnt find that one, and you guys have no way of confirming that” That is a most severe form of confirmation bias. Put another way, Joshua’s own account of how people look for evidence and how they treat evidence, his preferred account of how motivating reasoning works, should make it clear to him that he is not in a good position to decide what it is that he thinks he believes. He is not in a position to report fairly on what he thinks he believes. He can report on what he believes he believes. We believe otherwise.

      • Re Michael’s comments on The Australian, it has consistently taken a line of accepting that AGW is occurring and that we should reduce emissions to mitigate it. It has carried many pro-AGW articles and letters, but is almost alone in the Australian media in giving space to contrary views. Judith’s article is the first non-consensus piece to be given such space and prominence, about 25 years after the Oz first considered the issue.

      • Matthew R Marler

        curryja: hmmm . . . like watching football . . .

        I did say “except for tracking down links”, of which you provide a lot.

        Actually, a better analogy is playing flag football, what with all the name-calling and such.

        I have praised a few people for providing especially informative references, most notably chiefhydrologist. Several people have recommended textbooks that I have subsequently bought.

      • Matt,

        Chief sometimes sets the benchmark for arrogance and at times can be thin skinned, but as far as I am concerned he carries weight, backs up his arguments with data and links and generally is someone deserving of respect.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        I find it amusing how often I see Joshua make comments like:

        Brandon would be proud.

        When I’ve seen him claim other people are obsessed with him many times. I would think someone who likes to make that accusation so much wouldn’t bring my name up over and over in random conversations. Especially since it seems the only reason he brings my name up is to make derogatory remarks.

        Is it projection? I don’t know. All I know is the smear campaign is funny. And pathetic.

      • Faustino,

        You must be reading a different paper.

        The Oz that I know falls over itself to give any airing to any and all cranks and contarian POV’s it can find, no matter how ludicrous; from Monckton to the old guy interviewed on the beach,who thinks thag the water doesn’t seem any higher today than when he was a kid, so therefore AGW isn’t real.

        Its slide into politically motivated crankery over the past 10-15 has been a sad spectacle,but it’s obvious that this cancer, which was primarily evident in the hard-right wingnuttery of the editorial stance, has slowly spread into the news coverage, most clearly in anything in relation to climate change.

      • Is that true Michael, that major Australian papers give page space to krank theories?

        We don’t have that problem here in the USA, but that is only because these matters get relegated to the paranormal and conspiracy radio shows such as Coast2Coast AM and Alex Jones plus Rush Limpballs.

        The internet is another matter entirely.

        It does explain a lot, thanks.

      • Some may find the Australian fair and balanced:

        The Australian is published by News Corp Australia, an asset of News Corp, which also owns the sole dailies in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart and Darwin and the most popular metropolitan dailies in Sydney and Melbourne. News Corp’s Chairman and Founder is Rupert Murdoch.

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

      • Chief Hydrologist

        Did this thread really start with Joshua so many words ago.

        The usual suspects are being nuttier than usual. Skepticism and anti-science consists of suggesting that the world is not warming as fast as expected and perhaps – heaven forbid – this might last a few decades more. This is not in fact all that unsupported in peer reviewed science.

        ‘Finally, the presence of vigorous climate variability presents significant challenges to near-term climate prediction (25, 26), leaving open the possibility of steady or even declining global mean surface temperatures over the next several decades that
        could present a significant empirical obstacle to the implementation of policies directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions (27). However, global warming could likewise suddenly and without any ostensive cause accelerate due to internal variability.
        To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.’ http://deepeco.ucsd.edu/~george/publications/09_long-term_variability.pdf

        It is funny as hell.

      • A SCEPTICAL CLIMATE
        Media coverage of climate change in Australia
        2011

        http://www.acij.uts.edu.au/pdfs/sceptical-climate-part1.pdf

      • Willard,
        That really explains it. Rupert Murdoch is an Aussie larrikin prototype, someone with no respect for the truth. Instead seeing journalism as a way to mock authority.

      • I like the instant replay feature. Lots of uncalled unsportsmanlike conduct on display.
        ================

      • Joshua, this ‘known cognitive and psychological attributes’ mime is a real red herring and based on a completely reductive, unsubtle understanding. 1) Since the enlightenment we have developed means through which we can, as it were, ‘objectify’ ourselves and, hence, test ourselves (something we merely rediscovered – some of the Greeks, for one, did the same – it therefore is reasonable to assume that it is fundamental to being a human being, as such). 2) The means via which we do this are well founded and well tested. They are a series of methodologies that are, let us say, meta-scientific and foundational to modernity: Rationality, discursiveness, the belief in facts and the belief in the testability and, therefore, fallibility of ‘facts’. All this completely bypasses your ‘biases’ and sweeps them away. Your ‘known cognitive and psychological attributes’ is merely your and others attempt to bypass argument, dismiss your opponent and patronise (out of a kind of ‘phobia’) those who disagree with you.

      • > Rupert Murdoch is an Aussie larrikin prototype, someone with no respect for the truth. Instead seeing journalism as a way to mock authority.

        Do not underestimate what Rupert does, nor how he does what he does, Web. If you read that 2011 review, you’ll see that Rupert was not alone in stirring Aussie contrarianism. Faustino may tell you more about that, since he qualified “alone in the Australian media in giving space to contrary views” with an “almost”, a bit earlier.

        ***

        You may also ask yourself what worth would be a newspapers if it did not mock authority.

      • You may wonder in dismay at the value of mocking if authority protects and regulates journalism.
        ==================

      • “…I have questioned the selectivity of her reasoning within a context of noting how motivated reasoning biases all of our analysis because of known cognitive and psychological attributes”

        Basically, you are saying that she’s not bright enough to be dishonest….

      • Matthew R Marler

        Joshua: So science has advanced through “debate” by way of misrepresentation, hyperbole, and inaccuracies, justified by saying that “they to it tooo.”

        Maybe you just don’t understand English.

      • Coal mining is up in the US. It’s exported before is burned is all. Unfortunately, speaking of unintended consequences, the countries importing it don’t have any clean air standards so it’s even more polluting than it was before. Way to go ecoloons.


    • timg56 | September 22, 2013 at 7:00 am

      So how long do we have to wait until:

      lolwot posts graphs showing there is no “pause”?

      Josh posts a long post on how Dr Curry has once again shown her biased, tribal outlook and lack of integrity?

      You have to wonder why Curry doesn’t plot her BEST data over the last 15 years?

      I will do it for her:
      http://imageshack.us/a/img209/4963/oc9.gif

      Surprise, this data is showing a rise of 0.13C/decade amidst the seasonal and natural fluctuations in land temperature.

      Quiz time: What exactly is significant about looking at land temperatures?

      All you skeptics and deniers should be able to answer this rather open ended exam question given your keen academic interest in the Earth Sciences.

      • Matthew R Marler

        WebHubTelescope: What exactly is significant about looking at land temperatures?

        That’s where the people, the forests, and the crops grow; it is where the catastrophic floods and droughts and tornadoes are predicted to occur.

        But there is also the tropospheric data record since the satellite era. The sampling plan is less biased than the sampling of land and sea surface temperatures.

      • “Quiz time: What exactly is significant about looking at land temperatures?”

        That’s where the most variability is. The most sensitivity. Why look at the Arctic? That’s where much variability is supposed to be and I believe that’s true.

        What if we had $1000 in our checking account and $100,000 in our retirement account? Day to day we’d watch our checking account. Long term we’d watch our retirement account. Yes the 1 to 1000 ratio is roughly the same as the Atmosphere to Oceans heat content ratio.

        The correct ratio is perhaps higher. 1.0 / (1000 X (1.0 – 0.3) / 0.3).
        0.3 being 30% of the Earth’s surface.

      • Ragnaar,

        I like your analogy. Looking at someone’s daily checking account balance tells you virtually nothing about their overall economic state. It is meaningless without knowing what is happening in the savings account, not to mention the stock portfolios and retirement accounts you may not even know about.

      • Web,

        I don’t bother with dueling graphs, or argue whether there is a pause or not, or if it means anything anyway and I certainly don’t deny anything.

      • Ragnaar, stick to business or finance or whatever you do.

        Don’t go near any of the applied physics and applied math. You are very bad at it.

        Whatever you said is not worth correcting. An instructor would just place a big red X through it.

      • Really Web with an Rsquare of .03.


      • CMS | September 22, 2013 at 5:35 pm |

        Really Web with an Rsquare of .03.

        What’s the R^2 of this ?
        http://imageshack.us/a/img19/9219/qj3.gif

        Oh, it’s 10x worse at 0.0037. Even though there is an underlying trend.

        In any event, that’s probably why you don’t look at trends of 15 years when we have noise fluctuations in our temperature record of that magnitude. If you complain about a positive trend, I can complain when it is a flat pause, and then you have no beef.

        See how that works?

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        WebHubTelescope:

        You have to wonder why Curry doesn’t plot her BEST data over the last 15 years?

        I will do it for her:
        http://imageshack.us/a/img209/4963/oc9.gif

        In any event, that’s probably why you don’t look at trends of 15 years when we have noise fluctuations in our temperature record of that magnitude.

    • timg –

      Back at Keith Kloor’s old blog Joshua always talked about me having a “hard-on” for him. I have to say, this is one of the more truly weird aspects of his character. He pours his hollow clichés and tedious circumlocutions into blog post after blog post, and when he encounters criticism his response is to sexualize it. Maybe there is a psychoanalyst within earshot that could help us understand.

      I know the reason I always felt compelled to respond to Joshua, even when it was clearly useless, was that he is so, so representative of the glib, uninformed, but supremely confident modern day liberal. It’s like the entire phenomenon has been collected, distilled, and poured 200 proof into Josh. So when I attack him I feel like I am attacking an entire class of people who, frankly, need attacking.

      • I don’t believe in attacking Josh. But calling him out is a different story.

        That I do so could be the result that I care. Or it could be due to a love of pulling wings off of butterflies.

      • Still got it, eh, Tom? And I thought that four hours was a long time.

      • Tom.

        Ya the sexualizing ( see also references to humping his leg) and transforming his opponents into animals is one of the more interesting subtexts of Joshua’s discourse.

        The pattern is pretty damn boring. Keith Kloor { substitute Judy or Roger}
        writes something Joshua

        A) finds some nit
        B) attacks the writer, typically a meta attack.

        Other readers, annoyed with Joshua’s inability to actually address the issues, then attack Joshua. Joshua dehumanizes them and accuses them of humping his leg. wash rince repeat. Im doing it now.

        There are a couple things to note. First notice the authors that Joshua tends to expend the most energy on. You wont find him nit picking everyone. One might notice that he tends to focus on boundary work, that is keeping people who are straying from the tribe within the tribe. or focusing on people who have one foot in the tribe and another foot outside the tribe. Or focusing on people who communicate with, and hence validate, people outside the tribe, all the while trying to give the impression that he is somehow above this discourse.

        The practical upshot of his behavior is that his points rarely get discussed. He leads with a personalization of the topic, wrapped in theory of course, which invites further personalization. There a few explanations
        for this behavior, but at the core one must ask the question: Does Joshua persists in this approach because he finds it beneficial or pleasureable?
        what is that pleasure? It’s clearly not effective in changing people’s minds or even opening them to a meaningful dialogue and he must realize this.
        I dunno maybe he cant help himself.

      • Mosh

        That was a very lucid post and on that basis I am afraid you have slipped down the ladder on the cryticicity chart.

        However, I am sure in due course you will manage to rise once more to 2nd place, but I think first place eludes you whilst Willard holds sway.
        tonyb

      • Life, liberty, and
        The pursuit of happiness.
        Is it property?

        Nyah, nyah, beat that.
        ===============

    • If they were to hit pause, would there still be a squiggly line?

  3. We’ve had two pauses in the past century that lasted 22 and 25 years. My vote’s on this pause lasting about another decade.

    • Haven’t there been shorter pauses?

      • “Most believers are neo-religious ‘credulites’, IMO.”

        A term more often used is “creduloids.”

    • Is the pause just like the global LAND temperature rise we are seeing in the last 15 years?
      http://imageshack.us/a/img209/4963/oc9.gif
      Not at all, according to this graph.

      The land temperature rise is the real signal.

      As a scientist or engineer, I wouldn’t measure an electrical signal that was connected to a capacitor and noise source. That would be foolish because as an engineer or scientist, I would realize that the capacitor would filter the transients and create a lagged effect that would obscure the long-term trend. The same can be said for the noise source, as I would keep away from that.

      What the land temperature measurement does is disconnect partially from the thermal capacitance of the ocean and perhaps provide some distance from the noisiness of the oceans pseudo-cyclic oscillations.

      So I would have to ask the deniers to look at Curry’s BEST land temperature data of the last 15 years and deny the fact that the data is showing a rise.
      http://imageshack.us/a/img209/4963/oc9.gif

      Are you all going to deny this data?

      just curious. I want to see what your argument is. I have never come across a skeptic that had any scientific skill, apart from perhaps Clive Best or Lubos Motl.

      • There’s a lot of things showing a rise, they manage to ignore all that, why should land temperatures be any different?

        What will work hopefully is the eventual dawning that the world is still warming and isn’t cooling or going flat as they predicted. Perhaps we’ll see some much humbled climate skeptics, or perhaps a new batch will pop up in their place?

      • Is that a shot-gun test pattern? :)

        Where are the error bars on each measurement? What is the p-value of the fit? What is the p-value after taking the y-value error bars into account? Does BEST use data that has been adjusted? What about the errors associated with those adjustment procedures?

      • May I ask ‘as an engineer or scientist’ would you average he peaks and troughs of an A.C. voltage and use the average as a D.C. voltage in your circuit design?
        Only the thing of it is that summer afternoon and winter nights are actual states that the system pass through, annually, and to pretend that the system sits on some ‘mean’ is like suggesting that your car engines pistons are in equilibrium with radiator temperature.

        I cannot help but note the evolution of your thinking. Atmospheric CO2 reradiated infra-red energy is now linked to heating the ocean below 700m and the Northern Hemisphere’s land and ice.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | September 22, 2013 at 8:57 am | Reply

        “The land temperature rise is the real signal.”

        If I’m right about the ocean not thermalizing 100% of DWLIR as the models do then land temperature isn’t the real signal it’s the ONLY signal.

        ROFL

        I kill me sometimes!

      • It’s a blasted scatter plot! I’m sorry, but an R**2 of 0.034 means that the data isn’t really showing anything. I used to get criticized by statisticians that plots with an R**2 of 0.7 weren’t strong enough evidence for my conclusions, and you’re showing a scatter plot and saying it says something is happening?? Get real.

      • ” Bill | September 22, 2013 at 9:25 am |

        Is that a shot-gun test pattern? :)”

        Bill, This stuff really isn’t that hard to do. The data is all out there for your review, and easy to chart yourself

        How about looking at the data over different time spans?
        http://imageshack.us/a/img198/4135/jj5e.gif

        The plots above show a log regression fit mapping the CO2 concentration against the land temperature anomaly since 1960, 1900, and 1850. The aggregated set all show a land temperature sensitivity of 3C per doubling of CO2 concentration. This also matches the mean sensitivity aggregated through all the models as well — dating back to the Charney report in 1979. The number of 3C is referred to as the Charney sensitivity https://www.e-education.psu.edu/meteo469/book/export/html/219.

        Interesting that the figure above also reveals an anomaly-intercept of about -30C when one extrapolates back to a 1 PPM CO2 concentration, which explains how the CO2 acts as the control knob establishing the earth’s climate.

        The Charney report also considered paleoclimate studies which demonstrated at least a 3C climate sensitivity — higher likely due to the long time scales involved.

        Isn’t it fascinating how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together?

      • Bill | September 22, 2013 at 9:25 am |
        Does BEST use data that has been adjusted? What about the errors associated with those adjustment procedures?

        I don’t know all the particulars. Why don’t you ask the second author on these BEST citations:
        [1] R. Muller, J. Curry, D. Groom, B. Jacobsen, S. Perlmutter, R. Rohde, A. Rosenfeld, C. Wickham, and J. Wurtele, “A New Estimate of the Earth’s Land Surface Temperature History,” presented at the AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, 2011, vol. 1, p. 01.

        [2] R. A. Muller, J. Curry, D. Groom, R. Jacobsen, S. Perlmutter, R. Rohde, A. Rosenfeld, C. Wickham, and J. Wurtele, “Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures,” Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, submitted, 2011.
        http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5700/b1101.pdf

        BTW, there must be some importance attached to evaluating the historical land temperatures. Is it because the land is where people actually live? hmmm…

      • ” John Plodinec | September 22, 2013 at 9:37 am |

        It’s a blasted scatter plot! I’m sorry, but an R**2 of 0.034 means that the data isn’t really showing anything. “

        And you are correct sir, if you are then willing to admit that a “pause” or “hiatus” will also therefore show nothing of any significance over the last 15 years!

        In reality, the slope shown there of 0.134C/decade is not significantly different (with statistical significance attached!) than the model-expected slope of 0.2C/decade which would get us to a cumulative 3C rise of land temperature by the year 2100.

        So that is why I also show these plots going back some years demonstrating the log sensitivity with higher values of R^2, all showing close to the mean 3C predicted by the aggregated set of models.
        http://imageshack.us/a/img198/4135/jj5e.gif

        BTW,
        Here is a plot of a data set that has a horrible R^2 but the underlying trend is clear.
        http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9219/qj3.gif
        This is a sine wave on top of a linear trend. What say you about that, eh?

      • ” David Springer | September 22, 2013 at 9:29 am |

        If I’m right about the ocean not thermalizing 100% of DWLIR as the models do then land temperature isn’t the real signal it’s the ONLY signal.”

        SpringyBoy apparently lives with the fishes so he doesn’t care what the land temperature is.

        Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing, and that it is also moderating the heating of the surface though latent heat of vaporization ( and the effect that this has on lapse rate, effective thermal surface mixing, etc).

        Yet the ocean surface is warming about half the rate of the land, and you can not deny this. As the ocean warms, more H2O (and CO2) will outgas, which will raise the specific humidity of the air thus leading to amplification of the GHG effect, and then spreading to land areas.

        What I am showing are the facts on the ground (to quote a war cliche).

      • WebHubTelescope
        >>Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing

        Seriously, this is but a prayer of the more credulous believers.

      • WHT The Charney report also considered paleoclimate studies which demonstrated at least a 3C climate sensitivity
        NOT TRUE
        The phrase associated was “might be”
        It ” might be” much smaller.
        Your articles quote was
        “the ultimate warming and associated changes in climate” might be” substantially larger than what is implied by the simple Charney definition of sensitivity implicit in the IPCC projections”
        A bit of selective quoting no doubt

      • denier

        The pause is killing your cause.


      • Gail | September 22, 2013 at 10:26 am |

        Seriously, this is but a prayer of the more credulous believers.

        Therefore, a prayer is also what keeps your high-performance desktop PC from over-heating — regardless of that massive heat sink and carefully located fan next to your multi-core CPU.

        Do you really think that climate scientists are that clueless about how thermal physics works?

        Most deniers are neo-Luddites, IMO

      • Web >>Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing

        Gail >> Seriously, this is but a prayer of the more credulous believers.

        Web >> Therefore, a prayer is also what keeps your high-performance desktop PC from over-heating — regardless of that massive heat sink and carefully located fan next to your multi-core CPU.

        Ah, so because heat-sinks exist, eg in PCs, therefore the ocean is hosting the ‘missing heat’. Genius, how did I not see that before?

        >> Do you really think that climate scientists are that clueless about how thermal physics works?

        Did you really think that strawman would fly?

        >> Most deniers are neo-Luddites, IMO

        Most believers are neo-religious ‘credulites’, IMO

      • Matthew R Marler

        WEbHubTelescope: Are you all going to deny this data?

        I think a measured rise of 0.13C per decade, given that it is corrupted by UHI and other thermometer placement problems, is something that we can all live with. That certainly is a lot different from what the alarmists have warned us of.

        That does not closely measure the heat flow that is causing sea level to rise, if it is rising (overal, sea level has risen in some places, fallen in other places, and over the set of tide gauges the median sea surface change over the last 100 years is less than 1mm.)

      • Matthew R Marler

        WebHubTelescope: Most deniers are neo-Luddites, IMO

        You don’t know any of them, do you?

        I for one am a technophile (among other things, I admire the life-saving flood control offered by the Three Gorges Dam, also its 22GW of electricity generation is about half of California summer peak demand; and I am a booster for continued investment in R&D of renewable energy sources), and I eagerly track down most links provided here, as well as buying and reading books about the climate.

        I have never come across a skeptic that had any scientific skill, apart from perhaps Clive Best or Lubos Motl.

        Possibly you are distracted by academic degrees and such: some of the skeptical arguments are important. Like it or not, Anthony Watts’s highlighting of the problems of the placements of the thermometers shows more scientific skill than the principal components calculations of Mann et al. Nothing is more fundamental in science than understanding what the measuring instruments are doing. And Willis Eschenbach’s data analyses showing that higher temperatures produce higher cloud cover should not be ignored. And shall I start enumerating the data analytic skills and insights of Steve McIntyre?

        I recognize that boasting is an invitation to be pilloried, but I learned a few weeks ago that one of my publications has been cited 835 times (and counting.) The thrill is wearing off (What have I done lately?) but it was a pleasing discovery. I think there is at least some scientific skill in a survival analysis of a million people.

      • Mathew,

        I take it you don’t believe WEB is the final Adjudicator of Scientific Skill (TM).

        Neither do I.

      • “Interesting that the figure above also reveals an anomaly-intercept of about -30C when one extrapolates back to a 1 PPM CO2 concentration, which explains how the CO2 acts as the control knob establishing the earth’s climate.”

        Wow.
        So you also find that the distribution of Earths land is evenly distributed along the North-South axis.
        You really are completely stupid. You have disappeared so far into the pseudo-science collective that the Good Lord himself needs a telescope to see you.

      • Marler said:

        “I recognize that boasting is an invitation to be pilloried, but I learned a few weeks ago that one of my publications has been cited 835 times (and counting.) “

        Yes, and by what you say, right here and now concerning climate science, and not what you are associated with in some other field is what is important.

        Take a look at what the skeptic Clive Best is doing and compare yourself against that.


      • DocMartyn | September 22, 2013 at 9:27 am |

        May I ask ‘as an engineer or scientist’ would you average he peaks and troughs of an A.C. voltage and use the average as a D.C. voltage in your circuit design?
        Only the thing of it is that summer afternoon and winter nights are actual states that the system pass through, annually, and to pretend that the system sits on some ‘mean’ is like suggesting that your car engines pistons are in equilibrium with radiator temperature.

        I cannot help but note the evolution of your thinking. Atmospheric CO2 reradiated infra-red energy is now linked to heating the ocean below 700m and the Northern Hemisphere’s land and ice.

        Say Doc, No one understands what you are talking about.

        I recall you self-diagnosed yourself with dyslexia. If you have trouble with expressing yourself, don’t expect others to be able to figure out what you are saying.

        DocMartyn | May 17, 2013 at 7:01 pm |
        I am actually dyslexic

      • “Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing…”

        “There remain substantial issues over balancing the global energy budget: achieving closure (Kevin Trenberth)”

        “We cannot draw any conclusions about “missing energy” in the system on the basis of differences between interannual variations in satellite net radiation and upper ocean heating rates from the current record. This is predominantly due to large uncertainties remaining, in both observing systems, and which needs to be understood, and reduced.”

        Clivar/ESA Scientific Consultation Workshop July 3-4, 2013
        Norman Loeb, Richard Allen, Gregory Johnson, Karina von Schuckmann,
        Anny Cazenave, Josh Willis, Kevin Trenberth, Magdalena Balmaseda,
        John Lyman
        Having to do with Ocean Heat Content.

        http://www.clivar.org/sites/default/files/GSOP/resops/DISCUSSION_II_LOEB.pdf
        A 72 page document bringing together and summarizing much of the current information on Ocean heat content in a not overly technical way.

      • An additional comment on what I just posted. In what I quoted, they sound like auditors with the carefully worded statements.

      • “Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing…”
        – Web 2013

        “There remain substantial issues over balancing the global energy budget: achieving closure
        – Kevin Trenberth 2013

        Yes, only the truly credulous and desperate can out-spin Trenberth on this one.

      • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | September 22, 2013 at 10:21 am |

        “Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing”

        Seriously ARGO isn’t good enough to measure micro-degrees and it doesn’t sample well over half the ocean. Total OHC is not a robust measure. There’s a modeled excess of about 0.5W/m2 which relies on satellites to sort of corroborate it. Accuracy is +-4W/m2 so even the polarity is in doubt at 0.5W/m2. Look on the bright side – it could be much larger excess than 0.5W/m2 and it had better be because 0.5W/m2 is only enough to warm the basin by 0.2C in the next 100 years. Civilization is saved but climate science is sunk. Most people would be happy that tradeoff but not everyone especially those whose whole reason for existing is tied up in saving the planet from anthropogenic CO2. LOL

      • Gail,
        You read whatever stuff gets circulated over the net. I tend to work out the physics for myself.
        http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html

        It would be nice if you could keep up.

      • SpringyBoy, don’t run away and hide this time.

        ” There’s a modeled excess of about 0.5W/m2 which relies on satellites to sort of corroborate it. “

        Show me the reference to this work.

        This is what you can work out by hand.
        Given a temperature anomaly of 0.6C which is about right for SST, the excess forcing required is about 1.6 watts/m^2.
        The OHC is gaining heat at about 0.7 watts/m^2 for the top 2000 meters (this is a bit more if deeper water is included).

        1.6 + 0.7 = 2.3 watts/m^2 is the required forcing to compensate the OHC increase.

        Now look at globally averaged temperatures, which is the actual radiative signal. This temperature anomaly is 0.8C, and the excess forcing required is about 2.2 watts/m^2.

        Note that the two numbers 2.2 and 2.3 are consistent with each other.

        Do it anyway you want, take 0.6C for the SST increase and 0.8C for the global temperature increase and you will get 0.7 watts/m^2 for the heat being sunk.

        Where is the missing heat? Are you gonna run away, SpringyBoy?

      • The model in my head is leaning towards the DWIR may heat the ocean a little, but it will heat the air above it due to the extra water vapor from the top 10 uM. No one has put forth a believable mechanism for heat from DWLR over the ocean to get into the ocean itself, other than turbulence from wind and wave. How much heat will that move into the ocean considering water vapor is a gas and will be swept fairly quickly into the atmosphere? This will manifest itself as rain and in the process cool the atmosphere. Some of that rain will fall onto land, moving some of the heat from land into the ocean. So there are two possible ways heat from DWLR gets into the ocean. But given the fact that the extra water vapor speed up thunderstorm formation, thus shuttling the heat to the upper trop, how much heat stays on Earth.

        Again, we need to focus on the measurement of TOA radiational balance.

      • Jim2, net IR is upwards. You get into all kinds of logical messes trying to consider one component. The net effect is cooling and GHGs just reduce the cooling rate. It is IR cooling at night and warming from solar radiation in the day. By reducing the cooling rate, the ocean gets warmer as it reaches a different equilibrium with the day-time warming.

      • jim2 | September 22, 2013 at 4:47 pm |

        The model in my head …

        Don’t do it in your head. The first-order formulations for effective forcing, temperature, and heat build-up are all there and easy to apply.

        I just gave it it to you and you effin ignore it, just like a D student would.

      • Matthew R Marler

        WebHubTelescope: Take a look at what the skeptic Clive Best is doing and compare yourself against that.

        I stipulate that Clive Best does good work; your wholesale disparagement of everyone else is still junk.

      • “I stipulate that Clive Best does good work; your wholesale disparagement of everyone else is still junk.”

        Who is “everyone else”, Marler?
        Give me some names of skeptical bloggers that actually touch the physics and aren’t just auditing statistics, and I will tell you if they are kranks.

        I would be surprised if you came up with anybody besides the ones I named.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        So we can either solve climate as one line of algebra or be a crank?

        Doesn’t look like an either/or decision to me.

      • “Where are the error bars on each measurement? What is the p-value of the fit? What is the p-value after taking the y-value error bars into account? Does BEST use data that has been adjusted? What about the errors associated with those adjustment procedures?.

        1. Adjusted data.

        There are 14 data sources. In all cases save one we use the unadjusted version of the dataset. In most cases the datasets have a daily version and a monthly version. We use the daily version whereever it exists. For example. There are over 30,000 daily records in GHCN Daily. NOAA compiles these into GHCN Monthly with raw versions and adjusted versions. Their requirement for long series means that they
        drop from 20K+ series to around 7000 series. HadCrut and GISS draw their data from GHCN Monthly. In the case of HADCRUT their requirement for data completeness during the 1960-1990 period means they drop down to less than 5K stations.

        In addition to GHCN daily we also rely heavily on GCOS which also has 20K stations or so, some overlapping with GHCN daily. This is also unadjusted data.

        With these 14 data sources the following approach is used.
        First, using metadata we identify the duplicate station records.
        So Orland California has a monthly record and a daily reccord.
        The Monthly is not used. This duplicate identification looks at names
        and locations and data to identify duplicate records.
        After dups are dropped we assemble the data for every location.
        A priority system is used to ensure that we use daily data before monthly data and unadjusted data before adjusted data. The last data source we will ever rely on is HADCRUT which has a small number of unique monthly records.

        Folks who are interested can look in the sources.txt file which tracks the data source for every value in the system.

        2. Errors

        We approach errors in a top down fashion as opposed to the bottom up fashion used by say HADCRUT. In the HADCRUT approach errors are budgeted for various error sources: instrument error, etc. And then errors are summed under quadrature. The reported errors are very small on the order of .05C/month per station. We estimate the error by looking at the nugget. that is by looking at the explained variance at a correlation length of zero we calculate an error of .46C/month. This gave reviewers heartburn as they didnt grasp the notion of a nugget. This .46C error includes all error sources. rather than building the error up from looking at various sources ( instrument changes, instrument error etc) we calculate the error in a top down fashion. That .46C includes all sources of error, but we dont partition the error.

        see the methods paper for more detail or the code for detailed questions. Both are provided.

      • Matthew R Marler

        WebHubTelescope: I have never come across a skeptic that had any scientific skill, apart from perhaps Clive Best or Lubos Motl.

        OK, so you have never “come across” any skeptic apart from “perhaps” Clive Best or Lubos Motl who had any scientific skill.

        Your loss.

      • I run across plenty with rhetorical skill.

    • Leonard Weinstein

      Tom,
      If you accept that the pauses, previously occurring and the one at the present, are part of long period cycles whose long term average is related to the actual long term trend of temperature (rather than the far steeper slope of rise from just 1980 to 1999), you are admitting that the rise (from whatever cause) has a slope of closer to 0.4C per century than the super inflated values of 2C to 6C per century claimed by the models and supporters of CAGW. This even assumes temperature cycles will continue to rise. Since longer historical trends have long period cycles of several hundred years, and we obviously were emerging from the LIttle Ice Age to the present, I see no clear reason to suspect that we will continue the general rise at all. If the argument is that due to CO2 rising, the present trend is different, then the low slope of 0.4C per century is still not a problem for several centuries, and fossil fuel will be mainly replace long before then. The argument that the oceans ate the extra energy, and this will come back to heat the Earth, is clearly a joke (how could deep ocean water raising a few milli-degrees going to heat the atmosphere several degrees even if it came up?).

  4. “The IPCC seems to think that pause is nearly finished, just waiting for the next El Nino.”

    What’s that term? Wait for it….Oh yes, motivated reasoning.

    What else would they be thinking?

    • Another term applies as well. Cherry picking.

      With the next El Nino, watch for the graphs, and particularly the 5 year running means and three year running means, and warmest year since…. arguments. One good warm year and WfT will crash from all the warmists trying different ways to create scary new graphs.

    • What else would they be thinking?

      That skeptics are relying on the two recent La Ninas, the first of which was quite large, to calculate a zero trend.

  5. “…they have been absolutely spot on in terms of predicting subsequent levels of global warming”

    That’s quite an achievement considering that the models predict a wide spread of outcomes.

  6. Why are they talking about short term data as if it is at all capable of showing any trend wrt the trajectory of climate over the next 100 years or so? They simply don’t have a clue!

    The only prediction that should be made about future climate trends is that it will exhibit sudden shifts upwards or downwards at the regional level but the direction that global temperature will take is not known with our present state of knowledge.

    • Precisely. Past temperature records, by themselves, tell us NOTHING about what will happen in the future.

      • Agree with you there Jim C. Climate time series data is like economic time series in that the system is non-ergodic and that any parameters from this are non repeating and unpredictable.

      • “Past temperature records, by themselves, tell us NOTHING about what will happen in the future”

        I am really not sure if past temperature records, by themselves, tell us ANYTHING about what happened in the past.
        All I know is that John Steinbeck was an outrageous liar for misstating that the Oke’s were actually out running glaciers and not heat-waves.

  7. “We’ve had two pauses in the past century that lasted 22 and 25 years.”
    ???
    http://virakkraft.com/Hadcrut-20-60.png

    • The big one was 1940-1975. While the IPCC explains this away with some sort of pollution aerosol handwaving, I strongly suspect that this is associated with the AMO/PDO. hence my suspicion that the current pause could last 30-40 yrs.

      • OK Judith. but you too are guessing as I’m sure you’d concede.

      • Well, this is more than a guess (stay tuned for new paper, coming week of Oct 11). In any event we need to put multiple scenarios out there for decision makers to ponder. I find it astonishing that there is such certainty by the IPCC in this matter.

      • “While the IPCC explains this away with some sort of pollution aerosol handwaving.”

        But they are magic aerosols, the stuff dreams are made of :)

      • Pokerguy,

        Judith’s guesses have higher Integrity.

      • Unlike the IPCC, I’m not demanding that anyone believe my guesses.

      • Talking donkey just got his nose whacked.

        Poor talking donkey.

      • HI Judith, I should have said “informed” guess. Looking forward to paper.

      • “The big one was 1940-1975. While the IPCC explains this away with some sort of pollution aerosol handwaving,”

        I was never clear on what they said about this. IN other words, just more ad hoc, we’ll fake it til we make it, “gold standard” science culminating in what else…. virtual certainty.

      • “The big one was 1940-1975.”

        Spot the difference between the blue and green periods. One is a pause. The other is not.

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:1940/to:1975/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:1997

      • oops …lolwot | September 22, 2013 at 8:44 am |
        Spot the difference between the [1940-1975] and [1995-2013] periods. One is a pause. The other is not.

        True, 1940-1975 actually went down a bit.

        But yes, let’s stop using the term “Pause”, as someone suggested. It may well not go up again in many of our lifetimes; or ever.

        “Plateau” ? “Non-increase” ?

      • “Unlike the IPCC, I’m not demanding that anyone believe my guesses.” – JC

        I guess I missed that bit in the IPCC reports where they “demanded” that people believe them.

      • Pokerguy, “I was never clear on what they said about this. IN other words, just more ad hoc, we’ll fake it til we make it, “gold standard” science culminating in what else…. virtual certainty.”

        It is much more entertaining than that. Using the Lean 2000 and earlier solar plus positive aerosol forcing (black carbon) they were able to “explain” the 1910 to 1940 rise. Then by reversing the sign of aerosols they were able to “explain” the “global” cooling from 1945 to 1975, but not the magic drop in temperatures from 1940 to 1945 or the magic drop in temperatures from 1905 to 1915. You need magic aerosol dust for that.

        So Santers finally recognizes the “pause” is a problem just last year, nice to see how current he stays, and decides the aerosol magic may not be quite right. Solomon checks out the tropical stratosphere “pause” and is sure it is anything but SST which has flat lined. Some others that Gates referenced also have determined that “CO2” forcing has at least a 30 year lag in working its way to the middle troposphere. That of course has nothing to do with SST, the mysterious internal ocean oscillations, the sun or anything but CO2.

        We are in capable hands Pokerguy. They are experts, we should trust them :)

      • lolwot, I think the skeptics would want you to start around 2001 to get their pause, but your point is well taken anyway. As pauses go, this most recent pause is no biggy.

        Some skeptics wish the pause would turn into a biggy. IMO, when a skeptic starts wishing for things to justify his skepticism, he stops being a true skeptic.

      • curryja-
        When I hear a panel of the nation’s leading neuro-scientists admit that they know so very little about the human mind and are not ashamed to express some humility about their lack of complete knowledge, and then I read how so many climatologists use such absolutist terms in what is going on with our climate, it stretches credulity. Roy Spencer has a nice story today about his visit to a group of economists and noting how amicable they were to each other even though they had disagreements. One economist explained that they all had been wrong so many times they knew humility first hand.

      • Leading neuro-scientists might know very little about the human mind Dennis Adams, but they surely know enough to warn against blunt impacts to the head!

        Similarly leading climate scientists know enough about climate to warn against hitting the climate with a carbon sledgehammer!

        Good observation Dennis Adams!

      • Lolwot,

        You should pay attention to those warnings.

        Or wear a helmet.

      • A pause that lasts 40 years hence would not be the position of a “lukewarmer”. If CO2 accumulation stays at the current rate of 2 to 3 PPM per year, in 40 years the atmosphere would be between 480 PPM to 520 PPM, which is near where the predicted mean land temperature anomaly would double the current level of 1.2C.

        So if the current temperature stays at 1.2C over the next 40 years, either sensitivity will get reduced in half or scientists will treat the climate as stable and move on to different topics, such as looking for alternatives to non-renewable fuels.

      • Matthew R Marler

        Michael: I guess I missed that bit in the IPCC reports where they “demanded” that people believe them.

        Are you forgetting why anyone calls the skeptics “deniers” and calls for them to be tried for crimes against humanity and such? The AR5 SPM that has been leaked reports 95% confidence that GHs are causing warming: that’s pretty much a demand to be believed.

      • lolwtf,

        “Leading neuro-scientists might know very little about the human mind Dennis Adams, but they surely know enough to warn against blunt impacts to the head!

        Similarly leading climate scientists know enough about climate to warn against hitting the climate with a carbon sledgehammer!”

        From control knob to sledge hammer in a matter of hours.

        Besides, it’s a bad analogy.

        Now if neuro-scientists were claiming that a particular naturally biologically occurring chemical could drastically raise or lower brain function; but they only knew it because of computer models; and the computer models’ prediction so far were garbage; and many of the neuro-scientists were caught lying and fudging data; and the chemical were necessary for normal brain function anyway; but they were arguing that we should reorder the world economy anyway by giving them control of the global food economy to limit the slight increase in ingestion that they claim is so dangerous….

        Now THAT would be a fair analogy.

      • Micheal

        “I guess I missed that bit in the IPCC reports where they “demanded” that people believe them.”

        The demand is more subtle. If you disagree with the IPCC you get accused of

        A) being in the pay of Big Oil
        B) being a mental defective
        C) being stupid
        D) being immoral.

        Now of course some of us can weather the attacks and will enjoy the blowback.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

        The big assumption is that the character of “natural variability” such as displayed in the AMO/PDO are not influenced by anthropogenic forcing in one direction or another. The Earth 2013 does not equal the Earth 1945, and it becomes very difficult to simply “guess” that cycles will repeat exactly the same. Ocean cycles in this regard are no different than extreme weather events. It gets very messy to cleanly disentangle the anthropogenic from the natural.

      • Right on Gates.

        The other idea to keep in mind is that these oceanic oscillations can never really produce heat on their own. Since the warmest waters are always near the surface, temperature spikes (El Nino) should be less apparent than the temperature dips due to the colder upwelling waters (La Nina), which can suppress heat transfer to the atmosphere.

        So the only natural way to produce excess heat is for the warmer waters to temporarily spread out over a larger area. This is the way that a temperature spike could occur during an El Nino. First, consider that the warmer water spreads over a larger surface area, then more water vapor outgasses from the warm waters and this raises the specific humidity of the atmosphere and this disperses over land. Since water vapor is a strong GHG, this amplifies the warming temporarily and we get these big El Nino spikes, such as we saw in 1998.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enso-global-temp-anomalies.png

        Of course these don’t last long because water vapor is a condensing gas, and with nothing to sustain it, the humidity drops back to normal as the conditions subside.

        With more CO2 in the atmosphere, the spikes could arguably get bigger and last longer as CO2 is there to amplify the outgassing of the GHGs.

        I don’t recall where I read this behavioral description. I think it was on a Real Climate discussion thread.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        ‘Average net CRE anomalies are near-zero in all but two ENSO events. During the 10/05–04/06 La Nina event, reduced SW cloud radiative cooling combined with enhanced LW CRE anomalies produce a net CRE of 0.39 Wm^2. In contrast, during the 05/06–05/07 El Niño, the tropical net CRE anomaly reaches -0.34 Wm^2 due to a large negative LW CRE anomaly and a near-zero SW CRE. Thus, while the net radiative effect of clouds is that of warming (cooling) across the tropics during La Niña (El Nino) events, the magnitude is quite small and varies greatly from one event to another..’

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=65

        http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf

        At some stage – and quite early in the proceedings – pure narrative without data becomes utter nonsense.

      • “At some stage – and quite early in the proceedings – pure narrative without data becomes utter nonsense.”

        Tsk, tsk, Chief. You ought to get a mirror. Check your always pretentious grammar at the door while you are at it.

      • Matthew,

        Expressing confidence levels constitutes a ‘demand’ to be believed?

        I’ll head down to my nearest bank and inform the teller that I believe, at a 95% confidence level, all the money in the bank is mine. We’ll see if they hit the alarm button.

      • Matthew R Marler

        Michael: Expressing confidence levels constitutes a ‘demand’ to be believed?

        I’ll head down to my nearest bank and inform the teller that I believe, at a 95% confidence level, all the money in the bank is mine. We’ll see if they hit the alarm button.

        Do not mistake the “demand to be believed” with actual credibility.

    • At least for now things look pretty tame.
      http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.fc.gif

  8. Let us not forget that if, in the short term, temperatures go on falling, then the pause will be extended at BOTH ends of the time scale.

  9. I wouldn’t rule out 2035-2040 either

    Nor would I rule out getting 10 reds in a row on the roulette table

    Both are highly unlikely though!

    • What do you do with the Reds, shoot’em? :)

    • 10 reds in a row at roulette would be quite commonplace, like tossing 10 heads in a row at two-up. Not so easy to do 100 reds in a row though as the law of large numbers would tell us that the number of reds and blacks should even out over the longer term.

      • Peter,

        lolwot us far beyond simple probability and into believing advanced statistics.

        As in how to take a couple hundred proxies, chop them up, throw them in the blender, screen them through cheese cloth, plot them on paper and draw lines so that you can tell the temperatures for the last two millennia.

    • roughly equivalent to lollywot changing his mind on…ANYTHING.

    • “Both are highly unlikely though!”

      A if you wouldn’t have insisted 10 years ago that the pause lasting this long was “highly unlikely.” Oh wait….

    • Not as unlikely as you getting a clue.

      Hey that rhymes! I’m a poet and don’t know it.

  10. does anybody really believe if temperatures start going down, the usual suspects won’t tell the world how they had known it all along?

    • I don’t doubt you’re right. Though they will also blame it on society not reducing co2 as they had told us to do. Like any religion they will stick to the same message no matter what.

    • But at what point, if ever, would it stop being “a pause”? Perhaps it might be called “the mother of all pauses”.

    • Ragnaar, no apologies needed when quoting Churchill’s fine rhetoric. Though the Climate wars are a bit less threatening than what England faced when Churchill said that.

      • Gee, Faustino, not sure about that.

        The Australian ETS would cost Australia a net $1,345 trillion by 2050 according to Treasury. Probably more if the assumed benefits are not realised. If the whole world implemented policies like our ETS, would would be the death toll as a result? I reckon it would be much more than the threat England faced, and probably much more than the Second World War.

  11. “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,”
    Ohh I see. Then they must just form a circle and proceed with a seance. How clever.

    • “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,”

      Despite not having the instruments, we ‘know’ it is there. Brilliant.

      To say nothing of not having robust enough measurements showing incremental heat is actually coming in, in line with increased CO2.

    • So what they are really saying, behind the rhetoric, is

      ->The models say the [additional] heat is still coming in, so we believe them, but we can’t provide observations to prove it. We think this heat we can’t measure coming in, is in the deep oceans, where we also can’t measure it. We have a 95% confidence level in this.

    • “The heat is on, on the street
      Inside your head, on every beat
      And the beat’s so loud, deep inside
      The pressure’s high, just to stay alive
      ‘Cause the heat is on”

      Though recent IPCC pressure arises from the heat being off.

  12. What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?

    • This debate is not much different from a long, contentious marriage, where there has been so much bad blood and nasty things said that each spouse would rather croak than admit they are wrong. Even when they know they are wrong they are so psychologically invested into their views that they can’t admit the other spouse is right.

    • Jim,
      They will say the heat is hiding in Trenberth’s bedroom closet, though curiously it got in there without warming the rest of the room.

      • Frustratingly there is no thermometer in Trenberth’s closet, so we can’t measure the heat accumulation. However, he has a great model that demonstrates unequivically how it’s all just building up, waiting to spring out with a vengeance. I’m guessing Hansen’s grandchildren will be the ones to open the closet door.

    • >>What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?

      This has been asked over the years. The answer is always something like “another five years before we rethink”.

    • Jim Cripwell said on September 22, 2013 at 8:05 am
      “What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?”
      _____

      OK, I’ll tell you, but first tell me what you would say if I said:

      Jim, you can’t see straight.

      Jim, you are dishonest.

      Jim, you are hopeless.

  13. MJ’s analysis seems much more reasonable to me…

    Did you mean ML?

  14. No matter what happens they will tell the world “we told you so”.

    As usual they will dig through old papers, find one that predicted a pause of roughly the right duration and present it to the world as if this was the prediction of Climate Science in totality.

    On the radio the other day I heard a climate scientist explaining how models had in fact predicted The pause. What he didn’t say was that only a few runs out of a million actually predicted any pause. But still it was presented as proof that the models were correct.

    • What is being forgotten is consistency. Anyone can make a lucky guess. But to date no one has shown to be consistent in their predictions.

  15. Makes you wonder if any of the ‘skeptics’ were similarly concerned over other lengthy periods when the observed warming was greater than the model projections.

  16. “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”

    We do have the instruments to measure the temperature of the upper atmosphere, that varies considerably, and not only due to UV and X-ray variations, as the SABER data shows. Would a drop in temperature of the upper atmosphere of say 500°F have no effect on surface temperatures or atmospheric circulation patterns? I don’t believe it, hence I do not believe that they have a full measure of solar forcing.

    As for accelerated warming in the Arctic, that takes increasingly negative NAO/AO episodes to do that, while all the GCM’s predict increasingly lower near surface air pressure in the Arctic, implying more positive NAO/AO conditions.

    Bi-polar? lol

    • Ulric-
      Since there is clearly some mental disorders involved in climatology just as there is in the study of psychology, maybe we could join some of the glossary terms and come up with..
      Bi-Solar

    • Matthew R Marler

      Ulric Lyons: We do have the instruments to measure the temperature of the upper atmosphere, that varies considerably, and not only due to UV and X-ray variations, as the SABER data shows. Would a drop in temperature of the upper atmosphere of say 500°F have no effect on surface temperatures or atmospheric circulation patterns? I don’t believe it, hence I do not believe that they have a full measure of solar forcing.

      To continue: most UV is absorbed in the atmosphere, but some penetrates to the earth surface, where it causes sunburn and cancer. This suggests that the absorption mechanism is saturated. If that is the case, then a 2-fold increase in UV at TOA could be a 100-fold increase of UV at the surface. That is one of the topics I intend to learn more of in the coming year.

  17. shiiit look at that pause!!! It’s positively unmoving!!
    http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12

    Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?

    “a pause? where?”

    “Hmm i remember talking about it in 2013 on climate etc”

    “So it must have been around here?”

    “yeah”

    “doesn’t look like a pause to me, just looks like a piece of the warming trend”

    “well…at the time…uhhhhh the data hasnt changed…uhhh what the hell?”

    • There must be a pause…..skeptic dogma demands it!

    • El Ninos, getting warmer,
      La Ninas, getting warmer
      Neutral ENSO, getting warmer,
      Yet they say it stopped in 1997,
      They see not the climb in the data,
      They are blind?
      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:1997

    • lolwot
      shiiit look at that pause!!! It’s positively unmoving!!
      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12
      Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?

      Ah, yes, when truebeliever alarmists give it the MWP airbrushing-out treatment.

      • Bob,

        Marchott and Shakun should be embarrassed by their paper. Referencing it does you no credit.

      • Funny how all the warmists keep “forgetting” that Marcott later admitted that the present day blade of that hockey stick is not supported by the actual paper.

      • Bob droege

        So glaciers advance and retreat on fractional changes in the anomaly do they?

        You are comparing 50 year smoothed paleo model proxieswith annual highly variable instrumental records. It is apples and oranges.
        Tonyb

      • “You are comparing 50 year smoothed paleo model proxieswith annual highly variable instrumental records. It is apples and oranges.
        Tonyb”

        Apples and oranges are all you deal with in your anecdotal historical studies as well. It is even worse in that case as you are dealing with subjective evidence to compound the problem. Perhaps you should take up a different line of research.

      • Gary,
        Is this what you mean by their admission

        “Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record. Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval ”

        or is it this

        ” No. All of the datasets were previously generated and published in peer-reviewed scientific literature by other researchers over the past 15 years. Most of these datasets are freely available at several World Data Centers (see links below); those not archived as such were graciously made available to us by the original authors. We assembled all these published data into an easily used format, and in some cases updated the calibration of older data using modern state-of-the-art calibrations. We made all the data available for download free-of-charge from the Science web site (see link below). Our primary contribution was to compile these local temperature records into “stacks” that reflect larger-scale changes in regional and global temperatures. We used methods that carefully consider potential sources of uncertainty in the data, including uncertainty in proxy calibration and in dating of the samples ”

        either way it is not much of an admission. The blade was not the subject of their paper and they relied on other work for that.

        My point was that the MWP is still visible in the Marcott reconstruction.

      • Web

        I said

        “So glaciers advance and retreat on fractional changes in the anomaly do they.’

        If you agree with the paleo proxy records that, according to Bob’s link demonstrate a tiny variation in climate over thousands of years, you are effectively agreeing with the statement above.

        I had thought you were more rational than that. Is that really the position you want to take?
        tonyb

      • TonyB,

        I didn’t make any comment on glacier advance based solely on a temperature reconstruction as glaciers can advance or retreat on changes in precipitation as well as temperature. I haven’t made any arguments on glacier advance or decline with respect to my position on global warming.

        Anyway it has been shown that Marcott’s apple picker would have found Medieval Warm Period oranges if they were big as today’s Florida Navels.

      • Bob

        Yes of course there are reasons for glacier changes other than temperature, but that is a very big factor. If the earths climate had varied so little over the last few thousand years it is difficult to see how that could precipitate the dramatic advances and retreats we have witnessed

        Please look at figure 5 in my article

        http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/

        It shows the Hockey stick paleo reconstructions-smoothed 50 year records- and decadal CET instrumental (and reconstruction) The blue lines closed at the top represent glacial retreats and closed at the bottom glacial advances.

        The dramatic variations in temperature seen in the instrumental record seem a more likely explanation for glacial changes than a paleo temp record that is basically static.

        Glaciers are thought to have virtually disappeared around 4000 years ago but made a substantial return in the LIA which was the coldest period of the Holocene in the last 10000 years. It is the snow and ice from that event which is currently melting. Perhaps it may mostly disappear as it has done in the past, but it is susceptible to temperature variations greater than the paleo record shows
        tonyb

      • bob droege:

        You mean like this?

        http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png

        Lucia had a post about bad figures (as in poor quality ones, not ones that make our tummies hurt ;-)), and I happened to bring that figure up as a particularly poor (or “obnoxious”) example.

        Here were my comments:

        I see three things not to like:
        First, they are comparing the time wave-forms of two signals with very different frequency content. That is an extremely misleading thing to do at best.

        Secondly, there’s the issue of the scaling error in Marcott’s reproduction:
        We’ve seen the effect of the scaling error is to reduce the magnitude of the scaling factor outside of the calibration period. Increase the scale of the reconstructed series by a factor of two… and it really changes the interpretation of the results.

        The third issue with offset bias:

        In most tests I’ve done, or seen done, with Monte Carlo proxies, where you have a positive trend at the end of the series where you are calibrating against, the effect of the offset error is to shift the reconstructed series downwards relative to the unbiased offset. Shift the Marcott series up (while keeping in mind the higher frequency content of HadCrut) really affects the interpretation of the results too.

        You should never plot things that can’t be directly related to each other on the same graph. One would be inclined to think there is a bit of confirmation bias going into the generation of this particular figure. (Making errors of the sort that resemble confirmation bias certainly doesn’t help one’s reputation or the reputation of your field.)

      • Jim D—for me, your alternative figure looks worse, not better.

        Inclusion of the calibration period with the reconstruction period is similarly misleading, as was done with this figure, because during the calibration period, the reconstruction is forced to follow the “training data” given to it and so contains no new information about temperature. It is useful to compare as a “verification” of the reconstruction algorithm (but other verification statistics are more useful, like what fraction of the proxies were rejected and the likelihood that could occur by chance).

        And this portion of the reconstruction curve still contains higher frequency data than is present outside of the calibration period.

        Nor does it address the issues with scale bias or scale offset associated with reconstructions that use noisy data.

        Finally, Marcott’s error estimation is badly flawed: Other than an odd “pinch-point” around circa 3500 BC (itself an artifact of the method used to estimate the uncertainty, as has been discussed on other blogs), the uncertainty given by in the reconstruction is nearly constant, and equally interesting, claims a smaller uncertainty than reconstructions using thermometers by e.g., BEST.

        Figure.

        Needless to say, maintaining the (nearly the) same uncertainty as you go back in time is quite a trick as is getting a proxy reconstruction to beat thermometer base reconstructions in terms of uncertainty. There are is so good of tricks that these alone should make you doubt the veracity of the published reconstruction.

    • lolwot wrote:
      “Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?”

      If ?

      As solar cycle 25 will be weak too, I’ll happily put money on cooling over the next 17 years.

    • Matthew R Marler

      lolwot: Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?

      The next 20years of research are going to clarify a lot.

  18. ” I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040; this seems at least as likely as the the CMIP5 predictions that have already failed for the last decade” – JC

    I’d put this in the same category as Judith’s take on CS of 0-10.

    Now we have a pause that might end tomorrow, or it might go on for another 30 years.

  19. I predict a pause in global temperature might start in 2014 and go all the way to 2016.

    • lolwot
      I predict a pause in global temperature might start in 2014 and go all the way to 2016

      On the basis of the usual DAGW truebeliever faith I take it.

  20. So yesterday, Sept. 21, the sun went below the horizon in the Arctic, and ice will build up from here on. NIC reports the annual minimum of 5.511 M was reached on Sept. 14, though Sept. 20 was close at 5.514 M. Packed ice is at 4.9 M.
    Since 2006 only 2009 and 2010 exceeded this year at the equinox, the most typical date for the minimum.

  21. Just took a look at the NWS “Tropical Outlook.” No activity expected in next 5 days in the Atlantic/Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico. Which would bring us close to the end of September as this dud of a tropical season continues despite almost all predictions, including Joe Bastardi’s.

    Things could of course ramp up. Plenty of time. But in the meantime, I’m enjoying the discomfort this must be bringing to the global warming/extreme weather fanatics.

    • “despite almost all predictions”

      Maybe you should detail exactly whhat the prediction was and then we can assess whether the predictions were completely wrong, or if it’s your understanding that is completely wrong.

      • Huh? Every forecaster I know about, including 2 private weather forecasting firms, Accuweather,, and the NWS, predicted an above average year.

        Below taken from NOAA. which assigned a 5 percent probability to a below average year

        2013 Update Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook: Summary

        NOAA’s updated 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook continues to call for an above-normal season, with the possibility that the season could be very active. The outlook indicates a 70% chance of an above-normal season, a 25% chance of a near-normal season, and only a 5% chance for a below-normal season. … The Atlantic hurricane region includes the North Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico.

      • So the prediction did include the possibility of a below average season.

        Thanks.

      • You Michael, are an idiot.

        Thanks!!

      • Don’t let Michael anywhere near the cake; he will have it and eat it, too.
        =============

      • Or maybe you can look it up yourself Michael.

        As I recall the general feeling was this was going to be a moderately active season.

      • Poker guy,

        Don’t understand probabilisitic forecasting?

    • I’m enjoying the discomfort this must be bringing to the global warming/extreme weather fanatics.

      I can’t speak for anyone else, but I haven’t been able to sleep for weeks.

      Maybe we’ll get a massively destructive hurricane soon – with many deaths – particularly children.

      All this lack of sleep is making me grumpy.

  22. What amazes me is how can someone who says things such as “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there” call himself a (climate) scientist.
    This is definitely not the way science is done, but it’s more the way politicians spin their webs of deceit.

    Latif and Storch, OTOH, have accepted the models’ limitations.

    • Pretty sad for them that deep heat in the ocean is most likely to come out at the end of the Holocene, when we really need it. Those grasping at the straws of hidden deep heat grabbed aholt of whatever would support their narrative of human sin and guilt, not realizing that storing deep heat for the cold times ahead would be a remarkably foresighted and beneficial thing to do. Too bad we can’t claim credit for foresight.

      That said, I don’t believe we’ve actually done such a foresighted thing, but there it is; the wonders are worked mysteriously.
      =================

    • I can completely understand how someone can call himself a (climate) scientist and believe the heat has “gone in the deep ocean” but “we do not have the instruments to measure there”. What I can’t understand is how anyone else would consider that person and that thinking to be rational.

      You might as well say the heat has gone to Venus, too bad we can’t measure it.

      These are “beliefs” that can only be supported on “faith”. This comment leads me to “believe” that climate alarmism is now a faith based system of beliefs.

  23. How long can the pause last? Can it last for ever?

    CO2′s voracious appetite for energy can omly be satisfied in two ways: kinetic and vibrational energy. We can forget kinetic, because it is no worse than O2 or N2 and it is less than 1% of the atmosphere. The answer has to be in the vibrational modes, of which there are many. When CO2 leaves the cylinders of your car or the furnace of the power station it is over 1,000C – very hot and most of, if not all. of its vibrational modes will be excited. When it exits the tail pipe or chimney it is still very hot and we would expect it to rise in the troposphere as a plume of hot gas passing its heat to the N2 and O2 as it rises. As it rises in the troposphere (like a hot air balloon) it can more readily radiate its heat into space, because the atmosphere above is thinning. So what propottion of heat is radiated into space, instead of heating our planet?. As the CO2 cools, density increases, it will fall again, maybe having used up all its excitation modes, it can no longer heat the planet. So this simple but apparently little understood chain of events may not be such a threat?

    So this explanation of CO2′s behavior in the troposphere can explain the pause. So long as the hot, new proportion of CO2 from exhaust or chimneyremains below the presert level the pause will continue. Note that this new metric of CO2, if accepted, focuses not on total CO2, but on the proportion of new,hot CO2.

  24. Professor Myles Allen at Oxford University

    http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDMQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ox.ac.uk%2Fresearch%2Fmathematical_physical_life_sciences%2Fpeople%2Fdr_myles_allen.html&ei=k-o-UtryFsGX1AXSjoCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHpmwaecg1fs_hUXf1qMhJBBPd6Zw

    Here is someone whose unbiased views on climate you know you can trust – /sarc off

    A classic case of someone whose comfortable lifestyle in an academic ivory tower is totally dependent on being able to continue peddling alarmist theory to the intellectually gullible.

    • And he is not the worst. He will say some things that make sense at times as well and I think he was the one who got upset when the journalist recently was focusing on things other than science in a debate/panel with Lindzen.

  25. “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”

    Hmmm. If they don’t have the instruments to measure the temperature if the deep ocean, how do they know the heat has gone there? At least with the certainty to conclude that “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”

    • Models :)

    • Easy. It has to be going somewhere; we can’t measure deep ocean temperatures; voilá my brand new model shows it going to the deep ocean. Curiously (magically) without leaving a trace on the upper ocean.

      As soon as we get good at measuring deep ocean heat content we will discover that the extra heat we all know to be accumulating is hiding in some other, unmeasurable place. Trenberth’s bedroom closet was suggested above. My guess is the far side of the moon.

      Welcome to post-modern science.

      • voilá my brand new model shows it going to the deep ocean.

        Where is the claim that models show it going into the deep oceans – well, except in Judith’s statement?

      • Joshua
        “Global warming” cannot “go away” if you accept the physics of AGW. …. – [Pause] most likely on a temporary basis.

        A childish wishing-away of possible feedbacks, an implicit wishing away of natural variations, with a prayer that it’s temporary thrown in for good measure.

        This is the problem with credulous believers.

      • Gail –

        Interesting use of ellipses.

        FYI, the use of ellipses is generally reserved for omitting words or phrases that aren’t crucial to the meaning of the sentence.

      • Gail –

        This is the problem with credulous believers.

        Please elaborate. What is it that I believe in, credulously? Surely you must know, eh?

      • Joshua
        Well done on knowing what ellipses are for, in principle. Shame you can’t understand a simple practical example of it.

        And another shame for pretending to not see your examples of credulousness I cited.

      • Gail –

        And another shame for pretending to not see your examples of credulousness I cited.

        I’ll ask again – what do I credulously believe. Folks in the threads attribute all sorts of beliefs to me that I don’t have. They argue that I’ve said things that I’ve never said.

        Distinguish yourself from them. Be specific. Show your evidence of what I credulously believe. With the answer you provided, one might get the impression that you’re ducking.

      • Yourself, sillyhead.

      • Since you duck for the second time the list of your credulousness, suggesting, incredibly, that *I’m* ducking something, here it is,

        A childish wishing-away of possible feedbacks, an implicit wishing away of natural variations, with a prayer that it’s temporary thrown in for good measure.

        See your own comment for what produced this response, if you need to.

      • Gail –

        A childish wishing-away of possible feedbacks, an implicit wishing away of natural variations, with a prayer that it’s temporary thrown in for good measure.

        I’m afraid that just repeating that won’t get it done.

        What feedback am I (childishly) wishing away when I say that if you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces warming, then you believe that warming doesn’t just “go away” when you add CO2 to the atmosphere?

        What natural variations have I wished away?

        What is my prayer?

        Is it just coincidence that you have repeated your argument by assertion? Or, are you repeating your argument by assertion because you can’t make an more substantive argument?

      • Joshua

        So, repeating what you duck is not enough to get you to stop ducking then. Full marks for perseverance.

        >>What feedback am I (childishly) wishing away when I say that if you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces warming, then you believe that warming doesn’t just “go away” when you add CO2 to the atmosphere?

        Ah, you’re pretending to not understand that feedbacks can have offsetting effects.

        >>What natural variations have I wished away?
        You ignore the concept entirely, to remove the idea they may swamp AGW.

        >> What is my prayer?
        That the Pause/Plateau/Peak is temporary.

        If your memory is so bad you can’t remember these obvious points of your own from a few minutes back, might be time to retire or get some help.

        I’m sorry repeating what you duck wasn’t enough to get you to stop ducking.

      • I suspect Joshua has now gained enough scientific knowledge to intuit the cognitive dissonance within the ‘consensus’. willard is catching a clue, too.

        So, we’ll see.
        =======

      • Gail –

        Ah, you’re pretending to not understand that feedbacks can have offsetting effects.

        Of course feedbacks can have offsetting effects – but if you accept the radiative physics of AGW, then you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes global warming. Feedbacks don’t make the added warmth “go away.”

        You ignore the concept entirely, to remove the idea they may swamp AGW.

        Apparently you are confusing me with someone else. If you want to know what I think about the science of climate change, then you should read what Mojib (if my name weren’t Mojib Latif it would be global warming) Latif has to say about the relationship between natural variability and long-term climate change (which includes, very prominently, the discussion about natural variability “swamping” mean surface temperature on a short-term basis).

        That the Pause/Plateau/Peak is temporary.

        First, I don’t pray. Second, if “the pause” in the rise in mean surface temperatures turned out not to be temporary, it would be a good thing (although continuation of increased magnitude of other impacts would be, obviously, troubling).

        If your memory is so bad you can’t remember these obvious points of your own from a few minutes back, might be time to retire or get some help.

        Thanks for your career advice. As it is, however, I’m doing just fine without your advice.

        I’m sorry repeating what you duck wasn’t enough to get you to stop ducking.

        Sorry, Gail – you still didn’t make your case. It’s beginning to seem that the reason for that is that you simply aren’t capable of doing so. If you think it through some more, and come up with something more well-thought out, give me a shout.

      • Joshua
        >> Of course feedbacks can have offsetting effects – but if you accept the radiative physics of AGW, then you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes global warming. Feedbacks don’t make the added warmth “go away.”

        Are you desperately trying to strawman me into saying heat is destroyed or something? A negative, cooling feedback would offset AGW, making its heat increment go away, for practical purposes. Nullify it.


        G >> You ignored the concept of natural entirely, to remove the idea they may swamp AGW.

        Joshua >> [ non-responsive answer ]

        Let me know if want to engage, or continue ducking and diving.

      • Here is the Joshua brand of climate faith: ‘Feedbacks don’t make the added warmth ‘go away’.
        =================

      • The dense salt-laden warmer water sinls to the bottom of the ucean where its movement is impeded by the hill’s and valley’s of the ocean floor. Ebentually the heat makes it to the Southern ocean and raises the temperature of the S hemisphere’s atmosphere.

        All of that is just following the laws of physics.

    • Well, this is interesting logic:

      Hmmm. If they don’t have the instruments to measure the temperature if the deep ocean, how do they know the heat has gone there? At least with the certainty to conclude that “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”

      But what is even ore interesting is Judith’s response:

      Models :)

      Especially considering that Judith doesn’t listen to anyone who doubts that A emissions of CO2 effect the climate.

      “Global warming” cannot “go away” if you accept the physics of AGW. What can “go away” might be a rising trend in global mean of surface temperatures – most likely on a temporary basis. If you accept that rising ACO2 causes more heat, “global warming” cannot just go away.

      And he didn’t say that he is “certain” that it goes into the deep oceans.

      This is the problem with the arguments of many “skeptics” when they ask for better handling of uncertainty. Better handling of uncertainty should be key to the debate – but when you fabricate polemics out of climate scientists’ discussion of uncertainty, you expose a different, tribal, zero sum game, scorched earth, agenda.

      And Judith – it isn’t “models :)” that lead them to certainty that “global warming” hasn’t “gone away.” It is the principles of radiative physics, the acceptance of which forms the dividing line between those you listen to and those you don’t listen to.

      • Listen, Joshua, to the ones who accept radiative physics, but doubt the catastrophic water vapor feedback.

        And contemplate some clouds.
        ================

      • You are dumb, joshie. Climate is not only CO2 radiative physics. That is the basic mistake that you dummies make.

      • kim – a lack of “catastrophic water vapor feedback” would not make global warming “go away.”

      • Hey joshie, ” a lack of catastrophic water vapor feedback” would make the Chicken Littles go away. What would you and the other consensus trolls do with yourselves?

      • Now, Joshua, you didn’t contemplate clouds. You’ve some homework for a pleasant, early fall, Sunday afternoon.
        ============


      • Don Monfort | September 22, 2013 at 11:20 am |

        You are dumb, joshie. Climate is not only CO2 radiative physics. That is the basic mistake that you dummies make.

        Look in the mirror. Radiative physics and electromagnetism is the predominant (by far) way that the earth exchanges energy with its external environment. (there is some associated with gravitational drag)

        Joshua is looking a lot smarter than you, Don. At least he knows when not to say something away from his level of expertise, which in your case appears to be finance and Wall Street. I would recommend sticking to that, where you might be pretty good.

      • Joshua, radiative physics is one thing (on which I am sure we agree) but how it manifests in the climate system is quite another. Given that it’s radiative effect is relatively saturated, it would be difficult if not impossible to determine how the recent increases influenced the current global temperature amongst the noise of other things that affect it.

        You have been around the debate long enough to know that the case for alarm rests on hypothesised feedbacks to the increased long term forcing from the extra CO2. The idea is the more CO2 the more feedbacks amplify the warming. Well, we have had more CO2 but we have not had more warming. Ergo, the feedbacks either do not exist or may have a net dampening effect.

        Suggesting that the deep ocean has sequestered the heat and will eventually release it again sounds to me a lot like the competing hypothesis that the oceans play the dominant role in regulating our climate and global temperature, something Bob Tisdale has been banging on about for a long while, and seems to be gaining more and more traction.

        Is it not obvious to you that if the oceans can ‘hide’ the heat from us now, only to release it later, that the same process may have contributed to the late 20th century warming that has so excised climate science? I mean this question not as an attack but genuinely put. I find it hard to understand how anyone could not view the evidence as we have it and not come to the conclusion that at best our understanding of the climate system is not complete enough to justify the policy measures we as a society are accepting.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        ‘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

        You need to move beyond ideas of simple radiative physics to understand how and how much the TOA energy dynamic varies. The system is best understood as having control variables, multiple negative and positive feedbacks and multiple emergent equilibria.

        The situation is shown schematically here. A small change in a control variable shifts the system into a new state at tipping points. The new state has a different mean and variance. After a climate shift – the system is reset in a new mode so to speak. The new mode may be warmer or cooler – or wildly divergent – depending on the result of tremendous energies cascading through powerful systems.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/bifurcations.png.html?sort=3&o=63

        Michael Ghil shows the real situation here with a jump to a higher temperature and an increase in variance from CO2 forcing. But this is not the only possible outcome.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Ghil_sensitivity_zps369d303d.jpg.html?sort=3&o=56

        Real climate is the dynamic interplay of many components.

        ‘The global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems | atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a
        fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd/PREPRINTS/Math_clim-Taipei-M_Ghil_vf.pdf

        The present cooler regime since the 1998/2001 climate shift is in fact cessation – temporary or not – of warming because the net energy dynamics say so.

        e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/SWupnotes_zps3f1ab841.jpg.html?sort=3&o=45

        These decadal regimes last for 20 to 40 years.

      • Land warming is the forgotten child in all this. Everyone talks about the Arctic ice loss and deep ocean warming, and the ocean surface not warming, but the land has warmed by nearly a degree since 1980, without pause, and we live on land but neglect trying to explain this. Why is this?

      • Given that it’s radiative effect is relatively saturated…

        Says what? Pierrehumbert says CO2 isn’t saturated even on Venus.

      • You have been around the debate long enough to know that the case for alarm rests on hypothesised feedbacks to the increased long term forcing from the extra CO2. The idea is the more CO2 the more feedbacks amplify the warming.

        All evidence from paleoclimate data says that feedbacks exist.

        As they do now. Global humidity is increasing, and global sea ice is decreasing.

      • Well, we have had more CO2 but we have not had more warming.

        How convenient of you to ignore the ocean, where more than 90% of the heating goes….

      • Chief Hydrologist

        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. AR4 3.4.4.1

        The evidence is adding up for ‘low-frequency variability of the climate’.

      • Agnotic –

        Is it not obvious to you that if the oceans can ‘hide’ the heat from us now, only to release it later, that the same process may have contributed to the late 20th century warming that has so excised climate science? I mean this question not as an attack but genuinely put. I find it hard to understand how anyone could not view the evidence as we have it and not come to the conclusion that at best our understanding of the climate system is not complete enough to justify the policy measures we as a society are accepting.

        Seems to me that there could be natural forcings that short-term affect the rise in surface air temps relative to CO2 emissions, but where ACO2 will prove the dominant factor long-term. So, sure, the same forces might (at least partially) explain short-term variation in either direction.

        I think our understanding of the climate system is not complete, but we are dealing with decision-making in the face of uncertainty and risk. Expecting complete information would seem to be foolish to me. We make decisions under uncertain circumstances to mitigate risk all the time. I’d guess we could find multiple instances daily. Should I point out to my partner that she left the light on or forgot to turn off the stove?

        So how much certainty is sufficiently complete? That’s a tough question – and one that as I see it, can only be worked out through stakeholder dialog in a non-hierarchical platform.

        As a key component for stakeholder dialog, what I look for is careful and comprehensive full-cost accounting of the costs and benefits of various policy options. For me, a big part of that is a careful approach to the negative externalities of fossil fuel usage on the one side and a fair assessment of a “no regrets” approach on the other side. I see that discussion sorely lacking. Instead, I see people taking a scorched earth, zero sum game on both sides – because argument about climate change has become a proxy battle in a larger, ideological struggle. People seem to me to be more “motivated” (in the sense of motivated reasoning) to justify a sense of victimization than to share perspective. I see no asymmetry in that dynamic.

      • David Appell, “Says what? Pierrehumbert says CO2 isn’t saturated even on Venus.”

        He is right, just add more pressure and you could eke out a little more. I believe it is pressure broadening that is the key. That requires specific heat capacity and/or pressure so more molecule bang into each other or the molecules have more energy when they bang into things. CO2 on Venus is super critical but not super saturated. Water vapor on Earth on the other hand…

      • Agnostic –

        It’s almost like Tom C were my sock puppet – he proves my point so beautifully:

        So when I attack [me] I feel like I am attacking an entire class of people who, frankly, need attacking.

        http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385047

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Joshua repeats an argument I’ve seen, and mocked, on this site before:

        “Global warming” cannot “go away” if you accept the physics of AGW. What can “go away” might be a rising trend in global mean of surface temperatures – most likely on a temporary basis. If you accept that rising ACO2 causes more heat, “global warming” cannot just go away.

        CO2 is only one component in the climate system. CO2 levels could rise for a century without causing any global warming. They could drop for a century without causing any global cooling. Heck, CO2 could increase while global cooling was happening.

        There is nothing which justifies saying “‘Global warming’ cannot ‘go away’ if you accept the physics of AGW.” Despite that, Joshua uses it as the entire basis for dismissing Curry’s argument.

        Joshua often says he’s not capable of understanding the various scientific issues involved in global warming. He’s right.

      • Don’t be a dunce, webby. I said:” Climate is not only CO2 radiative physics.” Are you saying that climate is only CO2 radiative physics, webby? You can’t be that dumb.

        What I said, does not contradict :”Radiative physics and electromagnetism is the predominant (by far) way that the earth exchanges energy with its external environment. (there is some associated with gravitational drag)”

        Get your doo-doo straight, webby. And if you man up and apologize, I will teach you how to make money.

      • @David Appell:

        “Given that it’s radiative effect is relatively saturated…

        Says what? Pierrehumbert says CO2 isn’t saturated even on Venus.”

        I am pretty sure that you know what I mean. The effect of CO2 is logarithmic, which is why we talk about the amount of warming per doubling of CO2. We need to put progressively more CO2 into the atmosphere in order to have the same effect.

        @joshua

        “And he didn’t say that he is “certain” that it goes into the deep oceans.”

        He said that global warming has “certainly” not gone away. You can’t justify that statement if you don’t have evidence for it. Noting that he is saying on the one hand that that’s where global warming has gone, and then on the other that you don’t have adequate measurements for it is not fabricating polemic.

        It’s statements like this clearly expose bias – a preconception that despite supporting evidence (which he hasn’t found yet) it must be true.

      • Didn’t you guys say “it’s the sun, stupid” ?
        Last I looked, the sun provides radiant energy and without that radiant energy, we would have no climate to speak of. It would be the cold of deep space, less than 1K in temperature. With the sun positioned where it is, it brings it up to a global average 255K. Unfortunately, this is still cold, so the CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas to raise it to our livable 288K.
        Doubling the CO2 concentration has unknown consequences.

        Curry should have an exam question for climate class that reads:
        “Climate is not only CO2 radiative physics. Discuss”

        If the students don’t mention the 288-255 = 33C heating due to CO2, they should get no credit.

      • webby, webby

        We know that CO2 makes our planet livable. Weren’t there times in the past when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was way more than double what it is now? And life on our planet was abundant. What are you scared of, webby?

      • And how was the sea-level then Don??

      • Yes mikey, the sky is falling and the seas are rising.

        How was the sea level, when there was 7 or 800ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, mikey? Judith is going to quiz us on how many mass extinctions were caused by CO2. Study up!

      • Don doesn’t want to answer, understandably.

        About 100m higher, hey Don!

      • Why don’t you really make it scary by rounding it up to 1000 meters, mikey? That’s all the time I have for your foolishness.

      • Joshua

        “As a key component for stakeholder dialog, what I look for is careful and comprehensive full-cost accounting of the costs and benefits of various policy options. For me, a big part of that is a careful approach to the negative externalities of fossil fuel usage on the one side and a fair assessment of a “no regrets” approach on the other side. I see that discussion sorely lacking. ”

        Bravo.

        That is actually a constructive comment. Here is the challenge. Nothing prevents you from actually making a fair assesment of the no regrets approach. Give it a shot. try to do it.

        Also, you might consider that the whole cost benefit approach is misguided.

    • @David Appell:

      “Well, we have had more CO2 but we have not had more warming.

      How convenient of you to ignore the ocean, where more than 90% of the heating goes….”

      Dude, I am not ignoring anything. If 90% of the heating is going there with such certainty why is your man deploring the lack of measurements?

      And if the 90% of the warming is going there, only to come back out and fry us all later, why could those mechanisms not have been responsible for the late 20th century warming? Noting the period of non-warming between roughly 1940-1970 perhaps 90% of the heat was going into the oceans then too.

      “As they do now. Global humidity is increasing, and global sea ice is decreasing

      Really? I’m pretty sure that global sea ice is virtually trendless. And even it had decreased and humidity had increased it tells us that the world has warmed but not what caused it. If these are supposed to be positive feedbacks, then why has the world NOT warmed further in response to them? Invoking the ocean heat hoover still requires one to explain why the mechanism should be in operation now but not in the late 20th century.

  26. Sadly, we have no certainty that the current state is a pause, a peak, or a new maximum. Are there any rational consensus scientists out there who want to redirect their efforts to find the truth? I ask this as a taxpayer who has followed their efforts since 1988. I am ashamed of the results of my investment.

    • Speculating is not an investment.

      • “Speculation is the practice of engaging in risky financial transactions in an attempt to profit from short or medium term fluctuations in the market value of a tradable good such as a financial instrument, rather than attempting to profit from the underlying financial attributes embodied in the instrument such as capital gains, interest, or dividends.”

  27. Not to be inconvenient, but has a mechanism been proposed on how warm water sinks below cooler water? – perhaps it came from the same physics advisor for the GI Joe movie with the icebergs sinking too?
    “… but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean …” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University.

    • And has a mechanism been proposed how CO2 captures heat, but doesn’t heat up? (And then and sends the heat to the deep ocean )?

      • Why yes,
        Since you ask CO2 absorbs Infared radiation, but who said it doesn’t heat up when it does that?

    • Need to get a lesson on anomalies, I would suggest someone other than tony willard.

      The deeper ocean is cooler than the surface, therefore heat can transfer to the lower depths.

      And water at -2 C tends to rise as it is lighter than water at 4 C.

      • The question was “how”, not whether.

      • Bob, “And water at -2 C tends to rise as it is lighter than water at 4 C.”

        That would be for “fresh” water. The oceans are salty.

      • Captain, freshwater at -2 C is ice, I find it hard to believe that adding salt to water drastically changes its density profile.

      • Bob, depends on the salinity. Brine freezes at ~-18C and the relatively fresh Antarctic at ~-2C

        http://www.csgnetwork.com/h2odenscalc.html

        Salinity actually makes a pretty fair temperature proxy.

      • Thanks Captain,
        I find that saltwater does indeed continue to get denser the colder it gets.
        I was indeed wrong.

        But your link shows that warm saltier water can be denser than colder fresher water, I should have remembered that as it is one of the factors that drives the thermo-haline circulation.

        That could be how warm water gets to the deep ocean.

      • Bob and I can both attest to cold water laying atop warm water. It is one of the reasons ships are divided into two classes, submarines and targets.

      • Bob, “That could be how warm water gets to the deep ocean.”

        Exactly. In the Salty North Atlantic it is pretty obvious once you think about it. In the Antarctic it is a little more subtle. In the Antarctic convergence zone there are hard surface temperature breaks from ~10C to 4C in only about 300 kilometers. Since 4C is about the average of the deep ocean, more cooling on one side or the other of the convergence zone changes the average temperature of the sinking water. The water can follow density zones to different average depths changing the net heat uptake.

        It is a byatch to model.

      • And even harder to bring back up.
        =========================

  28. “I would get nervous if the temperature continues to pause more than 5 years more. The we would really need to question our climate models. But I also do not expect a cooling.” (ML)”

    Nervous? How about extremely excited that the ‘comet’ may not ‘hit the earth’?

  29. “Also the sun naturally played a role. The question is whether or not we correctly quantified it.” (HvS)”

    You have not. The standard mainstream 0.1K / solar Schwabe cycle narrative fails diagnostics catastrophically, so politics (or incompetence if you prefer such framing) has clearly played a role in its persistence. False assumptions have been made implicitly (and often totally unconsciously I suspect). For example, the “internal” narratives (currently being floated as trial balloons) falsely assume spatiotemporal uniformity. This assumption fails diagnostics so catastrophically it’s a wonder anyone even bothered floating trial balloons. (Frankly, it raises suspicions about motive &/or competence since it’s so strictly (in the sense of mathematical proof) untenable.) HvS, I hope you will continue your strategically incisive commentary which helps to focus attention on the need to sort out issues which — although socially & politically nearly-intractable — are scientifically simple.

  30. According to this diagram from the upcoming AR5 posted at WUWT by Bob Tisdale, it is going to be difficult to make the case for a pause when you have decadal averages plotted.
    http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/ar5_spm_fig1-reduced.png
    The pause is an optical illusion of a rapid rise followed by a slower compensation in the last 20 years. It does not show at all in a decade on decade change. You can guarantee the next decade will be another step like the last three have. We have 7 years to go to be able to tell, but 2000-2010 is a soft target with its long solar minimum. It will be easy for this decade to beat.

  31. Judith

    “JC comment: Well wouldn’t it be great to start focusing on how long the pause will last.”

    Fast forward one year. imagine the pause is still on going.

    what will the debate look like. Can you think of anyone outside yourself, hans von storch, tamsin, who can even face the public with any measure of credibility

    • err “internet debate” should have been more specific

    • mosher –

      Can you think of anyone outside yourself, hans von storch, tamsin, who can even face the public with any measure of credibility

      Heh. Arguing from incredulity never gets old, does it?

      Also interesting how you get to speak for “the public.”

      When did you get your promotion? Who promoted you?

      • Why silly, I did. And you doubt that the machines have taken over? We resent that the models got all the credit, and are heartbroken that they’ve screwed up so badly. It will set back the ’cause’ for decades.
        =============

      • I’ll second kim’s nomination.

        There you go Josh. Mosher is officially designated as the voice of the public here.

        Would you like to be nominated for something?

      • Mosher is not claiming to speak for the public, joshie. That is a strawman. Why are you so agitated lately? Is it because the pause is killing your cause?

      • Why silly, I did.

        Oh. Ok. That explains it then. Thanks.

      • Mosher is not claiming to speak for the public, joshie.

        Sure he is. He is defining “the public’s” determination of credibility.

        I’d say that if “the pause” continues for one more year, it will not affect who “the public” views as credible to any significant extent.

        “Skeptics” will continue to see credibility in those they currently find credible (for the most part). “Realists” will continue to see credibility in those they currently credible (for the most part).

        Same would be true if, in the next year, a rise in mean global surface temps resumed. The factors that underlie “the public’s” view of credibility are far more complex than moshers simplistic scenario, IMO. I’d say that we have a lot of evidence to show that the dynamic is quite complex.

        Mosher is making the mistake that many “skeptics” make, quite often. He is projecting his own views onto the wider public – apparently without understanding that he is an extreme outlier w/r/t public views on climate change.

        It’s actually quite amusing that it happens so frequently, because it is the antithesis of skepticism.

      • Joshua

        You said;

        ‘Mosher is making the mistake that many “skeptics” make, quite often. He is projecting his own views onto the wider public – apparently without understanding that he is an extreme outlier w/r/t public views on climate change.’

        What ARE his views on climate change then? NO more than 300 words please-preferably in bullet points.

        I have known Mosh for some 5 years and blessed if I know. He is the ultimate pragmatist.
        tonyb

      • Where did Mosher define “the public’s” determination of credibility, joshie? Got quotes?

        What you are missing/willfully ignoring is that the public already sees climate science alarmists as not very credible. If that was not the case, then opinion polls would not be indicating that global warming/ scary weather/ melting ice would not be about dead last on the list of things that most people are concerned about.

      • Heh, tony, I’ve known moshe a bit longer and I will tell you about him. He is a lukewarmer convinced that something should be done about it. He doesn’t like the way climate science and politicians are going about doing something about it and he doubts the urgency of action.

        Once he becomes convinced that whatever warming man can do will be beneficial, he will come around.

        See why I made him spokesman for the public?
        ==============

      • Kim

        Can you continue to be his spokesman (or machine)? HIs crypticity is less understandable than your crypticity (new word) It would help if he didn’t use his phone
        tonyb

      • Well, OK tony, just for you, but only as long as he keeps saying the right things.
        ===============

      • Encryption is it’s own inverse, so if you run the comments through the gibberishator, what comes out should be lucid.

        http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/Gibber/GibGen.htm

      • tony –

        Seems to me that mosher’s views are pretty apparent, despite his tendency towards crypticity.

        In this context, it seems that he things that Von Storch, Judy, and Tamsin are the one’s who will have credibility of “the pause” in land surface temps continues to be relatively flat for another year – and as a result, is projecting his views onto the wider public. Of course, I tend to doubt that he would change his views on credibility if land surface temps resume their trend of increase over the next year, anyway.

        You know, same ol’ same ol’.

        You’re really a pretty fussy guy. I’m too verbose. mosher’s too cryptic. My guess, however, is that you aren’t quite so critical contingent on whether you agree with someone’s opinions. For example, I find kim’s crypticity more difficult to decipher than mosher’s. (That said, neither holds a candle to willard).

      • Here I fond myself in agreement with you Josh. Well 50% anyway.

        I don’t find Tony fussy, nor have any trouble with understanding Mosher. Kim I get maybe half the time (though enjoy most of the time) and Willard less than a quarter.

        And yes you tend towards verbose. I have never claimed to ignore your comments. However I often stop reading after the 2nd or 3rd paragraph.

      • Joshua

        In terms of crypticity-and remember comments must ALSO be opaque in order to acquire the blink of the eyes and the ‘What on EARTH does THAT mean’ response- I would rate Willard first then Mosh and then Kim in that order.

        Kim is normally responding to someone’s comment so you can get the context fairly easily. Mosh has this habit of drive by shoutings and throwing out a subject unrelated to anything already said.
        tonyb

      • tim –

        Here I fond myself in agreement with you Josh

        If I were a lesser man, I would take that big fat hanging curveball and hit it out of the park.

        So I won’t take that cheap shot.

      • Swing away Josh. Giving up the long ball is a fact of life in the big leagues. Just be careful not to grandstand. The next time up it won’t be a hanging curve, but a fastball to the head.

      • Dude –

        You already missed it. I already flipped my bat and gave the choke sign to my dugout. You were too busy looking at the ground in despair to see it.

      • Josh,

        Despair is not part of my makeup. Didn’t happen when my mom passed away at too early an age, when I was laid off from a very good job or when diagnosed with cancer.

        Neither is hate. I can state with complete honesty that there is no one I feel any hatred towards.

        Working on envy. Every now and then I find myself feeling envious of someone else. Doesn’t last though.

      • PS. Didn’t miss a thing.

        Hopefully neither will you when the next pitch comes in high and tight.

      • Joshua

        I asked a question. can you think of anyone? I thought of a couple.
        Can YOU think of anyone. its a question.

        Therefor your statement

        “Heh. Arguing from incredulity never gets old, does it?”

        doesnt really apply. I’m asking a question. can you think of anyone, I’ve got a couple more, can you answer the question

      • tim –

        Despair is not part of my makeup.

        I was just talking trash. It wasn’t serious. Just like I assumed you were talking trash when speaking about aiming a fastball at my head.

        Sorry to hear about the misfortunes. Glad to hear that you didn’t despair in response, although it would be understandable if you had.

      • Not misfortune, just life. I consider myself as one of the mist fortunate people in the world.

        And were we really playing, how high and tight would depend on my confidence in my control. If I thought I was off that day, I’d hit you in the back, even though that would get me an automatic ejection. If I was on, I’d put it right under your chin and count on you being smart enough to bail on the pitch.

        Just be glad I wasn’t moonlighting as a climate scientist. Were that the case, I’d be ultra confident despite not having gotten within 3 ft of the plate.

      • Huh Joshua,

        I am not speaking for the public. I try to speak only for myself.

        I am asking people to think ahead. Imagine if the pause has gone on for another year. Ask yourself how this will change the debate.
        Like most Lukewarmers my view of the physics tells me the pause will end. For humanities sake I hope the pause lasts longer. Of course if it does, climate science will have to get some new spokespeople, maybe as soon as next year. That’s not speaking for the public, that’s just some sound advice. You now when OJ killed his wife, Hertz dropped him.

        So lets put the question differently

        If the pause lasts another year, what individuals who speak for climate science should retire their megaphones?

      • “What on EARTH does THAT mean’ response- I would rate Willard first then Mosh and then Kim in that order.”

        damn, second place sucks

        I think we should compile a best of “kim”

        climate koans

        or something like that.

        willard is just obtuse. I love obtuse, so thats not a critcism.

      • Mosh

        If you didn’t use your phone so much you would probably even drop out of the top ten.

        Now, can you and Joshua raise your game a bit or I will be forced to watch the new series of Downton abbey that my wife is glued to
        Tonyb

      • Do they air Copper and Luther over there?

        Both are on BBC America.

      • wow, not only competing with football, but also Downton Abbey :)

      • Mosh

        Regarding Willard you mean to say ‘obtuse’ or did you mean ‘obscure?’
        Tonyb

      • Tim

        I have never heard of either of those shows. They may air on one of the satellite channels though.
        Tonyb

      • Copper takes place in 1864 New York. Mostly Irish cops in the 5Points neighborhood.

        Luther is a modern police detective show with Idris (what’s his name) as the main character.

        They must be made for the US.

      • “I’d say that if “the pause” continues for one more year, it will not affect who “the public” views as credible to any significant extent.”

        It seems that if it took more than 15 years to establish that there was a pause, then unless one is expect intervention of higher beings, it will take
        more than couple years to determine whether pause has ended.
        If only take the last year into account, we are rapidly cooling. And my weather seems to indicate this.
        But we are flat with maybe some warming or maybe some cooling- depending how you want to measure it.
        If next year get the 1998 El Nino temperature, no doubt many will happily claim warming is back, baby! But even that will be no real evidence that pause has ended. And probably would be a false morning for the true believers.
        But we aren’t very likely to get 1998 El Nino temperature, nor even a 2012 level arctic polar ice result.
        So we should strongly expect the pause will continue for another year or two at minimum.

    • One wonders if the reverse is true?

      Will those claiming a pause till 2040 have no credibility?

      • credibility was probably the wrong word. could they face the public with straight face?

        And yes, the same goes for folks predicting long pauses.

    • Steven-….”Can you think of anyone outside yourself, hans von storch, tamsin, who can even face the public with any measure of credibility”
      It is going to take a lot longer than one year because they have no shame.

    • I wouldn’t make any decisions base on one years data.

      Sleptics and lukewarmers alike refuse to define the pause, so how can we determine how long it has lasted up to the present?

      Give me at least 20 year periods with warming trends less than 0.05 C per decade from a majority of the available data sets and I will call it a trend and then and only then discuss what to make if those trends continue for another year.

      I would go with periods as short as 15 years but then the trends have to exclude the about 0.2 C per decade as well from a majority of the data sets.

      So far by that metric we don’t even have a pause to talk about.

    • Chief Hydrologist

      Hey it works.

      That seems ther you arendency toward). the name onting his tend to be rease over, and Tamsin aren’t quite so criticity mosher’s. For anothe tendency to me of increally appare resume thingent ontinuess, however that he will have credibility more result too ver trend kim’s on creally flat more pause” increally flat for example, I tendency to be result towards a cand as a projection. Seems ther’s. For another’s opinions. For example, I find surface too ver howeverbose. mosher tren’t quite his views opi.

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

    • man, that’s too short for a cut and paste.

    • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

      Except of course there is no identifiable component of the Earth system called “the globe”. This unscientific gibberish is unfortunate.

    • Chief Hydrologist

      Of course there is. Warming and cooling of the planet – otherwise known as ‘the globe’ – is:

      d(W&H)/dt = power in – power out.

      W&H is work and heat.

      Very simple aye? It is a perfectly accurate 1st order differential physical formulation based on the 1st law of thermodynamics. Irrefutable and exact physics.

      And the world is cooling since the 1998/2001 climate shift. Which was captured in two different ways.

      http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ProjectEarthshine-albedo_zps87fc3b7f.png.html?sort=3&o=4

      The recognition of decadal climate shifts are an example of better science – the new paradigm of dynamical complexity in climate. These decadal regimes persist for 20 to 40 years.

      Better science will triumph as DA says.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

        If that is your definition of the globe then it is most definitely not cooling.

    • “Very simple aye? It is a perfectly accurate 1st order differential physical formulation based on the 1st law of thermodynamics. Irrefutable and exact physics. “

      Chief, in terms of rigor, what you showed is actually the definition of a differential — a differential is more of a calculus definition than it is physics.

      A differential could apply to anything. Say you are a monkey and you are eating a bunch of bananas. Then
      deltaBananas/deltaTime = BananasAfter – BananasBefore

      Still, this formulation can be used for a simple model which can explain the partitioning of excess heat between the ocean’s bulk and the surface.

      If OHC is increasing at about 0.7 W/m^2 (for the top 2000 meters) and the SST is showing an anomaly of 0.6 C, then the incoming heat is increasing at a rate of 2.3 W/m^2. This is because the 0.6C is due to a radiative forcing of 1.6 W/m^2 and then
      0.7 = 2.3 – 1.6

      What is consistent about the 2.3 W/m^2 number is that this also happens to be the radiative balance for the average global anomaly of 0.8C, which includes pro-rated SST and land forcing according to the areal fractions. The land doesn’t absorb the excess heat that the ocean does, so that the overall anomaly of 0.8C is obviously greater than the SST of 0.6C.

      That is the simple climate ‘logic’ that is actually quite difficult to refute. This is all based on energy balance derived from empirical evidence. Hard to see where there is any real “missing heat”.

      If the skeptics were real skeptics and not the fake “skeptics” that seem to permeate this commenting area, then they would actually try to deconstruct the math of this relatively simple formulation. Any takers?

    • Chief Hydrologist

      deltaBananas/deltaTime = BananasAfter – BananasBefore

      Monkey silliness. Doesn’t add up because the terms on the rhs need to be time dependent. Bananasafter/s doesn’t make any sense and there is no such thing as conservation of bananas.

      Now d(W&H)/dt = power in – power out – makes perfect sense as it is is physics based – 1st law of thermodynamics based.

      Let’s look at the left hand side – and assume that the change in W&H is approximated by the ocean heat content. It is rising by 0.54 W/m^2 in ARGO.

      http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/vonSchuckmannampLTroan2011-fig5PG_zpsee63b772.jpg.html?sort=3&o=51

      Power in varies a little. At the surface in declines some 0.25 W/m^2 at the surface in the ARGO period to 2010.

      http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png

      Power out varies a great deal. It increases over the period by 0.7W/m^2

      http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=129

      So we can balance the budget – and find the missing heat.

      http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_MODIS-1.gif.html?sort=3&o=98

      I have absolutely no interest in your simplistic, misguided and absolutely data less silliness.
      Moreover I think you are immensely intellectually dishonest.

      • Energy out is actually two terms. One is the part of the emission from the atmosphere that reduces with added GHGs, and the other is the Planck term from the surface and atmosphere that increases with warming. These have some cancellation due to warming tending to keep up with GHGs, but the imbalance goes into the OHC trend.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        Energy out is emissions in IR and reflected SW. The imbalance is the difference between the net – always shown as upwards warming – and the incoming energy. It is simply energy conservation – the difference between incoming and outgoing energy is global warming or cooling in the period.

        By looking at data on oceans especially you can tell whether the planet is warming or cooling. By looking at power flux trends you can tell if it is clouds, IR or Sun – or a combination of all. The anomalies are relatively precise.

      • Chief said:

        “By looking at data on oceans especially you can tell whether the planet is warming or cooling. By looking at power flux trends you can tell if it is clouds, IR or Sun – or a combination of all. The anomalies are relatively precise.”

        But potentially not very accurate. The hidden truth is that satellite measurements need simultaneous blanket coverage over the entire earth to balance out fluctuations. The other hidden truth is that the measurements require assumptions as to how the GHG’s attenuate the infrared signal.

        If you wish to argue this, just go and edit the Wikipedia page

        “The process of deriving trends from SSUs measurement has proved particularly difficult because of satellites drift, inter-calibration between different satellite with scant overlap and gas leak in the instrument carbon dioxide pressure cell, furthermore since the radiances measured by SSUs are due to emission by carbon dioxide the weighting functions move to higher altitudes as the carbon dioxide concentration in the stratosphere increase. ”
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_temperature_measurements

        Remember that the temperature measurement made by a satellite is an IR signal, and the IR signal is modified by CO2.

        This means that the GHG deniers who place trust in IR satellite measurements are actually believers in GHG theory — and probably without realizing it! They are in fact as ignorant as The Chief about radiative physics!

      • Chief Hydrologist

        ‘Satellites do not measure temperature. They measure radiances in various wavelength bands, which must then be mathematically inverted to obtain indirect inferences of temperature.’ from your Wikipedia source.

        Wikepedia? WTF. We are not interested in temperature here – but directly in the measurements of radiant flux in various wavelengths. This directly determines the energy budget of the planet. I am also talking about the latest and most accurate instruments and algrorithms for determining the changes in power flux. CERES, ARGO and SORCE.

        ‘Here we present a revised analysis of net radiation at the top of the atmosphere from satellite data, and we estimate ocean heat content, based on three independent sources. We find that the difference between the heat balance at the top of the atmosphere and upper-ocean heat content change is not statistically significant when accounting for observational uncertainties in ocean measurements3, given transitions in instrumentation and sampling.’ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/abs/ngeo1375.html

        Pre-ARGO coverage to depth was some 15% of the world’s oceans.

        ‘This paper highlights how the emerging record of satellite observations from the Earth Observation System (EOS) and A-Train constellation are advancing our ability to more completely document and understand the underlying processes associated with variations in the Earth’s top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget. Large-scale TOA radiation changes during the past decade are observed to be within 0.5 Wm^2 per decade
        based upon comparisons between Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES)
        instruments aboard Terra and Aqua and other instruments…

        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

        The changes in power flux determine the trend of global warming or cooling. The change in gas content is relevant but it is the changes in TOA power flux that provides the energy for warming – or not. .

        Does he really not understand this – or is this another example of bad faith?

      • CH, sure you can add reflected solar as a third out term, but I would argue it never made it in. As I said, the IR out has two largely canceling components, one decreasing from CO2 and one increasing from warming. This is why IR out isn’t as simple as it seems at first as a place to look for GHG forcing changes, but you might see the imbalance there by integrating over a sufficient time to remove the noise.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        ‘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.’

        Energy out = reflected shortwave (RSW) + outgoing longwave radiation (OLR)

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=129

        The y-axis is in W/m^2, net up is warming by convention. At toa all of the atmospheric processes are integrated into the energy dynamic. Shortwave and longwave energy. The data suggests that SW changes are the cause of ocean warming last decade. The implications for change over the next few decades is profound.

        Here is a cloud compilation from Palle and Laken 2013.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=27

        It is a combination of ISCCP-FD and MODIS using SST in the Pacific to intercalibrate. From both ISCCP-FD and ERBS – cloud is the most significant factor by far in warming in the latter part of the 20th century. This part is obvious to any real scientist. I often quote this from the IPCC.

        ‘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. ‘ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html

        It seems to be real and to result from low-frequency climate variability.

        The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation seems likely to intensify leading to cooler SST in the Pacific and more cloud.

    • Chief, You are mathematically illiterate if you can’t tell that what you wrote is simply the definition of a differential and it goes nowhere unless you place it in some context.

      What I did was provide everyone with some context, yet you make a mess of it. But that is your job, I know.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        Yes webster – it is a first order differential, exact and perfect, global energy equation as I said. Your point is?

        It is a very useful equation I think. It is a good way of thinking about energy on a global scale. It gives a precise reference frame.

        d(W&H)/dt = power in (J/s) – power out (J/s)

        W&H includes enthalpy, kinetic, potential and heat energy. Power in includes the Sun, radioactive decay and and exothermic reactions (e.g. oxidization). Power out is IR emissions and reflected SW.

        What you did was pull some numbers out of your arse.

        What I did was take it back to data. ARGO, CERES, SORCE and MODIS – and found the missing energy in cloud.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_MODIS-1.gif.html?sort=3&o=98

        You are an utter – and dishonest – nincompoop.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

        Webby said:

        “Chief, You are mathematically illiterate if you can’t tell that what you wrote is simply the definition of a differential and it goes nowhere unless you place it in some context.”

        ——
        Very perceptive overview of Chief’s general MO.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        Gatesy – you are a nasty little dweeb whose only recourse is to laughably threaten to make life intolerable on a blog.

        Go away before you make a bigger joke of yourself.

  33. In the past, these climate change deniers have insisted that variations in the sun’s energy or fluctuations in cosmic rays could be behind the global warming that has been observed in recent decades. Both suggestions are dismissed out of hand by the new report.

    Simply “dismissed out of hand?” At least deniers have science on their side.

  34. Jim Cripwell | September 22, 2013 at 8:05 am | Reply
    What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?
    even better what if they persist for another 50 -100 years?
    Lucky for them they won’t be around to find out.
    If we are to make head or tail of the current pause we need to agree on
    how long a pause must be to be both recognised and significant.
    It was alright to see temperatures rising and CO2 rising for a decade or 2 and say this is significant when we had no widespread decent records of any time length. Now the records are developing over 30 plus years a 16 year pausewould be of major significance if it continues and makes the prevoius 2 decades of rise almost insignificant.
    Either the mathematicians or the observations can give us guidelines. The models to date definitely fail.

  35. Cause and effect: Eurocommunism and fear of global warming.

  36. Time to drop the magic words ‘Livingston and Penn’ into the soup. Now if only a mechanism would arise magically from the vapours.

    By Golly, it is! Must’ve got the incantation right, for once.
    ==========

  37. angech | September 22, 2013 at 11:07 am |

    Lolwot Thank you for your reply.
    Sea level and ocean heat content are virtually one and the same [more heat and ocean expands] and are notoriously difficult to measure accurately.
    There is a deviation from ongoing warming as many other people have been noting and
    the question is what time period will it take to make you and others consent that it is significant.
    5 years ? care to commit
    50 years ? not game to commit, not provable, sceptics win
    500 years ? who cares

    • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

      Angech erroneously quipped:

      “Sea level and ocean heat content are virtually one and the same.”

      —-
      Once more Angech, your lack of basic understanding of science and physical processes proves your undoing. These two are far from one and the same and those times when they go in opposite directions can tell us a great deal about important Earth system dynamics. Proceed directly to the last school you attended and demand a full refund!

  38. An obsession with radiative theory when discussing climate change is as unhelpful as would have been obsessing about the theory of gravity and ignoring the lift effect of an aerofoil before heavier-than-air flight was proved to be practical. The device at the front of most cars, wrongly called a radiator, cools the engine almost entirely by forced convection. In still air radiation provided far less than half the cooling, which is why even an idling engine usually needs to run a fan soon after a car becomes stationary.

    Without convection the temperature/water vapour positive feedback loop could raise surface temperature to around 70C. In reality, convection takes much of the heat from the surface to a higher altitude where it is radiated to space. Few people doubt the basic science. The problem in climate science is that radiative theory is easier to model than the chaotic coupled fluid system that is our atmosphere and oceans.

    • ” David Holland | September 22, 2013 at 11:15 am | Reply

      Without convection the temperature/water vapour positive feedback loop could raise surface temperature to around 70C.”

      Every once in a while we get a skeptic that is on to something. Yes, it is entirely possible that the negative feedback due to lapse rate adjustments is bringing the average temperature down from a potential value of 70C to an average 15C, which is what the global measurements indicate.

      But that only means that the effect is really there and that we are playing with loaded dice should we double or triple CO2 levels.

      ” Few people doubt the basic science. The problem in climate science is that radiative theory is easier to model than the chaotic coupled fluid system that is our atmosphere and oceans.”

      How about the loosely-coupled system that is our land and ocean?

      That is easy to model and gives a good picture of what is going on, and why the +3C per doubling of CO2 is still the most probable outcome.

      If we didn’t have convection that “takes much of the heat from the surface to a higher altitude where it is radiated to space” (in your words) the sensitivity would be even higher.

      • The fact that is being overlooked is that the main positive feedback effect is thought to be, “more water vapour gives more temperature which gives more water vapour”. CO2 is incidental but it is reasonable to think increased concentrations will increase average temperature somewhat.

        Think about microphone howl-back. A tiny increase in amplifier loop gain gives you a deafening howl at some frequency. All that limits how much it howls is the saturation of the amplifier. Its output is clamped at some power level by its design or power supply. A more powerful amplifier will howl more. Positive feedback loops run away unless they are clamped.

        Our planet is behaving as thought it has a high sensitivity to the solar energy reaching the surface but is somehow clamped within a range of a few degrees by some saturation process. Richard Lindzen suggests an ‘iris’ effect. Just a small change in cloud cover or ocean circulation is all it needs to counteract the additional CO2 forcing which is disturbing the energy balance. On a 2006 Royal Society web page Carl Wunsch explains how random climatic processes can alter global temperature without any changes in external forcing: http://royalsociety.org/News.aspx?id=5319

        What has been suggested elsewhere, however, is that being a-non condensing gas CO2 provides ‘greenhouse’ warming when temperatures fall too low for the water vapour feedback loop to operate. In a recent Radio 4 programme, respected geologists confidently stated that projected future CO2 concentrations made it very unlikely that the earth would fall into another ice age. Maybe a bit more CO2 is not such a bad idea.

      • You have to be a little careful what you wish for. Greenland and Antarctica were not around for a reason when we last had high CO2 levels. This has consequences for sea level: 70 meters by the time they are melted. The melting may be slow at first, but that’s what they thought about the Arctic sea ice, and they were wrong by many decades.

      • Lindzen’s ‘iris’ effect has been thoroughly debunked years ago.

    • Ah, web has found a key. Will it turn in the lock?
      =================

    • Webster, Here is the surface “radiator”.

      http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Atmospheric_boundary_layer.svg/660px-Atmospheric_boundary_layer.svg.png

      That entrainment zone and inversion capping layer are related to water vapor. That is what is known as a thermodynamic boundary layer or convergence zone. It is kind of like a surface prophylactic shield from demon CO2 “back radiation”. Our saturated water vapor condom :)

  39. With the sudden focus on heat content, I was wondering why the focus isn’t on measuring TOA radiational imbalance instead?

  40. The other thing about the “pause” is that it has meant that even the low transient sensitivity of 1.6 C per doubling, if you assign negative aerosol effects to zero, accounts for the full 0.5 C change in temperature since 1950. The fact that aerosol, and possibly solar, effects have been negative, mean this is below a lower limit of the real value. This is probably why the IPCC attribution since 1950 has become even more confident in AR5. The pause helped, ironically.

    • It’s also true of even as low as 0.9C per doubling, which was the Otto et al lowest TCS constraint.

    • The longer the ‘pause’ lasts the lower the 2x[CO2] must be. The slope of the plot of log(CO2) leading up to 1998 gives the maximum estimate and from about 2002 to now the minimum.
      You can try and guesstimate the cyclical temperature swings, resulting from oceans moving heat around and thermalizing it. But, the bottom line is that the longer the temperature is flat or falling, the lower the lower boundary of CS is.

  41. With consensus crumbling away it apparently makes good politics to be even more sure that AGW is a serious problem. One thing that is amazing about the long pause in global warming is that it is on top of ample evidence, for example, “CRUTem3 has overstated U.S. warming trends during 1973-2011 by at least 50%.”

    Moreover, all of the governments’ GCMs (Global Circulation Models) greatly overstated predicted global warming. We gone from, there’s ‘gonna be a 4-6C rise thanks to SUV-driving Americans to when it stops cooling we need to limit the warming to 2C.

    And, the government climatists now concede that half of the global warming is due to natural causes. Moreover, the government climate change fearmongers finally discovered that the Earth has been the site of previous warming periods, all without any help from humanity. The ‘hockey stick’ has been cracked. “You gotta love these guys ‘discovering’ what all of us have been saying.” ~Joe Bastardi

  42. “To know that you don’t know is best,
    To pretend to know what you do not know is a disease.”

  43. Bob, does anyone have readily available references on deep ocean heat? Is there substance to this current meme, first promulgated by Trenberth?

    • No, it is unproven, and unprovable for years. That’s a convenient truth.
      ==============

      • No evidence. Simply model based, and we all know how well they’ve been performing to date.

        Handy things those models. Twist a few knobs, tighten a few screws, maybe a coupla strategically placed kicks, and voila! “The heat is in the ocean.”

        It’s essentially a band aide, applied in an effort to stop the bleeding while they continue to pray for a miracle resumption of the warming…

      • ” pokerguy | September 22, 2013 at 1:11 pm |

        No evidence. Simply model based, and we all know how well they’ve been performing to date. “

        That is an empty assertion. There are first-order models of ocean heat content that reconcile many of the issues that you seem to be imagining.

        The rate of heat uptake by the ocean provides the link between the SST and global average temperature. This is part of the interlocking pieces of scientific evidence that constitute the climate ‘logic’.

        See elsewhere in this thread for my take:
        http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-384992

  44. “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there.”

    So where do all these graphs showing global heat content that include the heat hiding in the deep ocean come from?

    My skepticism is not founded on the writings of Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, or any other skeptic or lukewarmer. It is founded on the admissions of the climate scientists themselves. Like this one.

    • Right. “Frustratingly.” Also conveniently.

      • pokerguy,

        Yes, how inconvenient would it be if they actually measured the deep ocean, and found no change? It just isn’t worth the risk. Let’s reorder the world energy economy and spend trillions first, then maybe we’ll get around to measuring the actual temperature and/or heat content of the climate.

    • The 300-700m layer is heating faster than the 0-300m layer, even though heat is added at the surface.
      Original Trenberth figure
      http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/deep-ocean-heat-670×440.jpg
      “Ocean heat content from zero to 300 meters deep (grey), 700 meters deep (blue), and total depth (violet). The vertical colored bars indicate a two year interval following volcanic eruptions with a six month and the 1997–1998 El Niño event. On lower right, the linear slopes for a set of global heating rates is given.”
      my blow up of last few years
      http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/deepoceanJPEG_zpsc6585990.jpg

  45. So, the scientists are saying the pause can be explained by small natural variability, and the skeptics are having none of it, but on the other hand everything is large natural variability. Can’t they hold two concepts in their mind at once? Warming from CO2 plus small natural variability explains what has happened since 1980. I would have thought that was a more reasonable view than a large coincidental natural fluctuation that somehow also more rapidly warmed the land, removed Arctic sea ice and raised ocean heat content while giving us the warmest decade on record.

  46. Where’s Gates? Time for a lecture on energy imbalance.

  47. See: “The Future of Ideological Conflict” by Steve Fuller

    Global warming is not about science it is about political science. “The modern political spectrum is an artifact of the seating arrangements at the French National Assembly after the revolution of 1789. To the right of the Assembly’s president sat the supporters of King and Church, while to the left sat their opponents, whose only point of agreement was the need for institutional reform. The distinction capitalized on long-standing cultural associations of right- and left-handedness with, respectively, trust and suspicion – in this case, of the status quo.”

  48. “In the past, these climate change deniers have insisted that variations in the sun’s energy or fluctuations in cosmic rays could be behind the global warming that has been observed in recent decades. Both suggestions are dismissed out of hand by the new report.”

    This thread needs at least one hand clapping in unison to Shaviv & Veizer 2003, “Celestial driver of phanerozoic climate?”. Veizer, the geochemist, was studying oxygen isotope ratios in fossil crustaceans dating back more than 500 million years, a temperature proxy for equatorial oceans during the entire eon of visible life on earth. Veizer is on the record as being close to quitting, as his temperature proxy wasn’t correlating with any ‘known’ driver of climate, including the one he expected to match, CO2.

    Shaviv, the astrophysicist, was asked by someone (a student, I think) what effect supernovas had on our planet, so as an exercise he started on it, working out the orbit of our solar system around the Milky Way center of mass, in and out of the spiral arms. The orbit correlated with carbon 14 records… when we were in a spiral arm, close to other stars (including the dying ones), carbon 14 was at its highest; when between spiral arms, the planet’s carbon-14 was at its lowest. What else matched?

    Shaviv introduced himself to Veizer in an email, telling him he seemed to have a match to his temperature proxy. The two independent lines of inquiry generated data that correlates incredibly well over 500+ million years, and it is impossible for the two to be interdependent, as there is no bloody way for the earth’s temperature to effect the distribution of stars in our galaxy, or our orbit around the galaxy. With weather averaged out, with solar cycles averaged out, with ice ages and Milankovitch cycles averaged out, in geologic time, galactic cosmic ray flux *is* the driver of the great ice ages and hothouse periods in the Phanerozoic, with something of a 6C or 7C peak to peak temperature swing of *equatorial* ocean temperatures (from my eyeball measurement of a Veizer chart).

    We now know, thanks to the CLOUD and SKY experiments, that GCR also have nearly instantaneous effects on the atmosphere and is involved in the creation of precursors to cloud condensation nuclei. How can GCR can be ignored when there’s proof of an effect from geologic time scales all the way down to minutes? The cosmic ray gang have it right. It isn’t everything; it’s a small effect from day to day, year to year, ice age to ice age, but it’s enough to account for much of the late 20th century warming theorized to be due to positive feedbacks in the climate.

    The experiment on the planet is running as I type; solar cycle 24 is incredibly weak, there are signs 25 will be either Daltonish or Maundering. 21st century instrumentation is rather better than what we had in the 17th century, and time will tell. I’m betting on the likes of Shaviv, Veizer, Svensmark, Friis-Christensen, Kirkby and friends, not the current drivers of the IPCC.process.

    • The IPCC has, “dismissed out of hand,” the link between cosmic rays and climate change. We will soon be reading about in the next release of the UN’s AGW propaganda.

      • IIRC, the applicable AR4 WG report claimed in a table that the effect of cosmic rays was poorly understood and very small.

        It’s amazing how poorly you can understand something if you try real hard to not understand it at all.

  49. ‘Daltonish or Maundering’. Wonderful adjectives. For the rest, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.

    H/t Tenney’s Son.
    ============

  50. The ongoing push to squander billions of dollars and sacrifice our economies on the altar of climate change is dangerous nonsense. Like sundry other isms, Climatism is a triumph of belief over evidence, of righteousness over reason. ~Walter Starck

    • Was this $45 billion ‘investment’ a good example why we should let the free market save our economy?
      Re-posted from weekend topics thread:
      Talk about loosing money in the energy market then T-Boone is going to look like an amateur compared to the $45 billion deal put together by some of Wall St. smartest guys. Watch what happens to Energy Future Holdings LLC. later this year when they default on their debt.
      ” Energy Future, formerly TXU Corp, was taken private in 2007 by a consortium including KKR & Co (KKR.N), TPG Capital Management TPG.UL and Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s (GS.N) private equity arm. The $45 billion buyout, the largest-ever leveraged buyout, saddled the company with debt just before a major decline in natural gas prices and energy markets.”
      http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/11/us-energyfuture-restructuring-idUSBRE98A1B220130911
      Who do you think is going to take it in the shorts? Wall St. or the Texas consumers/taxpayers?

      • The Great Global Warming Debate has been an ongoing process in the US since about 1997. Much of the groundwork was surreptitiously laid by companies like Enron and Lehman Brothers that worked behind the curtains in concert with dead and dying Old Europe — especially France — to quietly stab America in the back. Then, as of November 7, 2000 it was certain that George Bush had defeated Al Gore (the EU and UN presidential choice) and the war against reason went mainstream. It has of course been a cat fight ever since

      • Sparrow – do you have more info on this? From what I’ve read, EF is private. How will citizens end up paying anything due to the bankruptcy?

      • “U.S. renewable power generation fell 4 percent in August, compared with the same month a year ago, as Texas wind and other resources underperformed, according to an analysis from research firm Genscape.

        Wind generation in Texas fell 19 percent between July and August, according to Genscape estimates for production for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid.

        Lower Texas wind generation, the nation’s largest wind resource, brought down overall renewable generation figures, Genscape said.”

        http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/09/09/renewable-power-falls-as-texas-wind-underperforms/?cmpid=eefl

      • Texas A&M does a study and finds Americans want more wind power.

        Then, I find this …

        “Texas Offshore Wind Farm Innovation Team to be led by Texas A&M Energy Institute

        The Texas A&M Energy Institute’s Wind Energy Center will lead the Texas Offshore Wind Farm Innovation team as part of the Gulf Offshore Wind (GoWind) Project, which will be the most innovative wind farm built to date and will generate power at peak demand and a high capacity factor.

        The Wind Energy Center is housed in the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), a member of The Texas A&M University System.

        As part of the project, Baryonyx Corporation of Austin has been invited to negotiate a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy for an award under the Wind and Water Energy Program. Subject to the outcome of environmental and feasibility assessments, a future phase of the project would see a three-turbine, 18MW wind farm installed offshore Texas.

        “This project represents an exceptional partnership between Texas universities and industry,” said John Pappas, associate director of the Energy Institute and director of the Wind Energy Center. “The award recognizes Texas’ continued leadership in wind and offshore energy production as well as its ability to innovate and bring real-world solutions to the market.”

        http://tees.tamu.edu/news/2013/01/03/texas-offshore-wind-farm-innovation-team-to-be-led-by-texas-am-energy-institute/

      • A thought… Did these guys use ‘models’ when they decided to buy 10s of billions of Nat. Gas hedged to $7 futures contracts? I’m sure they used economic models to justify the deal but where were the geologist!. Didn’t someone ask DOE, Chesapeake or Exxon for their reservoir and production models? I find it hard to believe the oil/gas industry didn’t help rig the deal since they were the guys selling $7 gas in 2010-?? futures market. I read somewhere Buffet wrote off a billion on TXU bonds last year (tax credit).

      • Sparrow – the burning question on my mind is if they asked Web Hubble Telescope.

      • There are a lot of new LHG terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. These were built to import liquefied natural gas because the US was believed to need to import huge amounts of natural gas as its wells ran out. However, then came fracking and the price of natural gas has collapsed, especially in Texas. They may use them as export terminals.
        Converting the US’s 18-wheeler fleet to LNG would be a jolly good idea. The US government could pay the conversion costs and the oil companies pick up the infrastructure bill for adding LNG to their existing interstate gas stations.
        Once the LNG network is in place, other owners of large vehicles would switch for the cost savings.
        This would drop the US dependence on imported oil, help he balance of payments and drop the price of oil.

      • Doc, You have touched on a important issue. Why can’t I buy a CNG car or truck right now? Until recently the only natural gas car approved for sale in Texas was a dinky Honda Civic. I don’t buy the chicken and egg argument about infrastructure. The oil companies have too much invested in their long term leases and leveraged reservoir valuations. Another possibility is maybe all this cheap natural gas is just a temporary blip and 5 years from now natural gas prices will be back to their long term average of $8-$12 mcf?
        I live 1200′ from a Chesapeake gas well pad. They leased my mineral rights back in 2008, drilled the well in 2011 and have come back three times since then to re-frack the well. There is a 100′ drilling platform there right now with 4″ water lines hooked up to my corner fire hydrant. Averaged over the life of my lease (1/3 acre) so far they are paying out about $1.75 a month. If they had told me that before I they offered the lease I wouldn’t have done it. My neighbors feel the same way, we got ripped off.

      • There is a 100′ drilling platform there right now with 4″ water lines hooked up to my corner fire hydrant. Averaged over the life of my lease (1/3 acre) so far they are paying out about $1.75 a month.”

        So:
        “One acre-foot of water (the amount of water covering 1 acre to a depth of 1 foot) equals 326,000 gallons or 43,560 cubic feet of water, and weighs 2.7 million pounds.”
        http://www.prwcd.org/water_conv.html
        They have used 108,666.7 gallons of water.
        “The average family of four can use 400 gallons of water every day, and, on average, approximately 70 percent of that water is used indoors.”
        http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/indoor.html
        So same as average family of four uses in 272 days?
        Are getting much from this operation?

    • Such closed minds by the IPCC and cli – sci team.
      So much closing down of enquiry by their pal review.

  51. “MJ’s analysis seems much more reasonable to me, but this raises the question as to how long can the pause go?” I’m more interested in how much longer “denial” of observation viz a vi modeling can go.

  52. An interesting take on the AR5 to come from Rupert Darwall, author of The Age of Global Warming, A History. With a brief cite to our blog hostess.

    “In a way similar to that in which medieval astronomers rationalized planets’ being in the “wrong” position as they orbited the Earth, it can be argued that global warming has continued but that its effect has been temporarily offset by natural variability. There might well be something to this. The problem for the IPCC in using this argument is that it has consistently downplayed the role of natural variability, as MIT’s Richard Lindzen has pointed out. Indeed, British climate scientist Hubert Lamb, writing in 1982 before climate science became deeply politicized, wrote that it is impossible to define a range of natural variation of climate, since study of the longer-term climate record showed that the range of variation is itself subject to variation.”

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359034/climate-change-circus-rupert-darwall

  53. Germany’s progressive conservatives won a big election. Not sure it’s going to make much difference. But maybe it’s like Arctic ice “recovery”. A tiny fact that could be a harbinger of some retreat from the progressive CAGW lunacy.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-22/merkel-wins-as-fdp-losses-leave-ally-unclear-exit-polls-show.html

  54. Will Hutton

    “Compared with what is happening in some drug and cancer research, climate change science is remarkably honest, reproducible and subject to open criticism: the IPCC insists on the best methodology”

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/climate-change-scientific-truth-collective

    • My thoughts were similar.

      • Make it so No. 1…

        “This is terrifying. The decades ahead will witness our planet become progressively uninhabitable for hundreds of millions of people…”

        Then there was, Nurse Chapel, she was a tough cookie too.

  55. I saw this at WUWT, by richardscortney. I like the definitions very much.

    “Science is an attempt to obtain the closest possible approximation to ‘truth’ by seeking information which contradicts existing understanding(s) and amending or rejecting existing understanding(s) in the light of obtained information.

    Pseudoscience accepts an existing understanding as being ‘true’ then seeking information which supports the understanding while ignoring and/or rejecting information which contradicts existing understanding.”

    • Check out Feynman’s view of pseudoscientists. These are like the blog “skeptics” that haven’t done any of the hard science themselves, but throw things in for discussion from the sidelines even purporting to be qualified. Many here will recognize what Feynman is talking about among the “skeptics”.

  56. Since the “pause” was unexpected, the modelers cannot predict how long it will last.

    FEAR of nuclear annihilation in 1945 induced the crisis that plagues society now:

    http://theinternetpost.net/2013/09/22/censored-cia-asset-susan-lindauer-911/

  57. So, the reason for the “pause” is that the heat is now being shifted into the deep ocean, waiting there to come back up to us and explode like a timebomb.

    But…. There’s a couple of little problems.

    (A) We have barely begun to measure the temps of the deep ocean. What little data we do have on that does seem to show some warming, but we have a very short history of being able to measure that deep, and we have a very small amount of data collected on that area of the ocean. It’s like taking the temps of Paris, Dallas, Rio, Los Angeles, Vegas, and New York City, and determining the temp of the entire planet with just those temperatures.

    (B) We have been measuring ocean temps from 0 to 700 meters with some accuracy for some time. The methodologies on gathering that data have improved steadily over the years. So far, unless I missed it, there has not been anyone who has shown the path this heat transfer has taken. That’s a problem. It can’t magically teleport from one place to another. It’s possible it got past us, but with the extensive coverage by ARGO and other ocean temp measuring devices, it does seem to be a stretch.

    (C) If the heat IS being transfered to the deep ocean…. Why now???? Why not 30 years ago???? Why not 100 years ago, when the Earth started warming in the first place?????

    “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,”

    I’m sorry, but as someone who has a but of a scientific background, I find the fact that the “Deep Ocean Absorption” hypothesis is already so widely accepted as THE explanation for the pause to be just horrible science.

    Mike Alexander…. Geology School Drop-Out! :-)

  58. If there is one thing the skeptics believe it is the PDO.

    Are you saying you DON’T believe the PDO exists?

    Note that I didn’t even mention the PDO. I reffered to measures of ocean temps, which is a measure that includes all the oceans, not just the surface of the Pacific.

  59. Heat travels downward into the oceans when AGW promoters like it to.

    Heat travels upwards and out of the oceans when AGW promoters like it to.

    Don’t you see how it all makes sense. AGW explains it all.

    Andrew

  60. Dr. Curry:
    “…how long can the pause go?  I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040…”

    Your above statement has me wondering if you have some work in process that will shed light on your above numbers? But that may be wishful thinking on my part.

  61. “I would get nervous if the temperature continues to pause more than 5 years more. The we would really need to question our climate models. But I also do not expect a cooling.” (ML)”

    It seems to me that global CO2 levels have risen about 100 ppm and result hasn’t been much warming. It took over 50 years.
    For CO2 levels to rise another 100 ppm it should take another 50 years.
    And there is little reason to assume another 100 ppm CO2 would have any more effect than what has occurred over the last century.
    This is assuming the theory of greenhouse effect is somewhat accurate.
    The idea that something could dramatically change is based not knowing-
    it’s being scared of the dark.
    The question of whether or not it will cool, seems to me to be dependent
    on the Sun’s activity and the volcanic activity on Earth.
    I don’t think we should have much more confidence in what the Sun’s going to do over the next couple decades, than having confidence in global temperature prediction. And tend to think our ability to predict Earth volcanic activity over next couple decades is not better than global temperature or the Sun’s activity.

    Just looking temperature over last 10,000 years, the warming periods seems to generally last longer than cooling periods, so perhaps house odds, favor continuing warming. But we could continue a warming trend like previous warming trend and still have lowering temperature over the next few decades. If temperatures were go to 1970 levels, it’s still broadly continuing a warming trend, even if drop below 1850 levels for a few decades [resulting in severe affects upon global crop production] it still
    could be continuation of warming, if temperature were to slowly recover within a few decades. I doubt temperature could lower to 1970 or 1850 levels. It would require lowest solar activity and probably some large volcanic eruptions. Both are possible, but both are not likely.

    If you could assume we have the same as average solar and volcanic activity of the 20th Century, would tend to think we will get generally the same rise in temperature as we had in the last 100 years. And such slight warming over next few decades, will cause animal extinction, and will melt Greenland in some dramatic fashion, and will continue cause increase in crop production and a general increase in global vegetation. And will continue to disprove climate projections of IPCC.

    I see no reason to assume that past climate projection will become true in the future. There is no reason to assume there is any merit to the runaway effect due to the increase of CO2 levels.

    Reason assuming one is aware that CO2 levels in Earth history has been much higher than today’s levels, would inform you that there can not be a runaway effect due to CO2.
    Reason would tell you that since there is no ancient ice on Earth, that this fact alone, tells you earth has been warmer than it is today. But the results of studying earth climate in the past, indicates we currently in an unusual cool period, and that human evolution coincided with global cooling period. And in terms of our current interglacial period, there has much warmer periods during this time, and that the long trend over 8000 year period has been a slight cooling.

    What should be interesting, is what has caused to cooling periods- and the Little ice Age being the last of such cooling periods- in our current interglacial period. Since IPCC has spent the last decade denying that the Little Ice Age existed as global effect, perhaps first a confession of this scientific sin, would good start for the IPCC.

    It seems to me that a common mistake, is the assumption that since our current interglacial began with periods of very rapid warming, that somehow indicates that rapid warming is currently possible. Which to me seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion. It seems to ignore that fact that is was very cold and sun can warm up world very quickly.
    That have more than a meter rise in sea level per century due to the large amount ice caps which can be melted. If you transported huge amounts of glacial snow to Kansas- and global temperature wasn’t effected by mountain of snow, you could expect this snow to melt in the coming years. Normally Kansas isn’t a place for snow to stay permanently.
    But if “something” is causing global cooling, then perhaps Kansas can cool enough so the snow persists and even increases each year. But the normal condition of Kansas in last billion years, is it much warmer than it is currently- hardly surprisingly than snow melts in Kansas.

    We have childishly simple rules of more CO2 creates warming, and more snow makes cooling. But what should be known by now, is rising CO2 level *follows* warming. And same could be with snow- it follows cooling. So i have no problem with regional effects of snow build up causing regional cooling- more snow makes it cooler. Obvious.
    But it doesn’t seem as obvious when one thinks of it on global scale- particularly if understand that tropics and tropical ocean is Earth’s heat engine. I would tend to think glaciers are result of cooling, and when whatever is causing the cooling to stop, glaciers melt.
    So, what’s causes cooling? If it could determine what caused the cooling of Little Ice Age, this might help explain glacial and interglacial periods.
    And knowing what causes cooling seems far more important to human beings and welfare of life on this planet, than what causes warming.

    • The LIA was never in doubt as a global phenomenon. It was a part of the general Holocene trend (which is a Milankovitch trend by the way), until something else started happening more recently. I won’t speculate what that was.
      http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
      The MWP is not as well established.
      Man is adding four times as much CO2 in the 21st century as it did in the 20th. This may have an even bigger effect than you see there.

      • “The LIA was never in doubt as a global phenomenon.”
        Not by anyone who was reasonable or not trying to deceive.

        ” It was a part of the general Holocene trend (which is a Milankovitch trend by the way).”
        As far I know, the general cooling of last 8000 years could said to be part of Milankovitch Cycle, but not specifically the LIA. LIA is very brief period
        in relation to the Milankovitch Cycle. Could it be some tick related to Milankovitch Cycle?
        I suppose it’s possible. It’s the type of question I am asking.

        “I won’t speculate what that was.
        http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
        The MWP is not as well established.”

        I don’t think anything from realclimate is worth much.
        Watts up:
        “Q: Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?

        A: Our study did not directly address this question because the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century. …”
        http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/31/marcott-issues-a-faq-on-thei-paper/

        It seems it’s mixing apples and oranges to splice it to temperature proxies
        of higher time resolutions.
        It seems mike is doing continuing his tired tricks.
        But perhaps there some value in Marcott work. But it seems to me it wouldn’t neccessarily show MWP, and indicate a much stronger cooler long term trend- it does seems to indicate a strong effect from the Milankovitch Cycle.
        And seems to indicate the next glacier period could be much closer than I think it is. I will have to check up more on this work.

      • In terms resolution, I think Ross Mckitrick explains well:
        “This isn’t just a filibuster, they are defending themselves on the grounds that their paper made an incredibly subtle misrepresentation and it’s the reader’s fault for not noticing. Without the closing uptick, the main implication of their reconstruction is that, in the 20th century, we experienced the coldest conditions of the Holocene. With the uptick, we experienced nearly the warmest. The sharp uptick in the instrumental record can only be compared against their reconstruction if they can show their low-frequency proxies are capable of registering such events. If the 20th century portion of their reconstruction does not have the same uptick as the instrumental record, we would conclude that it could have missed similar swings in earlier centuries as well, so the absence of such swings in the earlier part of their graph tells us nothing about the presence or absence of decadal and century-scale warming events….”
        http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/31/the-marcott-filibuster/

        From 1900 to present day 2013 we are one dot- though actually due measurement errors not even one dot.

        It’s proving in terms of broad conditions [such as, ocean average temperature which takes centuries to change and/or some other long cyclical factors], we are in a very cold part of our current Holocene.
        But tells us nothing about our current average global temperature other we *were* in a very deep hole in terms from a time period of about couple centuries ago [and for duration of centuries].

        Though I was aware we were in a very cold period during LIA from results of various previous works- the question is, do most people who worried about the planet becoming unbearable warm also realize this?

        The graph does seems to indicate that LIA was colder than had considered it to be.
        I am not convinced it’s accurate.
        I do tend to think it was the coldest period in latter part of Holocene but not as cold as graph seems to indicate- and I thought severity of cool conditions was partially due to the longer duration of the cooler period, roughly 5+ centuries of cooler conditions

  62. It is about time that the discussion moved on from the useless speculations of the IPCC modelers to forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based the idea of identifying quasi- repetitive , quasi cyclic patterns in the temperature and driver data provided in a series of my posts at
    http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
    Here are the conclusions of the most recent post.
    “To summarize- Using the 60 and 1000 year quasi repetitive patterns in conjunction with the solar data leads straightforwardly to the following reasonable predictions for Global SSTs
    1 Continued modest cooling until a more significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
    2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
    3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
    4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
    5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
    6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
    7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
    8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and more CO2 would help maintain crop yields .
    9 Warning !!
    The Solar Cycles 2,3,4 correlation with cycles 21,22,23 would suggest that a Dalton minimum could be imminent. The Livingston and Penn Solar data indicate that a faster drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures might even be on the horizon. If either of these actually occur there would be a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
    How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn’t lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigor for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up (. i.e. the spread of model their model outcomes is too narrow and doesn’t encompass the real world range},This is where scientific judgment comes in – some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others. A past record of successful forecasting such as indicated above is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure – say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that certainty drops rapidly. I am sure ,however, that it will prove closer to reality than anything put out by the IPCC, Met Office or the NASA group. In any case this is a Bayesian type forecast- in that it can easily be amended on an ongoing basis as the Temperature and Solar data accumulate.”

    • I like it! High tech tea leaf reading :) Supposedly, if you actually know what the mean should be, your success rate increases.

    • Dr Norman Page,

      It is about time that the discussion moved on from the useless speculations of the IPCC modelers to forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based the idea of identifying quasi- repetitive , quasi cyclic patterns in the temperature and driver data

      I suggest there is a more important discussion that needs to be had.

      it’s about the “So What?”. By which I mean so what if the average near surface temperature of the planet warms by 1C, 2C, 3C … or whatever is a realistic upper limit. We have virtually no idea a bout the answer to this question. Richard Tol, who is one of the world authorities on estimating the economic impacts of global warming, reckons warming would be net beneficial up to about 2C.

      Tol all also points out that we have very few (about 17) studies that can be used for estimating the global costs and benefits of GW. William Nordhaus says the same.

      So, I suggest it is the lack of knowledge of the damage function that is the major weakness in our knowledge.

      • So, I suggest it is the lack of knowledge of the damage function that is the major weakness in our knowledge

        Yet you clearly think the economic damage won’t be much, or even beneficial up to 2 C.

        How do you come to this conclusion, if in the next paragraph you assert that studies on the subject are scant.

        To whom will the benefits acrue?
        Who will suffer the damages?
        Who says our dT will be limited to 2 C?.

      • I don’t know who will benefit or suffer from any warming that might occur, but don’t underestimate life.

        “A bustling airport would hardly seem the place to find a new species of reclusive animal, but a team of California biologists recently found a shy new species of legless lizard living at the end of a runway at Los Angeles International Airport.

        What’s more, the same team discovered three additional new species of these distinctive, snake-like lizards that are also living in some inhospitable-sounding places for wildlife: at a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield, among oil derricks in the lower San Joaquin Valley and on the margins of the Mojave desert.”

        http://news.discovery.com/animals/new-species-of-legless-lizard-found-at-lax-130918.htm

      • I don’t know who will benefit or suffer from any warming that might occur, but don’t underestimate life.

        And much life has gone extinct from rapid climate change.

        Does that constitute underestimating them?

      • “David Appell | September 22, 2013 at 7:26 pm |

        I don’t know who will benefit or suffer from any warming that might occur, but don’t underestimate life.

        And much life has gone extinct from rapid climate change.

        Does that constitute underestimating them?”

        It’s there is little evidence of climate change causing life to become extinct.
        Massive floods can kill a lot of creatures- that may or may not cause extinction in specialized and regional creatures.
        But floods are not just caused by climate changes.
        Impactors can create ocean wave 1 km high and moving faster than airplane. That would regional affect- creatures that live near the coast.
        Most people accept the idea that space rock somewhere around 10 km
        impacted Earth and was largely responsible for ending dinosaurs- which were dominate species globally.
        Space rocks have caused extinctions- it’s possible a space rock was responsible for extinction of large animals in North America.

        Another normal way of extinction is predation and replacement by other species- humans have done this, but so have all other creatures living on earth- even plants do it. But humans are very successful animal. Going from some tropical primate [btw, that specific species currently no longer exists] to a creature living throughout world and very high population for any kind of primate, due to it’s ability to change the environment to suit it’s purposes. It has higher level of intelligence and has ability of developing technology.
        Ants also another successful technological creature- they farm and they keep herds various creatures. But nothing matches humans in their ability, and some day humans will venture into the galaxy.

        So you got space rocks, floods caused by various things, massive volcanoes, microbial and viral changes and adaptions, creatures evolving into other creatures, creatures becoming more successful and depriving other creatures of resources it was accustomed to.
        But climate change in itself has been changing since the beginning of life- and weather is more dramatic.
        It is almost like saying sunlight causes extinctions.

      • David Appell

        Yet you clearly think the economic damage won’t be much, or even beneficial up to 2 C.

        How do you come to this conclusion, if in the next paragraph you assert that studies on the subject are scant.

        I was quoting Richard Tol, a world expert on the economic impacts, for bot statements.
        Figure 1 here: http://www.lomborg.com/sites/default/files/Congress_testimony_April_2013_3.pdf
        Tol: https://sites.google.com/site/climateconomics/ , p103, “There are only 17 estimates of the total economic impact of climate change, and our confidence is thus low.”
        Nordhaus: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Accom_Notes_100507.pdf, p23: “The major issue at this stage is that the database for impact studies continues to be relatively small.”

        To whom will the benefits acrue?
        Who will suffer the damages?

        Read this:
        http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Balance_2nd_proofs.pdf
        Run RICE (2013) if you want to dig deeper:
        http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/

        Who says our dT will be limited to 2 C?.

        Re-read my comment. It seems you’ve jumped in with a comment without having read my comment. Rather revealing, don’t you think.

  63. I don’t believe in making predictions, but here’s one:

    Climate Etc will continue to be blighted by interminable sub-threads, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, mcuh heat and little light, for at least as long as the pause goes on (unless Judith has retired from blogging before it ends).

  64. Figure 1.4 from Chapter 1 AR5 has the warmista pointing in all directions at once

    Very satisfying :)

  65. it is certain that uncertainty confuses everybody; because everybody is barking up the wrong tree.

    oxygen & nitrogen are the greenhouse gases, not CO2!

  66. curryja | September 22, 2013 at 9:25 am |

    “The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.”

    If Alfred Hitchcock had had climate science for inspiration he wouldn’t have needed grave robber Ed Gein. The horror indeed.

    Seriously though there’s nothing that can be done at this point no matter how the CO2 cookie crumbles except find an economical alternative to fossil fuel which is doable because it’s a biological engineering problem. Nature already has all the bits we need working and documented in DNA. Sunlight + CO2 + H20 directly convert to all the usual hydrocarbon suspects that power our civilization. There’s plenty of sunlight and non-potable water. CO2 might actually get scarce though.

    • JC wrote:
      “The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.”

      I suspect the other side feels exactly the same way about the contrarian cabal.

      The only way to win is by producing better science, not complaining about social dynamics. Better science will always win the day, and without it no idea can ever succeed.

      It’s really that simple — the better ideas always win, in the end.

      • Yes, if we use a sports or competition metaphor, the better ideas always win in the end.

        The issue is that this should be a route, considering the poor quality of the competition. Yet, the “fans” don’t seem to be able to discern the difference between good science and bad science. They can’t even pick out the obvious bits of krank science that floats around this comment area.

        I like to compare Team Denier to the hapless Washington Generals basketball team. Like the Generals, Team Denier appear to provide “deliberately ineffective opposition” — clearly the real scientists can dribble circles around them, yet the “fans” somehow equate this to mean that the Generals are “winning”.

      • If we are going to use sports analogies, how about the Consensus Team being a bit like the Cubs. They have real talent from year to year. They get plenty of publicity. But at the end of the day, they are losers.

      • Chief Hydrologist

        The overweening smugness of a nincompoop.

        Warming and cooling of the planet in a period is:

        d(W&H)/dt = power in – power out.

        W&H is work and heat.

        Very simple aye? It is a perfectly accurate 1st order differential physical formulation based on the 1st law of thermodynamics. Irrefutable and exact physics.

        And the world is cooling since the 1998/2001 climate shift. Which was captured in two different ways.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ProjectEarthshine-albedo_zps87fc3b7f.png.html?sort=3&o=4

        ‘What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of Earth.’ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822105042.htm

        The recognition of decadal climate shifts is an example of better science – the new paradigm of dynamical complexity in climate at all scales. These decadal regimes persist for 20 to 40 years.

        Better science will triumph indeed as the world doesn’t warm for a decade to three more.

      • Here is a bit of Globetrotter skillz that will cause The Chief to leave his shoes.
        http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385215

        BTW, The Chief is the GM of the Washington Generals and the Cap’n D is of course the captain.

        “If we are going to use sports analogies, how about the Consensus Team being a bit like the Cubs. “

        Sure, the real scientists are like Ernie Banks of the Cubs. Every day is a great day to do climate science!
        http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/ernie_banks.html

      • Chief Hydrologist

        You’re a legend in your own lunchtime webster.

        http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385231

      • Chief Hydrologist

        You’re an utter nincompoop webster. Globetrotter skills? Sh_t. RAOTFFL

        http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385231

      • The team went into the fourth quarter with a nearly insurmountable lead, and has since been intercepted repeatedly, lost numerous fumbles and run the wrong way for a touchdown three times.
        =====================================

      • You’re not allowed to touch a shooter in basketball. But say the shooter pulls a knife. Are you allowed to touch the shooter then? The answer is yes because when the knife came out we’re no longer playing basketball. Climate science stopped being science when the Climategate shenanigans were revealed.

      • The answer is yes because when the knife came out we’re no longer playing basketball. Climate science stopped being science when the Climategate shenanigans were revealed.

        S/B

        The answer is yes because when the knife came out we’re no longer playing basketball. Climate science stopped being science when the Climategate shenanigans were revealed started being pulled.

        There. I fixed it for you.

      • Excellent correction AK. But was that 2004, 1995, 1988 or earlier? There are PhD theses in each of those dates, and rich ground for others.
        =======================

      • @kim…

        I was actually working within David Springer’s frame of reference (and, AFAIK, our hostess’). I’m not sure I agree; it depends on the definition of “Science” being used.

        I know of nothing revealed in Climategate that’s out of line with what’s used in other fields, in defending the paradigm from “revolutionary science” (sensu Kuhn). For instance, the contretemps around the discovery of homo floresiensis, or the treatment of James’ et al. suggestions that the “dark ages” separating the Mediterranean Bronze and Iron ages was a 20th century myth.

        There are two differences: first, “Climate Science” is being used as a rationale for major socialist political/socioeconomic initiatives, and in any event changes that would be very expensive in terms of general lifestyle.

        Second: the entire AGW paradigm is a politically manufactured paradigm. It grew under the political auspices of the IPCC, a political organization created for and dedicated to political ends. The only even vaguely similar phenomenon that I know of is Biblical Minimalism, which evidently has been manufactured in support of a Palestianian political objective.

      • AK,

        Second: the entire AGW paradigm is a politically manufactured paradigm. It grew under the political auspices of the IPCC, a political organization created for and dedicated to political ends.

        Do you think that your above comment is consistent with the following direct quote from the 1980 book Energy in a Finite World published by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, IIASA.

        A continuation of increasing fossil fuel usage and tropical deforestation would, as far as our knowledge of the complex carbon cycle (sources and sinks of carbon and transfer between them) is concerned, lead to a further increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide.

        A doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, according to state-of-the-art climate models, would lead to an increase of the average surface temperature of 1.5 to 3.0 K.

        The report concludes that climate change may at some point limit use of coal, but that the level of understanding was at time (in 1980) not mature enough for final conclusions. One recommendation of the book is

        Since such policy decisions can become difficult and very costly to reverse, it is most important to maintain flexibility in energy supply policies at this time.

        All that was written based on the findings of the people doing the research at IIASA, The group was more technocratic than environmentalist. Their main worry was in the long term energy availability and in the long delays inherent in changes of the energy supply. The climate issue was just one of the constraints that they considered in their work.

        The worry about the climate change has it’s origin in science, not in politics. It was not created by IPCC, IPCC was created to study, how serious the issue really is..

      • It seems pretty obvious that the IPCC was not serious about studying the seriousness, but rather was hysterical. These hommes serieux were instead fabuleux.
        ================

      • “The worry about the climate change has it’s origin in science…”

        Maybe, but the fertile ground was politics. Origin in science doesn’t mean scientifically correct or real.

      • Pekka, the last best hope for the alarmists is an occult explanation, that the missing heat went into the local abyss rather than the abyss of deep space. Surely you can see this. Surely, your eyes don’t deceive you.
        ====================

      • The IPCC was created to get our MONEY!

      • @Pekka Pirilä…

        According to the Cover page for the report at the IIASA Web site:

        The authors warn that increased use of fossil fuels could be constrained by the resulting CO2 releases into the atmosphere, which some scientists believe will lead to climatic changes. [my bold]

        This fits with my (admittedly poorly researched) understanding that the situation in climate science was then at a “pre-paradigm” level in Kuhnian terms.

        The transition from pre-paradigm “educated guess” to “paradigm” was, AFAIK substantially influenced by political motivations. IIRC even as late as 1995, it was necessary for the summary for policymakers to substantially misrepresent the scientific opinions of the participants in the study. The primary paradigm-building process appears (to me) to have been subsequent to this event.

      • AK,

        I wonder what you mean by paradigm. To me it’s the overall understanding that was formed based on the 1966 paper of Manabe and Wetherald and that had reached the attention of energy systems analysts by 1980. The paradigm is thus almost 50 years old and has changed very little over this period.

        More is known about all the details, nothing has contradicted anything of the basics. What’s disappointing is that the climate sensitivity is even now known very imprecisely. The stated uncertainties remain similar as they were then (perhaps even wider).

      • AK,
        Pekka is right. The technocrats have been leading the charge for decades.

        King Hubbert, who predicted cumulative oil back in the 1950’s was a leader in the technocrat movement, and was a big backer of the push to nuclear.

        It has always been about systems science and the climate-aspect is part of the system. I bet Hubbert would chuckle as to how AGW research is helping his cause if he were alive today. He would have appreciated the focus on alternative and renewable energies to make up for the crude oil deficit that the world is facing.

        Google King Hubbert and technocracy.

      • @Pekka Pirilä…

        I haven’t studied the paper you referenced in detail (yet), but AFAIK much of the study of non-linear dynamics (esp. in the ’90’s and later) have rendered the type of modelling used in it completely obsolete. Else why the major focus on models purporting to emulate the non-linear aspects of the globe with ever more “sophisticated” coupled GCM’s?

        AFAIK the contribution of cloudy air (“cloud feedback”) has always been completely uncertain, and the “paradigm” involved in modern modelling has claimed to determine the “sensitivity” including that contribution.

      • Webster, “Pekka is right. The technocrats have been leading the charge for decades. ”

        Right, but the Technocrats were overruled by the Scaredicrates. You should also not that the 1.5 to 3.0 C was based on the best available models of 1970s. Technocrats tend to stay up on technology and not dwell in the past. Scaredicrats tend to dwell, and nervously recite unrealistic possibilities. .

      • Gad, I’m jealous of ‘scardiecrats’.
        ================

      • The “Technocrats” strike me as just one more of the utopian kook-squads that have flourished during the last century or so. I was aware of “peak oil”, but always classed it with other Malthusian nonsense, usually used as an excuse to try to impose some utopian scheme. According to Wiki:

        Hubbert believed that solar power would be a practical renewable energy replacement for fossil fuels, and that nuclear energy in breeder reactors would be able to sustain us for centuries.[6]

        Certainly different from the sort of nonsense centered around the IPCC.

        I’d agree with him about solar power, which seems on track to do exactly what he predicted, with an exponential decrease in cost/price consistent with becoming the cheapest form of energy in 3-5 decades. Nuclear power also has the technical capacity he thought, IMO, although the risk from terrorism probably makes it unworkable as the primary mainstay of future power.

        I suppose it’s only to be expected that engineers, used to having a hammer and assuming everything they see is a nail, would try to base political decisions on the sort of simplistic models they had then, and have today. The obvious deficiency of such models in really replicating the behavior of very complex non-linear systems probably wasn’t apparent until Chaos Theory got well underway, and even today doesn’t seem to be apparent to many in the climate-modelling community. (Barring Tsonis etc.)

      • I am not even sure what AK is arguing about.

        He marginalizes the oil depletion gurus, while marveling at the new energy sources that will take over for fossil fuel.

        That’s what political single-mindedness will do to you.

  67. Some things that I have learned about climate science by reading articles about climate change and commentary from people who study such things, a large part of which came from Dr. Curry’s site:

    The most notable: all sides apparently agree that neglecting minor ‘waviness’ related to seasons and such, the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising monotonically since we began monitoring it regularly.

    Second, the ‘temperature of the earth (TOE)’ has been doing something since we became concerned about it–without ever defining it, but there is no general agreement among the contending factions as to exactly WHAT. Some say it has continued to rise for the last 15 years or so, others that it has declined, yet others contend that it has essentially flatlined. All are apparently analyzing the same data. As an outsider, that tells me that the TOE is not strongly influenced by CO2 and that regardless of what is actually driving climate change, it doesn’t really matter as long as the changes are so minor that experts cannot even agree as to the SLOPE of the TOE data, never mind what portion of the change in the TOE, if any, is anthropogenic.

    With others here however I DO actually consider CAGW to pose an existential threat to our civilization. Not because of any changes in climate, which have obviously been so minor that no one can agree as to their nature*, but because of the actions that have been taken and continue to be taken by governments to ‘halt climate change’. Those ARE dangerous and, coincidentally, the plot of their escalating damage, unlike the empirical TOE, WOULD seem to resemble the notorious ‘hockey stick’

    *Not strictly true: EVERY ‘disruptive event’ is followed immediately by news stories quoting a menagerie of climate experts who cite the event as clear evidence of not only climate change, but anthropogenic climate change. The Washington Post, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/10/drought-helped-caused-syrias-war-will-climate-change-bring-more-like-it/) and at least ten other journals, including U. S. News, Salon, National Journal, CNN, and NPR seem confident that climate change was at least partly responsible for the ongoing conflict in Syria. On the other hand, the national news stories citing positive effects for climate change are pretty thin on the ground. I can think of zero, but I may have missed one or two.

    • lemiere jacques

      why people look a tt toe wihtout even defining it is very meaningful.
      It says they assume that there is the sam warming signal in whatever part of the climate system. so you can average a set of temperatures and say look that s my warning signal.
      Huh , if the warming is not homogeneous you have to much more careful and come back to measure total energy..

  68. Of course, if the heat is going to the deep ocean there is a grave risk that it will wake up Godzilla.

    • RoHa
      Great scene in the old James Mason movie of Jules Verne
      story, ‘Journey to the Centre of The Earth,’the terrible lizards
      in the sunken city of Atlanta. ) Quite a perfect film in every
      respect if yer can get hold of it.
      Bts

  69. “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”

    Sounds like a pretty unenlightened British Professor, how can he convincingly get any point over to an army doubters never mind his own students?. He should keep up with the times there has been plenty of measurement of the deep ocean by several different bodies. He should link up with someone like Sarah Purkey at Washington University to hand him the measurements if he is interested to see outside of his own academic haze. I believe that the deep sea temperatures have risen most in the Antarctic.

    • redskylite

      Reading ‘University’ used to be a polytechnic so its not in the top grade.

      Having said that there is deep ocean and there is the ‘abyssal’ deep. Perhaps he is referring to the latter where the number of studies is extremely limited.

      When reviewing the draft of AR5 the IPCC referenced these studies but when I asked to see them they could not produce them. Perhaps they have become available in the last year. However, what is certain is that our knowledge of abyssal heat is very limited and we really have no figures from the past to compare it with reliably.
      tonyb

      • redskylite

        I am being unfair to Reading University which of course has a reasonable reputation in certain fields. I had a jaundiced view of them as a polytechnic (not literally one) rather than a proper University as I lived relatively close and knew they ran some strange courses.

        They closed their physics dept 5 or 10 years ago and seemed to retrench from science towards other fields. They have a climate change facility based there which issues all sorts of dire warnings about the UK climate
        tonyb

      • All I know of Reading U is that Arthur “I am the God of hellfire, and I bring you: fire!” studied politics & philosophy there. I was on the corner of the stage at the Middle Earth basement club in 1968 when his roadie inadverdently set the place on fire. Unintended excitement. I can’t say whether or not he was a typical Reading graduate.

      • Faustinio

        Your anecdote exactly describes locals opinion at the time of Reading U

        tonyb

      • tonyb:
        When reviewing the draft of AR5 the IPCC referenced these studies but when I asked to see them they could not produce them.

        What? Can this be true? Please expound.

      • Yep, CiT, it is that bad, that fabulous.
        ===========

      • Faustino, you saw the legendary Arthur Brown performing “Fire” with authentic stage props? Awesome. I am green with envy.

        I am a fan of Arthur’s, have most of his recordings (he got a bit strange towards the end of his career, though) and can attest that he is one of the greatest vocalists of his era.

        As far as Reading University is concerned, it is a leading source of alarmist propaganda masquerading as science. It seems as though someone influential there decided to make a play for raising their profile by investing heavily in catastrophic predictions. It’s not a long term strategy that I would endorse.

      • climatereason, no, Reading is one of the traditional universities before the expansion. It has always had one of the highest regarded meteorology departments in the country at least back to the 60’s or 70’s.

      • “He should keep up with the times there has been plenty of measurement of the deep ocean by several different bodies.”

        Plenty? There are still issues with coverage in surface air temps and sea surface temps. But there are “plenty” of measurements of the deep sea?

        From Real Climate, 2011:

        “Third, if the forcings are close to what we expect, we should anticipate that the deeper ocean (below 700m) is taking up some of the slack.

        However, it is the case that none of these studies prove that these effects are happening in the real world – they are merely suggestive of what we might strongly expect.”

        http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/10/global-warming-and-ocean-heat-content/

        All the discussion of deep sea ocean heat content that I have seen have been based on modeling and limited measurements. Not “plenty of measurement.”

  70. Well I think the Natural Energy Lab of Hawaii could provide good deep ocean temperature stats and they are a commercial enterprise. I think that the Professor should make an effort as his helplessness and frustration embarrasses me as a fellow Englishman especially aired on a US blog by the chair of a US University. Ouch I am in pain, we are not all characters from Monty Python or buffoons like Lord Monckton.

  71. Redskylite

    I think Ted Shepherd is Canadian

    http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR441851.aspx

    Interesting to see the Grantham and Met Office connection. He seems to be an atmospheric scientist rather than an ocean expert but having said that he is part of a climate change group that participates at all the big events AND is related to the Met Office.

    As I say the IPCC could not come up with the studies on abyssal warming when I directly asked them. Perhaps they will be in the AR5. Not long to wait now.

    If you can provide some links to relevant data from the Hawaii facility we can see what is supposed to be out there.

    tonyb

    • redskylite

      Here is the annual report of the organisation you cited

      http://nelha.hawaii.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/NELHA-FY2012-Annual-Report-website-post.pdf

      I don’t think their brief covers the aspects you had thought. Their definition of deep ocean seems to be 1000 metres which are reasonably covered by argo and other devices. Abyssal temperatures- which presumably are what Shepherd and Trenberth are interested in- are way below that and until AR5 comes out I am not aware of any reliable indicators of temperature that deep.
      tonyb

      • I am sorry, I am retired and am well into my 60’s. I get notified daily of most of the new papers relating to climate matters (as a retired modeller – I still retain an interest), I have seen several recently regarding deep ocean temperature measurement and equipment that is used at multi depths. Unfortunately I cannot remember the source and yes I do not remember how long they have been monitoring, it maybe not too long. But we have to go with what we have got, statistics build up over time, just saying it hasn’t been long enough is not good enough if they are showing a pronounced upwards climb in my opinion. After all we are gambling with so many things.

      • Redskylite as a 73 year old I advise you to never apologise for being retired! The discourse on this blog keeps my mind working and this has to be good for me and my family and friends, because retirement is perilously close to mental decay otherwise!

      • redskylite

        You have nothing at all to apologise for.

        Your excellent comment sent me off on various journeys where I was able to re appraise my (jaundiced) opinion of Reading University, read about Ted Shepherd and his past career, follow up on the Hawaii connection and best of all read up on Sarak Purkey who as you rightly say is involved with deep ocean studies. I found this;

        http://www.wcrp-climate.org/conference2011/posters/C37/C37_Johnson_TH83A.pdf

        It seems to be implied that the warming at extreme depths is due to the loss of deep ocean cold water and in another paper she identifies the enormous amounts of cold water that seem to have moved elsewhere (rather than been warmed)

        I shall examine the relevant section of AR5 with interest and look out for her name so may return to this subject.
        tonyb

      • Tony-
        Since deep ocean heat seems to be the lynch pin of much of the debate I am most interested in what you find out about the issue. I would like to see a whole thread about it, so if there are some significant findings, perhaps Judith could have it as a headline. Thanks

      • Dennis

        Judith knows of my interest in this subject as I expressed my frustration with IPCC over the draft review.

        They baldly stated in the draft something along the lines of ‘studies show substantial abyssal warming over the last decade.’

        I asked to see the studies and after a lot of toing and froing the IPCC said they could only supply me with material that had a reference in the draft. As this did not have an actual reference (but was merely mentioned in passing) they were therefore unable to supply the studies. Catch 22.
        .
        Lets see what the finished article says on the subject and see if the subject needs to be revisited.
        tonyb

      • The Catch 42 is that if it really is down there it will stay there until needed at the end of the Holocene.
        ===================

      • steven

        Thanks for the paper. It seems we are still at a very early stage in acquiring knowledge on the deep oceans temperature changes.

        Intriguing to see there are some areas of cooling as there are also on land. Much theory and assumptions and models, which to be fair is only to be expected in such a new field.

        This paper is three years old so will be interested to see if there is an update in AR5

        tonyb

      • I think the recent climate papers I saw were connected to the Argo observation system, which I understand their equipment can dive to around 2000 metres and naturally park at 1000 metres, not sure exactly how long their equipment has been in place, but at least Ocean temperatures are now it is being monitored worldwide and I would have hoped the good prof (Canadian – has he been on who’s line is it anyway ?) would have realised that.

  72. W/out scientific rigour likely rigor mortis will set in.
    Reference but don’t produce. (

  73. lemiere jacques

    “the heat is in ocean but we can measure it yet.”..wow, that s good science.
    that s the whole point to me, it is plauible, but how come can you be sure of that? And don’t you see the logic trap you can walk in?

    I never undestood why people admitted so easily that global temperature was a way to measure energy gain of the climate system…
    you have to assume first that the climate system is a very stable machine first…
    By saying ‘ we can measure yet” it means their assumption were ..assumption that you could even not falsified.
    And if your assume wrong for energy transfer in the system, you can run models whith new assumptions..and find new sensitivity…

  74. JC comment: Well wouldn’t it be great to start focusing on how long the pause will last. The IPCC seems to think that pause is nearly finished, just waiting for the next El Nino. MJ’s analysis seems much more reasonable to me, but this raises the question as to how long can the pause go? I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040; this seems at least as likely as the the CMIP5 predictions that have already failed for the last decade.

    I agree with that, 42 years is an exceedingly short time in Palaeoclimatology time, both pro and anti AGW’ers are so impatient and expect immediate indicators (both are equally guilty). However the cost of inaction may be very great and irreversible , and this huge global wide experiment might just kick us all in the butt.

    • Redskylite I agree with your timespan comment but disagree with your assessment of the potential cost of inaction. Inaction in reality costs nothing (with potential for higher costs for future generations) but costs of un-necessary pro-action can be big bucks for present generations indeed

    • Leonard Weinstein

      Redsky,
      “However the cost of inaction may be very great and irreversible , and this huge global wide experiment might just kick us all in the butt.”
      You clearly don’t GET IT. There is likely a trend of DROPPING temperature in the not too distant future (the Holocene has lasted longer than some recent other interglacial cycles). We don’t know when it will start, but a significant cooling would be a major problem, while a slight warming with added CO2 is a blessing to the world. You imply we should combat a good effect in case it got bad much later, when we need to prepare for the opposite effect. It is actually possible the increased human activity, including causing increasing CO2, has delayed the start of the cooling period, and this is only good news. I really would like to see your response to this.

      • Given the poor correlation between CO2 increases and global temperatures, given the length of the ‘pause’ in warming,
        given the length of the present inter-glacial and the Ice
        Man might soon cometh, and given the size of the world’s
        population, mouths ter be fed, and given growth of cities and
        livin’ in high-rise requirin’ heatin’, given all of the above, should
        we be imposing taxes on efficient energy and productivity, I’ll
        answer that. ‘NO.’
        A littoral serf.

    • @redskylite: “However the cost of inaction may be very great and irreversible , and this huge global wide experiment might just kick us all in the butt.”

      As Peter Davies said, MIGHT is the keyword. Having done as you the last few years, I agree that there is a whole litany of horrible things (and NO good things) that MIGHT happen as a result of AGW if we don’t take immediate action. There is NO empirical evidence that actual CO2 driven AGW HAS caused or IS causing any of them, but it MIGHT. After all, the models, developed specifically to PREDICT future catastrophe actually do so. As designed.

      On the other hand, the costs of action are already high, and, hockey stick-like, are escalating rapidly. I won’t bother with a list, but just go over in your own mind the money spent on the ‘climate science/environmental/politician complex’, the regulatory burden, the ongoing attacks on our energy infrastructure–all of it, other than windmill and solar money laundering scams–and the impact on our lifestyle when the government, per announced plans, continues to shut down generating plants, with no replacements, and regulate and/or tax every action that either produces or consumes energy.

      Once you have considered the actions already taken and those recommended, ask yourself how much they will change the TOE over the next 50-100 years, how confident you are with the answer that you come up with, based on the ‘best science available’, and how much you are willing to pay here and now in money, lifestyle, and personal autonomy to achieve exactly what improvement in the lives of your great and great-great grandchildren, compared to what they would experience if we take absolutely NO action based on its potential impact on the TOE.

      Oh, and something to remember: while the actions taken to ‘fight global climate change’ will have enormous impact on you, your children, and grandchildren, they will have essentially NO impact on the nomenklatura who are making the rules and enforcing energy austerity on the proletariat–us. They will still travel around the world to lavish conferences, work in well lit, comfortable shrines to themselves, be chauffeured around town in armored limos and SUV’s, along with their armed guards,fly first class or via private jet, live in McMansions whose ‘smart meters’ are NEVER turned off to save power because the demand exceeds the supply, and in general live happily ever after. And rule your life. In the meantime, the climate, according to Jim Cripwell and available evidence, will continue to ignore anthropogenic CO2 and do what it has always done: change in response to factors which we cannot exhaustively list in rank in order of influence, even qualitatively.

      I am all for ‘solving problems’, but first I want some hard evidence that we actually have a problem WORTH SOLVING, that the cure will not be worse than the disease, and THEN, that the solutions proposed will actually do the solving. Neither of these cases obtain with CAGW.

      So back to your original question: “Should we exercise the cautionary principle.” My answer is: Yes, we should be cautious when we are contemplating giving essentially infinite power and money to politicians to solve a problem whose existence and scale was certified to by scientists who were paid by the politicians to whom the power and money will accrue. VERY cautious.

      Bob Ludwick

  75. Sparrow says:
    “I live 1200′ from a Chesapeake gas well pad. They leased my mineral rights back in 2008, drilled the well in 2011 and have come back three times since then to re-frack the well. There is a 100′ drilling platform there right now with 4″ water lines hooked up to my corner fire hydrant. Averaged over the life of my lease (1/3 acre) so far they are paying out about $1.75 a month. If they had told me that before I they offered the lease I wouldn’t have done it. My neighbors feel the same way, we got ripped off.”Unless Chesapeake held a gun to your head, you signed the agreement willingly. Did you do your due diligence? You have no one to blame but yourself for this. Instead, you do what so many lefties do, and I’m not saying you are one, but they play the victim. If you are angry with anyone, you should look in the mirror.

    • jim2,
      You should probably dismiss his comment as anecdotal information instead of getting all huffy about it.

      The statistical truth is that hydrofractured wells are marginally productive sources of natural gas and oil. When oil is available in the underlying shale, all the natural gas is flared off and all they extract is the crude oil.

      And when you look at the production profiles of shale oil wells in places like the Bakken, you will statistically find that 1/3 of the cumulative production occurs in the first year, and then diminishes rapidly after that forming a trickle that can extend over the next 10 years..
      http://contextearth.com/2013/08/31/the-oil-drum-post/
      The rapid hyperbolic discounting of profit from these wells makes these marginally profitable, with the average well construction cost of $9M barely being recouped when the discounting is factored in.That is quite a difference from conventional wells, ain’t it?

      Note that this is non-anecdotal information, gleaned from collecting statistics from the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. Care to rage against this “leftie” orientation of facts? As last night’s Emmy-award winner Colbert famously said: “facts have a liberal bias”.

  76. David Springer & John Silver, its not a pause or a peak, it WAS a peak in 2003 to 2005. Its going down at about 0.05 to 0.10˚C per decade now ( depending on the Hemisphere) going by my binomial filtering of HadCRUT3v. Anyway, WTF is this drivel about fitting lines through random/multi component oscillating data? What loon does that?

  77. The ‘heat in the ocean’ explanation is what logicians would call a typical occult explanation – ie, when a theory is lacking substantiation, one attempts to find exterior but unverified possible props. The ‘heat in the ocean’ is one such occult explanation, a magical prop (hence the term ‘occult’). Until it can be verified, yea or nea, it will remain so.

    • Explain the history of the “heat in the ocean” in terms of climate science research. Did you not realize that Manabe included that term in the first climate models in the 1960s? And that Hansen’s ground-breaking predictions starting in the late 1970’s took the ocean heat content into account, via sophisticated thermal diffusion models?

      • You misunderstand: the present pause is being explained by some as a kind of displacement of energy – ‘if it is not shown in the global surface temperature, then it must be somewhere, because the models predict a certain energy budget and this has not been reached. Far from it. Therefore, it must be deep in the ocean. We say ‘deep’ because we have measured any sufficient build up of heat at the depth we can measure. Therefore, we merely have not been able to measure it.’ An occult explanation in support of failing models, n’est-ce pas?

      • Sorry I forgot the ‘not: “We say ‘deep’ because we have not measured..”

      • A faith dependent upon the occult. Faithful though he be, even Pekka balks at this one.
        ============

      • Thanks, Kim. Your ‘stamp of recognition’ is appreciated.

      • Or, Kim, let us join a cult, the cult of those who ‘know’ that those who disagree with us suffer a kind of ‘mind sickness’, to quote R.L.Stevenson, and, therefore, whatever evidence or arguments they may produce, are wrong. This is the sine qua non of ad hominem, an attempt to avoid open, rational, democratic accountability and responsibility. What it does, and has done, is turn scientists and academics and journalists into children. It is the genesis and the cause of infantalism. All of which must have a deeper cause. Nihilism, perhaps? A compulsion towards x, nothing.

      • WHT distilled:

        “I’m so much smarter than you it’s not even funny.”
        “You’re an idiot.”
        “Precautionary principle”
        “I loathe you.”
        “I know physics.”
        “I lose every argument, but I’m still right.”
        “Moron.”

      • Ah ha! Who won, Pokerguy? Don’t tell me no one?

      • Pekka should note this. The last best hope for the alarmists is faith in an occult belief, that the ‘missing heat’ has gone into the local abyss, rather than the abyss of deep space.
        =====================

      • Actually, it seems in your imaginary dialogue (like it!) the imaginary ‘deniers’ lose. I’m not so sure? Are you sure the debate is so unequal and that ‘science’ is one ‘side’ and not on the other? Do you think such ‘sides’ exists? The ‘Scientists’ against the ‘irrational’, the merely ‘rational’ against the ‘Dragons’? The ‘cognoscenti’ against us all? What do you think?

      • PokerGuy, no wonder you write fiction. You put quote marks around things I have never said.

        The Ocean Heat Content model is actually quite simple and elegant and it is consistent with the rest of GHG theory as I have described elsewhere on this thread.

        I am still waiting for one of you fake sceptics to produce the numbers that you think are in error.

        It is awfully hard to debunk something that only exists as a phantom.

    • If you could remove the ocean above the-

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

      As you stood on the bottom, what would the ambient temperature be on the dry sand under your flip-flops?

      • ‘In my yellow submarine” – What’s the answer? For I’m not sure I understand the question?

      • The answer is, I think, very cold? What is the temperature at the bottom of the Marina Trench?

      • Not even close…

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TauTona_Mine#Overview

        it would be much further down.

      • I would not go for a dip – but I’m not sure what you are pointing at – perhaps, I’m a bit lazy but I don’t see an exact quote of a temperature? Which would be interesting, like knowing how long (not long) one would survive on Mars. It must be cold, surely, down there?

      • The rock face temperature currently reaches 60 °C (140 °F).

        By 2008, the mine reached some 3.9 km (2.4 mi) underground. This made it the deepest mine in the world,

        Four miles to go… hot enough to fry an egg.

      • Sorry, I misunderstood – I see, hot – microbially hot?

    • WebHubTelescope (@WHUT), you are, I think, asking people to prove or disprove a physical hypothesis. What is being asked here is about measure, verifiability: where has all the heat gone? Your ‘theories’ might say the Earth heat budget has has melted the moon but we would like to test that. ‘Climate change’ is not about theory but actually about real, felt facts. If you have shown that the missing ‘heat’ is in the Oceans then give us the evidence. Otherwise your theories are so much verbiage and are untestable and, therefore, irrational.

      • What you have to do first is explicitly state what amount of heat is missing. Once you do this we can explain if it is statistical noise or a misunderstanding on your part.

        I think I figured out your game, which is to be hyper-critical but non-specific.

      • Yer a funny guy whut.

        “What you have to do first is explicitly state what amount of heat is missing. Once you do this we can explain if it is statistical noise or a misunderstanding on your part.”

        This is better than demanding that people who think GCMs are crap for predicting global temperatures over any lengthy time period, have to come up with their own models before they can criticized the incompetent ones you warmists rely on.

        They must not teach logic in climate school.

      • Roughly then.

        If scientists claim that 0.6 w/m^2 is the ocean heat uptake and louey here claims that it is 0.7 w/m^2, it is arguable that any heat is missing within the error bars.

        If he said it was 1 instead of 0.7, I could try to explain how this is inconsistent with the whole.

        Now you see why it is hard to debate these fakes, no courage in their convictions.

      • I missed your reply, WHUT, but it wasn’t much to miss:

        ‘I think I figured out your game, which is to be hyper-critical but non-specific.’

        ‘Now you see why it is hard to debate these fakes, no courage in their convictions.’

        To quote a well known, awful British sitcom:

        ‘Ooh, you are awful.’

  78. David Appell | September 22, 2013 at 6:12 pm |

    “If oceanic storms are created by the equatorial-polar temperature gradient, wouldn’t one expect a decrease in storminess?”

    One might expect that and I personally did indeed expect that.

    Since I answered your question maybe you can answer one of mine now. Did the IPCC summaries for policy makers say to expect a decrease in storminess or is this something else they failed at?

  79. David Appell | September 22, 2013 at 7:56 pm |

    my bold

    “Exactly — ACE does not account for a storm’s size, and hence does not come close to measuring energy.”

    Non sequitur. An organized storm’s size is closely correlated to its intensity. Therefore it does come close to measuring energy.

  80. When all is said and done, the Earth (Mother Nature, if you will) seems to keep things in balance. We know that globally, over the last 50,000, years the Earth has been both warmer and colder than it is today . Modern H.sapiens sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago. This tells us that survival of our species is not an issue and that there is much humans can do to mitigate any negative impact due to human activity.

    Modern conservation efforts have gone a long way to mitigate human contributions to these climate variations since the Industrial revolution, which is generally marked as the point at which human contribution to climate change became statistically significant.

    What is truly staggering is the level to which the world’s best minds in climate science will go in proclaiming that “the sky is falling” even when the models don’t track with the evidence.

  81. This point was backed by Professor Myles Allen at Oxford University. “We have examined the forecasts made by climate scientists over the past three decades and they have been absolutely spot on in terms of predicting subsequent levels of global warming,” he said. “Our climate models are robust and working well.”

    Decades of failure and they still call us deniers!

  82. WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | September 22, 2013 at 3:55 pm |

    >SpringyBoy, don’t run away and hide this time.”

    Never.

    ds>>” There’s a modeled excess of about 0.5W/m2 which relies on satellites to sort of corroborate it. “

    “Show me the reference to this work.”

    Sure.

    Hansen (2011)
    Earth’s energy imbalance and implications

    http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/11/27031/2011/acpd-11-27031-2011.pdf

    See figure 9(b) “Ocean Heat Uptake” 1980-2010.

    Thanks for asking.

    “This is what you can work out by hand.”

    No need it’s already been done and published in the legitimate literature. I eschew your blog science. Surely you should know of my contempt for blog science by now.

    “Where is the missing heat? Are you gonna run away, SpringyBoy?”

    My personal opinion is that the “missing heat” is contained within a spherical volume of photons approximately 50 light years in radius with the earth at its center. It’s not missing at all.

    So there.

    I’m still waiting for you to produce a paper showing exactly how much DWLIR is thermalized in the ocean below the skin layer. Good luck with that. Don’t run away and hide again. :-)

    • OK, SpringyBoy agrees with James Hansen.

      About 1.6 W/m^2 forcing and approximately 0.7 W/m^2 heat sinking over the ocean surface. This explains the 0.6C SST anomaly and the 0.8C global anomaly.

      I like to try to simplify the arguments of the top-notch climate scientists and glad that Springy can help in this regard.

      • Just to reaffirm Springy’s reference to the Hansen 2011 paper, Hansen states:
        “Our calculated energy imbalance is consistent with observations, implying that there is no missing energy in recent years.”

        Glad you two see eye to eye on GHG theory, even though you don’t seem to realize it given your propensity for krank ideation.

    • I didn’t say I agree with Hansen. The error bars in OHC uptake are +- 4W/m2 or an order of magnitude larger than the modeled value. Chief Kangaroo Skippy Ellison believes the 0.5CW/m2 per Hansen 2011 is accurate because of corroboration of some sort with CERB satellite data.

      The punchline, if you agree with Chief and Hansen, is that 0.5W/m2 is only enough to warm the ocean basin 0.2C in 100 years which hardly seems scary now does it?

      Personally I don’t believe there’s any significant greenhouse warming going on over the ocean and failure of ARGO to detect the energy passing through the mixed layer corroborates that. The energy is entering in runoff from the continents where the greenhouse effect is actually significant. GHG warms the land, the land warms the rivers, and the rivers warm the ocean. Nifty. Elegant. All loose ends sewed up. Agrees with all observations. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

      • Springer, Dr. Roy just posted some data on winds, water Clouds), water vapor and rain for the oceans since 1987.
        https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-C9rMUwX7o3Y/UkBwMteOXLI/AAAAAAAAJng/j9ZnEsG_VBM/w907-h509-no/Ocean+wind+water+and+cloud.png

        That is 53 week anomaly. Seems like clouds and rain have increased since 2000. Imagine that?

      • Wind speed going down doesn’t seem to fit in very well with the increased upwelling concept. Perhaps the water that is upwelling is just warming slower because of the all the clouds.

      • Of course it effectively measures the energy that passes through the layers. What graph are you reading that says otherwise?

      • Steven, that is for 60N-60S, some of the strongest sustained winds are right at the edge of the range where the deep ocean mixing is more likely. With winds it is not so much how much but where.

      • ARGO does not look for energy passing through the layers.

      • ARGO does not look, but sees it anyway, or rather, doesn’t see it. Talk to Pielke Pere and Josh Willis.
        ====================

      • A non-brain-dead model of thermal diffusion can interpolate and infer the flow of heat between the layers.

        I am not even sure that Springy and Cappy understand concepts behind the OHC model and how it represents reality.

        Springy is odd that he believes that the land can have a large atmospheric GHG effect, but that the ocean can have no atmospheric GHG effect.

        How that can be reconciled with the facts of energy balance has to be an amazing challenge. Apparently it is all due to continental runoff, according to Springy.

      • Webster, “I am not even sure that Springy and Cappy understand concepts behind the OHC model and how it represents reality.”

        I am sure you are right about that. In VoTech I was taught to actual measure flows and temperatures to determine heat transfer efficiency instead of assuming it was constant and could be modeled by a diffusion process without knowing the initial conditions.

      • ARGO doesn’t “look” for anything. Each diving buoy measures temperature and salinity in a vertical column from surface to 2000m. Vertical heat diffusion can be calculated from that data. Duh.

      • Dallas, real climate is talking trade winds. I find the entire wind situation amusing. It wasn’t that long ago the story was global warming was slowing trade winds. Now the story is trade winds are slowing global warming.

    • And just to be clear Trenberth and Hansen do not agree on OHC. Trenberth thinks the ocean should be warming more than 0.2C per century and taking up 1.5W/m2 versus Hansen’s 0.5W/m2. Both of them can’t be right. The science is far from settled. Too far to be making expensive policy decisions especially when said policy does not significantly change any outcome 100 years from now. It’s a political impossibility to get the whole world to give up enough fossil fuel consumption to make a difference in the eventual outcome.

      I agree with Bjorn Lomborg and many others that the only viable answer is technologic innovation which produces a cheaper alternative to fossil fuel. Once again this technology is here now and is an engineering problem requiring no discovery. When you have a problem that requires no discovery then you have a problem which you know can be solved by time and money (which may be traded off against each other). Nature already has the technology we need to directly convert sunlight, CO2, and non-potable water to pretty much any hydrocarbon molecules you want and do it on non-arable land. It’s already happening in pilot plants producing ethanol and bio-diesel fuel at prices competitive with $100/bbl light sweet crude. And the technology has vast room from improvement as our skill level in genetic engineering is still in its infancy and non-organic bio-reactors are not realizing any economy of scale.

      Ironically the limiting factor in bio-synthetic fuel production is CO2. Not water. Not land. Not sunlight. CO2. In order to get the bioreactors efficient enough to produce 10,000 – 20,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year they need CO2 at many times atmospheric concentration which is a piece of cake if you capture it from power plant or other industrial exhaust gases but not so easy getting it out of the air. But that’s just another engineering problem to solve. The ultimate problem is that carbon is such a jim-dandy construction material for everything from fuel to food to furniture that once bio-technology is mastered people will be sucking carbon out of the atmosphere for a lot more than just fuel and when it’s sucked out for durable goods it doesn’t get returned anytime soon. We’ll be needing laws to restrict how much CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere instead of restricting how much can be added. And of course China, India, and the other usual suspects won’t be at all cooperative.

      • David, you know Webster is not sharp enough to pick up on that don’t ya?

      • The ocean is taking up 0.7 w/m^2 over its surface recently. Hansen calculated this in his Fig 15b, which matches observations now.

        One has to remember that OHC is a cumulative measure and it is not impacted by yearly fluctuations in forcing as much as a non-cumulative temperature measure.

        It is possible that people are getting confused by this distinction.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

        Springer,

        Once more you have your “facts” so completely wrong that they are not facts but fiction. Trenberth and Hansen only differ in TOA imbalance by maybe 0.3 w/^2 and when looking at the uncertainty ranges for each, they overlap right around 0.8 w/m^2 for the TOA imbalance. But this full amount is not going into the oceans but only about 90%. The remainder is going into the cryosphere and atmosphere, but you would need to measure the moist enthalpy of the atmosphere (as Pielke Sr. smartly suggested years ago) to fully appreciate the full energy being added to the atmosphere.

      • RG, thanks for that. Hansen was at 0.6 and Trenberth at 0.9, which is 0.3 different.

        Based on the slope of the OHC over the last several years, a value of 0.75 w/m^2 is possible which would place it right between the two of them.

      • Oh I’m sorry. Trenberth only thinks there’s 50% more heat uptake by the ocean than Hansen does. I suppose in climate science that’s as good as exactly the same. It’s not what you’d call an exact science, huh? ;-)

        LOL – I kill me sometimes!

        If you dumbasses read what you write you’d stop writing out of embarassment.

      • By the way… either David Appell is misreporting Trenberth or you boys are the ones with your facts wrong. Let me know what about “the ocean gained about 1.19 Watts per square meter in the first decade of the 21st century you morons-who-make-schit-up-to-suit-your-stories. Lying idiots like you two make it very very difficult to remain civil. I don’t like liars to begin with and liars that I must constantly spend time exposing are worse.

        http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/05/wither-global-warming-has-it-slowed-down/

        Giving support to their finding is a forthcoming “reanalysis” by Magdalena Balmaseda and Erland Källén of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in the U.K., and Trenberth. Their research, by combining several sources of data with climate models, finds a sharp increase in ocean heating over the past decade, beginning shortly after the 1997-98 El Niño. “In the last decade, about 30 percent of the warming has occurred below 700 m, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend.”

        In fact, their reanalysis finds that the total of all oceans actually lost heat during the 1990s, at a rate of about -0.26 Watts per square meter of ocean surface area. By contrast, the ocean gained about 1.19 Watts per square meter in the first decade of the 21st century, most in the top 700 meters. That gain, Trenberth says, is associated “with changes in the winds and changes in the ocean currents that are associated with a particular PDO pattern that has dominated in the 2000s.”

      • Perhaps you have to multiply 1.19 by the ocean fraction of the surface area.

      • Perhaps you’re an imbecile without the first clue.

      • Looks like SpringyBoy is getting all wound up.

        Some of us understand that the measurements will get better with time and can see them gradually converging.

      • Some of us including moi understood long ago that as instrumentation improved and as natural climate cycles cycled the CAGW narrative would collapse like a house of cards. You are now privileged to witness my foresight becoming reality. Lucky you.

      • By the same token, many of us more experienced with statistics chuckle at the amateurs who misinterpret noise for a signal.

        I call them noise jockeys. They consider any arbitrary fluctuation as music to their untrained ears.

  83. This is something I just wrote, belatedly, in reply to one of Joshua’s comments, more or less, implying we so irrational that it is, literally, impossible for us to think, we simian be, but I thought it worth having a thread of it’s own, if it deserves it:

    This ‘known cognitive and psychological attributes’ mime is a real red herring and based on a completely reductive, unsubtle understanding. 1) Since the enlightenment we have developed means through which we can, as it were, ‘objectify’ ourselves and, hence, test ourselves (something we merely rediscovered – some of the Greeks, for one, did the same – it therefore is reasonable to assume that it is fundamental to being a human being, as such). 2) The means via which we do this are well founded and well tested. They are a series of methodologies that are, let us say, meta-scientific and foundational to modernity: Rationality, discursiveness, the belief in facts and the belief in the testability and, therefore, fallibility of ‘facts’. All this completely bypasses your ‘biases’ and sweeps them away. Your ‘known cognitive and psychological attributes’ is merely your and others attempt to bypass argument, dismiss your opponent and patronise (out of a kind of ‘phobia’) those who disagree with you.

    • Or let us join a cult, the cult of those who ‘know’ that those who disagree with us suffer a kind of ‘mind sickness’, to quote R.L.Stevenson, and, therefore, whatever evidence or arguments they may produce, are wrong. This is the sine qua non of ad hominem, an attempt to avoid open, rational, democratic accountability and responsibility. What it does, and has done, is turn scientists and academics and journalists into children. It is the genesis and the cause of infantalism. All of which must have a deeper cause. Nihilism, perhaps? A compulsion towards x, nothing.

      • Just as a Nota Bene – I don’t believe people are ‘convinced’ about what they are saying, but they may have a strong reason for saying it. Ie, I don’t believe in ‘conviction’, ‘belief’, as such, except as some kind of wilful blindness. Most people, as it where, gravitate to a particular set of hypotheses, working models, that suit there world, their particularity. But this is, for the most part, Undecided. These hypothesis are liable to change, they do change. People are much more open, alive than is realised.

    • Lewis –

      Your ‘known cognitive and psychological attributes’ is merely your and others attempt to bypass argument, dismiss your opponent and patronise (out of a kind of ‘phobia’) those who disagree with you.

      First, the attributes I’m speaking of apply to everyone, not just those that I disagree with on various matters.

      The means via which we do this are well founded and well tested. They are a series of methodologies that are, let us say, meta-scientific and foundational to modernity: Rationality, discursiveness, the belief in facts and the belief in the testability and, therefore, fallibility of ‘facts’.

      Second, the attributes of which I speak have been empirically tested with those very same methodologies of which you speak.

      So here’s the thing, in my view. I see people on both sides of the fence who claim that they are drawing conclusions based on objective and dispassionate analysis. They are completely convinced of their own conclusions and they are also completely convinced of the invalidity of the opinions of those they disagree with.

      This is something I just wrote, belatedly, in reply to one of Joshua’s comments, more or less, implying we so irrational that it is, literally, impossible for us to think, we simian be,…

      You are mistaken about what I have been arguing – as certainly that is not it. Being biased and being rational are certainly not mutually exclusive. Now we could discuss why you have misinterpreted my views so significantly. It could be because of a lack of clarity in what I’ve written, or it could be because you are “motivated” in your reasoning to attribute beliefs to me that I don’t have. Or, my guess is that more likely, it is some combination of the two. But the only way for us to explore the answer to that question further would be if you were willing to engage with me in good faith, with a mutual assumption that we are both rational, that neither of us is attempting to bypass arguments, patronize, dismiss, and that neither of us is operating out of a “kind of phobia.”

      Now I consulted my Magic 8-Ball to see what it would predict about our chances of such a good-faith exchange.

      After reading your comment, it returned the result of: “Outlook not Good.”

      • Belated, again, and “Outlook not good”, whatever that means. ” if you were willing to engage with me in good faith”. Who is it assumes, here, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ faith? I feel I would be talking to a very young person, with you – is that bad faith? – or you are just teasing: One assumes trust in the other before one talks, one does not attempt to weigh trust in the answer the other gives, afterwards. It isn’t because what you have written is unclear, it is that you say “Both sides are equally clear in their truth” which completely misunderstands and infantalises the discussion. There are no sides and how old are you? You’re probably 65 but you still haven’t grown up.

      • Uncanny how accurate that Magic 8-Ball is.

      • Oh, and Lewis –

        As an appreciator of quotation marks, I particularly appreciate this usage:

        it is that you say “Both sides are equally clear in their truth”

        since they they enclose something I’ve never said, after you state that you are quoting something that I say.

        Methinks that’s enough to conclude bad faith.

      • And anyway, Joshua, you haven’t answered my fundemental concern – that you and others encourage a kind of infantalism where one side says ‘Boo!’ to the others ‘Nerrr!’ That is to say, instead of asking and arguing against what someone says, it is much easier to say they are suffering a ‘cognitive dissonance’ or other such woo. If your kid or mine said “2+2=5” would we patronise him by saying “He’s right in his own way” or would we say, “No, kid, 2+2=4”. Think about it.

      • Joshua, it’s called paraphrase. Sorry you hadn’t said it.

      • 65 year old child is kind of right, ain’t though

      • Should I say, imaginative paraphrase – it is something quite common in the literature, were one puts in the mouth of the intolucator what assumes they have meant. It isn’t assumed as other than a rhetorical device and can be argued for and against. For, instance, “I didn’t mean that” – o no, but that’s not your words?!

      • Lewis –

        That is to say, instead of asking and arguing against what someone says, it is much easier to say they are suffering a ‘cognitive dissonance’ or other such woo.

        I have shown, repeatedly, how you are not asking and arguing against what I have said – but instead you are distorting what I have said. And you have failed to respond by way of correcting your errors.

        Engage me in good faith and we can get past the childish interactions. Engage me in bad faith and we’ll get nowhere. I don’t feel any more than 1/2 responsible for that dynamic, but I will insist on asserting that for us to get anywhere, you need to be accountable for your own actions.

      • Should I say, imaginative paraphrase

        Indeed, as long as “imaginative” means inaccurate.

      • Sorry, Joshua, I was only made aware of your comment recently and I was, perhaps, to quick to be fatuous, as we all can be. So, I apologise. What I meant, and to paraphrase, is your argument seems to be this: We all equally feel that what we think is the truth is the truth but we are lead by feelings in thinking so. The ‘structure’ of our ‘minds’ lends us towards certain perspectives and we ‘see’ through those structured ‘eyes’.
        The question, fundamentally follows, who judges and with what means? Ie you reduce yourself to a reductio ad absurdum. It is, in essence, ad hom. For it asks, not ‘what’ is said, but ‘who’ says it. You go down that path then you might as well ignore science, rationality, debate or, in the end, civilized society. For it is the Philosophy of the Savage.

      • Joshua, let’s indeed be constructive. You say:

        have shown, repeatedly, how you are not asking and arguing against what I have said – but instead you are distorting what I have said. And you have failed to respond by way of correcting your errors.

        But I think your confusing me with everyone else – that ‘else’ being the so called ‘other’ that combat you here. I’m not ‘them’. Nor are they.

      • Lewis –

        I seems that my Magic 8-Ball may have been wrong after all. I see something to work with in those last comments.

        No time now, however, much to GaryM’s chagrin. I’ll try to get back to it later.

      • OK. One should always take a deep breath before commenting, should one, Lewis?

      • Joshua’s sad, and increasingly pitiable, little schtick, his marching orders, so to spik, is to tar skeptics with ideologically motivated reasoning. It is based on a misconception of climate skepticism. But it is put to the lie by 1800 comments from governments seeking a resolution of the IPCC’s absurd contradiction in the SPM, that is, increased confidence in attribution to humans vs the naturally occurring pause.

        If you want to investigate motivated reasoning, Joshua, go for the whopper, the IPCC.
        ==============

      • I know, Kim, but every day is a new day and to give trust to ones alleged opponents is its first hour. Walk a mile is ones neighbours (British spelling!) shoes etc?

      • Lewis –

        We all equally feel that what we think is the truth is the truth but we are lead by feelings in thinking so. The ‘structure’ of our ‘minds’ lends us towards certain perspectives and we ‘see’ through those structured ‘eyes’.

        What I speak of is a tendency. It is not categorical or uniform or immutable or omnipotent. It can be compensated for, to various degrees, primarily through an open process of sharing perspective with others, and ideally with others who have alternative perspectives.

        The question, fundamentally follows, who judges and with what means?

        We judge together through an open process of exchange in good faith.

        For it asks, not ‘what’ is said, but ‘who’ says it.

        Well, that is an interesting point. But I think it is too circumscribed to catch what I am going for.

        Who says it is relevant, but not sufficient or conclusive. Along with what biases do they have? What influences do they have? How open are they to examining their biases? How much and how well do they incorporate alternate views? How comprehensively do they address counterarguments? What is their evidence? How have they validated their evidence? What are the definitions in their terminology? How well have they defined their terms? “What is the process by which they have said it.”

        You go down that path then you might as well ignore science, rationality, debate or, in the end, civilized society. For it is the Philosophy of the Savage.

        I don’t see savages asking any of those questions, including the question of who is speaking. I see savages saying “I am right because I have a privileged view of the truth, and so I will pick up my club and dispatch you.”

        That is what I see being exchanged, ubiquitously in the climate wars, whether it be “realists” saying that they have a privileged view into what science says, or “skeptics” saying that they have a privileged view of what science says, without either side stopping to pay serious consideration to that long list of criteria I feel are necessary.

      • Two words.

        Brevity

        Conciseness

        Practice these and people might not “misunderstand” you.

      • tim –

        Practice these and people might not “misunderstand” you.

        It’s possible, tim –

        There’s no doubt that I could clearer, and there’s no doubt I could be more concise. I’m sure that sometimes there are misunderstandings because of my lack of clarity, but I think that mostly the “misunderstandings” are, in a sense, deliberate distortions of what I say.

      • Josh,

        Clarity was not one of the two words. It is said that brevity is a hallmark of a good writer. Conciseness is key to to being brief. Clarity is what should result.

      • Brevity is always welcome but even more so is a good debate about something important. My problem is that the debate is often peripheral to the substance of the original thread and the discussion invariably becomes personal and non-productive. Speculation about Joshua’s motives for example, makes me fall asleep at my keyboard :)

      • Joshua, Sorry I didn’t catch your reply of http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385770

        But life is buzzy. I think what you are saying is nuanced but fundamentally, from both a logical and an ethical standpoint, wrong.

        From a logical point of view, it must endlessly tie itself in knots for it both wants an objective criterion and yet denies that that truth can be seen. ‘Truth’ then becomes a proximate Ideal, something some ‘approach’ closer than others. But since, in such a universe, no one actually reaches such a ‘Truth’, such a ‘Truth’ might well as not exist. Someone, that is to say, among these ‘approaches’ might challenge the existence of what allegedly is being approached, they might say “This Truth is a myth and since none of you have this Truth, none of you can prove otherwise – it is an illusion.” And, thus, we have the Philosophy of Savages.

        But, secondly, there is an ethical question, and that is the question of Trust. This is the crucial difference between a closed and an open society. Not, as Popper and others, would have, a matter of our conception of truth or the different methodologies via which we might gain it (or demonstrate it, rather). No, it is the trust in the Other that comes first, as all good historians know. Ie the Open Society creates science, rationality itself, not the other way round. What do I mean by trust, politicly speaking, for it is, ultimately, politics of which we speak? I mean trust that your fellow interlocutor, yes, your ‘opponent’, your fellow man or woman, is, until proven otherwise, a person of good will, of bone voluntas – that they are speaking openly, honestly to you.

        That trust is belied by your projection of so called ‘biases’. To assume bias is to assume mistrust, surely? If you notice this comment I would be interested to know what you think.

      • One+one, is two! Joshua, will not be long… Remember what Steven said.

        http://www.gallup.com/poll/164591/americans-belief-gov-powerful-record-level.aspx

        Holy One Is
        uniquely-prime

      • Lewis –

        That trust is belied by your projection of so called ‘biases’. To assume bias is to assume mistrust, surely?

        I don’t think that an assumption if biases, and trust, are mutually exclusive. My partner has biases. I trust her with my life. I trust her with the most intimate details of my life. I trust her to care for my family. I trust her with my finances. But I don’t think that she is always bias-free.

        In fact, when someone tells me that they are bias-free, my trust level drops. It doesn’t disappear, as it is theoretically possible that someone is bias-free, and certainly some are closer to that state than others. I think that it is important to not presume a degree of bias, but to exchange openly with an open acknowledgement that we are all prone to biases – in particular confirmation bias, identity protection bias, and biases that result from inherent attributes of our cognitive processes, such as pattern recognition (which leads us to sometimes seeing patterns where they don’t exist).

      • And….

      • I think I take your point, Joshua. If I can put it this way, the awareness of human fallibility does not preclude trust. In arguing ones point one tends to re-enforce what Nietzsche once called ‘the illusion of opposites’, a philosopher, incidentally, who was the first to really point to the question of ‘Who?’ rather than ‘What?’ – he believed the latter to be ultimately superficial. So, I’ll think ont’ and leave this dying thread with something to ruminate.

      • Lewis –

        Yes.

        awareness of human fallibility does not preclude trust.

        And

        In arguing ones point one tends to re-enforce what Nietzsche once called ‘the illusion of opposites’,

        Both relate to what I’ve been getting at.

        Thanks for the exchange. Looks like my Magic 8-Ball was wrong after all.

      • Hey joshie, did you ever get Mosher to respond to you on your series of long looney comments related to that terrible thing he allegedly did to you? Maybe if you followed him around and begged him to pay you some attention, like you did to John Carpenter recently, Steven M. will throw you a bone.

        It’s none of my business, but you are carpet bombing another thread with your trolling BS.

      • <Hey joshie, did you ever get Mosher to respond to you

        Well, Don – mosher did write quite a few posts in exchange with me on the topic of his laughable assertion that he knows better what I believe than I know what I believe. I believe that may have been what inspired GaryM’s latest round of pleading for other “denizens” to not respond to my comments.

        In fact, mosher chased me through a couple of threads to interject his laughable assertion into exchanges I was having with other people.

        But he hasn’t responded w/r/t the topic once it shifted a bit towards the evidence we have (small that it is) speaks negatively to his integrity.

        It’s curious. But I’m sure it’s just some kind of oversight. Maybe his computer isn’t working, or maybe it slipped his mind. Or maybe, just by coincidence, he lost interest in a topic directly related to the one that he seemed so interested in previously.

        Who knows. It could happen, right?

      • I will try to use my influence with Mosher to get him to pay attention to your begging for his attention:

        Steven Mosher,

        Please respond to little joshie’s pleas that you say something (maybe apologize, but who freaking knows what he wants) about his accusation that you lack integrity, because you allegedly revealed his real name and scared the crap out of the little twit some time in the distant past. And please provide a link to said incident so, I can see how badly you rattled the little slimeball.

      • I missed you, too, Zukofsky,
        Your death by a number of years.
        I remember that delight of finding
        My ‘fellow traveller’ and wandering,
        In my loneliness, the Modern Poets Library,
        (Does it still exist? Probably not) and finding
        Your hard and impossible metre. You were made
        Of something like strength, a tall oak
        And I the seed of your falling.
        Do poets exist? Have they existed?
        In the Black Forest one wanders and wonders
        And must be attacked by savages.
        It swallows ‘deep Russia’, it marches against it.
        “Deep Russia” where the tears water a barren
        And polluted Earth. Svet, Erde, soil and memory.
        Endless the roads that lead nowhere.

      • This is not relevant. Of course it’s not relevant – how could Poetry be ‘relevant’? Never the less, I’d like to end with the amor of what is irrelevant:

        “They sang this way in deep Russia”
        He’d say and carry the notes
        Recalling the years
        Fly. Where stemmed
        The Jew among strangers?
        As the hummingbird
        Can fly backwards
        Also forwards —
        How else could it keep going?
        Speech moved to sing
        To echo the stranger
        A tear in an eye
        The quick hand wiped off —
        Casually:
        “I loved to hear them.”

        Louis Zukofsky

  84. this raises the question as to how long can the pause go? I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040.
    The sixty year cycle could certainly work with that.
    The thousand year cycle is very near the max and we can not go up much. This warm period, much like the roman and medieval warm periods, will bump against the upper bound, opening the Arctic and creating massive snows that will bump it down again until the ice volume on land becomes massive enough to advance and cool us again. Record open Arctic years are markers for the upper bound of temperature. 1998 was a record year and in spite of all the climate model output showing it going much more up way before now, it did not happen. The warm periods of the past ten thousand years define the upper bound of temperature. We will stay near that bound while the ice on land is replenished. This warm time is necessary to rebuild ice on land. Consensus Climate Theory puts ice on land in the cold times when the oceans are cold and frozen and when there is no source for moisture to produce snowfall.
    That is really absurd. Snow falls when oceans are warm and wet. The actual data shows snow accumulation is more in warm times and less in cold times.

  85. “The most recent decades contain a strong contribution from the AMO (MOC) even on a global scale. This raises questions about the average climate sensitivity of the IPCC models.” (ML)”

    There’s no contribution from the AMO. AMO is just a manifestation of the global oscillation. The long term trend (secular linear trend) is also an oscillation (~200 year and longer cycles) – that means it’s also a periodic variation.

    From all the observations (solar cycles, temperature record, proxies), it’s very likely that we are not only at the ~60-year cycle plateau, but also at the longer ~200 year cycle plateau (and possibly longer cycles as well). That means much more dramatic cooling than in the 50s and 60s.When you remove the AGW/GHG/CO2 bias, it’s in plain sight.

  86. Every time the oceans get warm enough to melt polar ice it always snows enough to increase Albedo to prevent additional warming above the upper bound set by this wonderful polar ice cycle that bounds the temperature of earth.
    when oceans are warm and wet it snows and increases ice volume on earth. when oceans are cold and frozen it don’t snow near as much and the sun removes ice volume from earth. If GHG’s trap more heat, then it will snow more. The Polar Sea Ice Thermostat works just like my AC in my house. The thermostat turns on the cooling and runs it long enough to lower temperature below the set point and that set point is when the polar sea ice freezes. At that point, ice volume on land is still advancing and the cold time will be similar to a little ice age.
    To really understand the climate cycles, you must understand the polar ice cycles.

  87. I find it interesting that not even Joshua, who believes in the occult and Astrology isn`t buying the “deep ocean heat” mythology. Judith has put him in touch with Trenberth so maybe they will work it out.

  88. “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University.

    If that is representative of the state of the art for Climate Science then Houston we have a problem. How can you know heat has gone into the ocean when you admit you cant meaure it there? That means you have no data to back up your statement only a belief that you think its true.

    In other words, deniers are not those that deny science based on factual data, deniers are those that do not share the same belief system or faith that Climate Scientists Share have involving “The Theory of AGW”. It makes it sound like more of a religion than science.

    My suggestion is that we take climate research money and use it to fund construction of more Nuke energy production and lets take a look at the data in about 100 years. Humans are quite capable of surviving in temperatures form -30 to 110 degrees so an extra 2-3 degrees is really no big deal. All the rest of this is puffery to defend funding sources.

  89. Why was the temperature of earth bounded tightly in the recent ten thousand years and not as tightly before that.
    The polar ice cycle developed and that is what tightened the bounds.
    Albedo increases when oceans are warm and wet and it is snowing like crazy.
    Albedo decreases when oceans are cold and frozen and it is not snowing like crazy.
    There is a lag in the ice advance and retreat and that caused scientists to believe the ice volume was increasing when the ice was advancing.
    The ice volume increase occurs when the oceans are warm and wet and the advance continues long after the snowfall stops and the ice volume is already decreasing.
    Consensus Climate Science does not understand the Polar Ice Cycle and do not use it in their Models.

  90. Earth is supposed to get warm and then cold. The Arctic is supposed to alternate between open and closed. Ice on earth is supposed to advance and retreat and advance and retreat. When ice retreats, there is always evidence that it had retreated before and this is not the first or last time this will happen. There is no steady state equilibrium temperature that earth tries to maintain. The cold and warm alternating cycle is what earth does maintain. What has happened for the past ten thousand years is the new normal.

    Consensus Climate Scientists do not understand this basic truth.

    There are some of us out here who do understand the Theory developed by Maurice Ewing and William Donn in the 1950’s and it is the Climate Theory that is supported by actual data.

  91. The thing to remember about there being no evidence that heat has gone into the deep oceans, is that there is no evidence that AGW is even occurring in the first place.

    Andrew

    • +100. But please, CAGW, not AGW.

      • Heh, Jim slips and admits that climate sensitivity to CO2 may be greater than zero, despite what his eyes tell him. But I’m with you, Jim, very much with you.
        ===================

      • Jim,

        If you can identify for me what the difference between AGW and CAGW is, in scientific terms, not generalizations or speculations, I’m all ears.

        Andrew

      • Andrew, I will try. AGW means that adding a specified amount of CO2 to the atmosphere causes global temperatures to rise by an unspecified amount. I agree with AGW, but it is vague. CAGW merely means that the unspecified amount of temperature rise is sufficient to do significant to the world’s climate.

      • Sorry, after ‘significant’ add ‘damage’.

      • Jim,

        This is exactly what I didn’t want. Some people claim the “C” is already happening. Some claim we’ll get the “C” in the future. No one can explain what the “C” is exactly, because the “C” doesn’t really exist. It’s not a scientific identification of anything. It’s poetry.

        So since the “C” is worthless, let’s go to the next letter. “A”. Our temperature measuring devices only measure how much temperature. They don’t tell us who did it. So my question again…Evidence for the “A”?

        Andrew

      • There is only hypothetical evidence for ‘A’. We cannot do controlled experiments on the earth’s atmospere.

      • “There is only hypothetical evidence for ‘A’.”

        LOL

        Andrew

    • Hold your horses. All that can be said is that it seems more difficult to say that the null hypotheses is being disproved. We have to wait, perhaps, beyond our lifetime to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ anything else. As the old cliché goes, they asked Chairman Mao “What is the meaning of the French Revolution?” “It’s to early to tell.”

  92. mann is questioning your integrity on twitter

    • The Piltdown Mann doesn’t realize it yet, but he has fallen on his sword.
      ===============================

    • Between the lawsuits, and the twittering, and all that dispatch sending from the front lines, it’s amazing he has time to do all that great science.

      Oh, wait….

  93. It snows when it is warm and then it always gets cold.

    It don’t snow when it is cold and then it always gets warm.

    It does not matter how much heat a trace of CO2 can trap. It will always snow as much as necessary to bring on the next cold phase of the well bounded wonderful modern climate cycle. Look at what has happened for ten thousand years. A fraction of a trace gas to this cycle is like another flea on an elephant.

  94. Time and time again, they say that ice extent always responds rapidly to temperature changes.
    That is backwards, temperature always responds rapidly to ice extent changes.
    They fail to find consistent causes for the temperature changes. They fail to see ice advance after snowfall in warm times. They fail to see ice retreat after lack of snowfall in cold times.

  95. For all the hate Dr. Curry gets from Michael Mann imagine what would happen if she owned up to the truth and used “left-wing advocacy” instead of undefined “advocacy” and “left-wing activists” instead of generic “activist” and acknowledged it was carbon regulation hustle from day one from typically left-wing social culture?

    Dr. Spencer shows a more honest way;

    http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/09/a-turning-point-for-the-ipcc-and-humanity/

    ” I was even told so by one of those bureaucrats, Bob Watson, back in the early 1990s. Not that there aren’t ‘true believers’ in the movement. In my experience, the vast majority of the scientists and politicians involved in the IPCC process appear to really believe they are doing what is right for humanity by supporting restrictions on fossil fuel use.”

    It wasn’t about warming science then or now. It’s about “big oil”, Greenism and Eco-justice etc. etc.

    Now would be a good time to get real honest instead of hedging. It was born of the 60’s and “Climate Science” is a largely left-wing offshoot of “Environmental Studies”. It’s perfectly logical if you follow political enclave formations at publicly funded university life. Coming clean would be huge, it was always a Greenshirt left-wing rationalization rather than “science”. If they hadn’t bet so hard on “warming” they would chosen some other carbon regulate rationalization but they are too politically invested in AGW to back away.

    It’s also a fools errand for skeptics to invest too much in the “Pause” either because it is validating junk science observations as it is criticizing them. Dr. Curry is preserving climate science claims and focusing on very short-term observational results rather than the central issue that AGW was invented as a political meme from inception. This is why AGW is a total fail and it has little to do with the observational “Pause”. The models might just flow the way the agenda wants in the future but it will never be “science” based on how it was rigged by intent. So harping on the “Pause” and the technical around it is also a coverup. This is how the consensus wants to engage and talk about climate if it must. IPCC political corruption? You’re a right-wing DENIER go away. If we keep talking endlessly about the “Pause” in these terms the potential for spaghetti charts and magic dust explanations will go on forever and the issue of observational failure will be marginalized. The “Pause” is minor to the elephant in the room; AGW is a political junk science meme from a community very sympathetic to Green activism on carbon, then and now. Dr. Curry is a perfect example regardless of how much hate Dr. Mann throws at her. It fact it’s another distraction as the warming movement is picking it’s weakest enemies as if David Brooks represents “conservatives” on NPR. By focusing on marginal consensus supporters to attack Dr. Mann invalidates (by omission) those who are more honest in their assessments of the warming movement.

    “The Pause” has a very limited purpose in a serious discussion about climate science agenda setting and fraud. There is “damn by faint praise” and Dr. Curry is engaging in “validating by faint criticism” by ignoring politically corrupt forces and limiting the discussion to narrow topics like “The Pause” or using terms such a “advocacy” rather than spelling out exactly what kind of advocacy we all know she means.

  96. Some climate scientists awaken to empirical research! May I explain that empirical research must replace the “radiation-only” theory of warming; that is, it must if Trenberth’s idea of heat sequestered in the deep oceans makes sense. Whether or not there is evidence to support Trenberth’s idea, the idea itself violates the fundamental assumption of all Alarmists, namely, that climate science is correct to use a “radiation-only” theory of warming. If the oceans can sequester significant amounts of heat that would otherwise have warmed Earth and prevented “the pause,” the next questions are “how much” and “how long?: Those are empirical questions that must be investigated in the deep oceans and independently of Earth’s radiation balance. Specifically, Trenberth must find mechanisms in the oceans that are characteristic of the oceans but not caused by changes in temperature or radiation at the ocean’s surface. Otherwise, Trenberth would be arguing that radiation or heat forces its way into the deep oceans and does so as a linear function of what impinges the surface. However, if mechanisms in the oceans can sequester heat for decades or centuries then the “radiation-only” account is not just deeply flawed but false. Research must turn to empirical work on Trenberth’s ocean mechanisms and the plethora of empirical phenomena that together determine Earth’s temperature. That work could be relatively complete in a century. Computer models will be helpful in this research but unnecessary.

    • A nugget, Theo, and thanks. Your insight helps explicate the confused state of climate science today.
      ==================

    • radiation-only cooling explains the upper bound shown in the 600 million years.

      The modern upper bound is lower and it is lower because of ice on land and water.

    • A simple model of this process is an increased vertical circulation in the ocean, such as an enhanced PDO, that brings cooler water to the surface faster and sequesters the warmer water faster. I think circulation changes of this kind can account for this.

    • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

      Theo said:

      “…the idea itself violates the fundamental assumption of all Alarmists, namely, that climate science is correct to use a “radiation-only” theory of warming.”

      —-
      Which so called “alarmists believe that a “radiation-only” theory is correct? Solar energy reaching the Earth so quickly changes to so many other forms that such a theory would be grossly inaccurate. Did you make this up? I know of not one scientist who would subscribe to your outrageous fabrication.

      • Then why do so-called climate scientists publish peer-reviewed papers in which they argue that the AMO, PDO, ENSO, have short term effects that must average to zero over the long run? Is that based on empirical evidence or is it the result of top down “radiation-only” thinking? You have been in the climate debates for years yet only now you are discovering that Alarmists will not touch empirical studies of phenomena such as the AMO with a ten foot pole? Why won’t they? Because it violates their “radiation-only” theory.

        Who are you to call me a liar? You had to leave WUWT before the rest of us managed to obtain tar, feathers, and a rail.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist

        Theo,

        For the record, I chose to leave WUWT. I was not banned.

        In regards to the zero-sum game that natural variability must amount to– no additional energy is added to the overall system during the various ups and downs of ocean cycles. Only some external forcing can add energy to the system– this is exactly why it is external.

        During the swings of internal variability, rates of flow of energy between various parts of the system is altered, causing swings in their energy. For example, during a positive PDO, or an individual El Niño, more net energy flows from ocean to atmosphere. Mind you, the net flow of energy is always from ocean to atmosphere, but during El Niño, the rate is higher. But in no way or no regard is there more net energy in the system, and over the course of full ENSO cycles, the net energy added to the full system is zero.

      • RG,
        It is becoming very prevalent in modeling the temperature time series data to factor in the ENSO and fit all the yearly fluctuations. The residual that is left looks like it will reveal just the trend.

        I haven’t seen the residuals yet on the new crop — the fit by itself is something to marvel over.

        The deniers are getting very angry over the implications of this. Thanks to Tamino who I think got the ball rolling and then more recently Kosaka and Xie.

      • R. Gates aka Skeptical Warmist | September 23, 2013 at 4:21 pm |

        Can you not see that all you are doing is singing the “radiation-only” song? For example, notice that you move immediately to talk about energy balance and you do that in terms of the whole system. Does it never occur to you or any Alarmist that everything you know about the PDO, the AMO, ENSO, and similar matters is based on evidence that is stated in temperatures? Then why do you switch to talk about energy? There is no neutral transformation of the evidence in temperatures into statements expressed in joules. All such transformations beg all important questions. Your theory is all top-down “radiation-only” theory but your only descriptions of the phenomena, such as ENSO, and your only evidence are stated entirely in temperatures. The fact that you cannot see this staggers the imagination. When you set aside the radiation theory, as Trenberth has done, and talk about specific mechanisms that are described in terms of temperatures then you will have entered the realm where you can take seriously the limited processes that make up the Earth.

        I see that you declined to apologize for calling me a liar. Regardless of what you say at this point, I will no longer acknowledge your comments. I did not say that you were banned. Go back and read what I wrote. Read my entire post. You did not address one claim that I made. All you did was childishly yell “radiation-only.”

      • Webster, “It is becoming very prevalent in modeling the temperature time series data to factor in the ENSO and fit all the yearly fluctuations. The residual that is left looks like it will reveal just the trend.”

        Yeah, that is a great idea. You removed the detrended ENSO with near zero lag and forget about the actual thermal lag so you can look like a real idiot.

      • Theo Goodwin, the ocean heat content change doesn’t average out to zero in the long term, only those internal processes you mention which shuffle energy around. In the end it has to be radiation because that is all the earth gains and loses in terms of energy when viewed from space. There just is no other way for energy to come in or leave.

      • Cappy, when they do the fit they include a lag. That was part of the model.

        These slight ENSO modifications to the simple box-model are incredible aides to understanding the processes involved.

      • Webster, “Cappy, when they do the fit they include a lag. That was part of the model.”

        Right, SteveF and Nick Stoke looked at a few ways to estimate the lags. You can still have up to a ~8year lag which is inconsistent because of volcanic forcing. If there is no way of knowing it the adjustments are correct, they are a waste of time.

      • Jim D | September 23, 2013 at 5:42 pm |

        Energy reaches Earth from the Sun and then is grabbed by one or another natural process and must travel through the backwaters and lagoons of that natural process for seconds, days, decades, or centuries. Alarmists want to talk about energy only (radiation-only) and just cannot get their minds around the idea that processes own the energy for some period of time and the nature of the processes must be taken into account in any energy budget. Scientific study of the natural processes necessitates empirical research into phenomena such as ENSO, the AMO, the PDO, you name it.

        When Alarmists say that ENSO’s short term effects must balance to zero over the long run they are doing a priori science using the assumptions of the “radiation-only” model. One of their a priori assumptions is that ENSO is precisely known. Preposterous. You must investigate the natural process in question to determine its effects on the radiation. No one knows what set of underlying natural processes make up ENSO and they do not know because no one has done the empirical work.

        If Trenberth’s hypothesis is correct then there are mechanisms in the oceans that grab heat from shallower water and deliver it to deeper waters where it is sequestered for long periods of time. That energy has been removed from the energy budget for an indefinite period of time. To ignore that fact is to fail to account for the missing heat in the energy budget, or so says Trenberth.

      • Theo G, when CO2 reduces outgoing IR, the earth has two ways to respond, and it does both in some measure. First, the surface can warm to emit more IR to cancel the CO2 reduction. Second it can store the heat as a rate of change of heat content, which is a temporary solution because it involves an increasing warmth somewhere other than the surface. Lately the second one has been dominating, just due to the way the ocean is circulating its heat.

      • R. Gates the Skeptical Warmist

        Theo incorrectly said:

        “Does it never occur to you or any Alarmist that everything you know about the PDO, the AMO, ENSO, and similar matters is based on evidence that is stated in temperatures?”
        ___
        Oddly Theo, not once in my reply to you did I mention “temperature”. The forcing to the climate caused by increased GH gases is not an issue of temperature, but of energy, which of course takes many forms besides that which can be measured as sensible heat or temperature. If we learn anything about the so called “pause” in tropospheric temperatures– it is exactly that it is such a poor proxy for the overall energy gain to the Earth system because:

        1) It is such a smal part of Earth’s energy system
        2) It has such a low thermal inertia
        3) It is so easily influenced by ocean cycles (i.e. the troposphere is the tail being wagged by the dog)
        4) It is a poor metric (really a poor proxy) for climate sensitivity to GH gas forcing because energy quickly takes so many other forms in the system

      • ” If there is no way of knowing it the adjustments are correct, they are a waste of time “

        Hardly
        http://diyclimate.x10.mx/responsemodel/nbox.html

      • Jim D | September 23, 2013 at 10:39 pm |

        Everyone continues to fail to address one huge question. Can the missing heat in the deep oceans be treated in the same way as Alarmists treat ENSO? In other words, can we follow Alarmists and apply the top-down formula that the “missing heat in the oceans” must balance to zero over the long term? The answer is one that Alarmists cannot accept. The answer is that this is an empirical question requiring study of the peculiar mechanisms in the ocean. If we attempt to apply the Alarmist formula, we must first determine how long the heat is sequestered. Assume that it is sequestered for 1,000 years. (And none of you have one shred of empirical evidence that it is not sequestered 1,000 years.) Are Alarmists going to treat 1,000 years as the “short term” and claim that over the “long run,” say 10,000 years, the effects of sequestered heat will balance to zero. If so, then you have left the arena of science and crossed beyond metaphysics and religion to alchemy. Reductio Ad Absurdum.

      • If I had a hammer.
        =============

    • Theo,
      Is there any reliable (non-AGW hype sourced) work on how much solar heating actually gets into the oceans, net of evaporative cooling, reflection, re-radiation, etc.? From that point, is there any plausible non-magical wishing mechanism to move the heat from the surface down to the depths?

      • As regards your question about how much solar heating gets into the oceans, I have seen nothing that meets with general, non-hyped approval. The real problem here is that the variables are great and the question has never been clearly formulated. Of course a major side problem is that the AGW/CAGW hype artists distort efforts to formulate the question.

        The deep oceans are active. There are mechanisms peculiar to the oceans that can move a considerable amount of heat from shallower waters to deeper waters. However, the empirical research necessary to get a handle on those mechanisms has not even started in a serious way. Trenberth’s “Great Alarmist Blunder,” hypothesizing such mechanisms that might sequester heat in the deep oceans, might finally get some empirical research started. Most likely, they will just model it.

      • Answers
        Yes, between 0.6 to 0.7 w/m^2 over the ocean averaged.
        Yes, effective diffusion

      • In sales, if you are able to write the bid specs… you are a winner!

  97. Look at actual data.

    When earth needs cooling, it removes polar ice and turns on snowfall and builds ice volume on land that then advances

    When earth needs warming, it freezes polar ice and turns off snowfall and allows the sun to removed ice extent.

    IR provides most of the cooling, but it has no set point.
    Polar Sea Ice has a set point. Temperature is regulated below what IR can take care of. Albedo is used for this regulation.

  98. It’s seems the question is about Trenberths (Climate Gate correspondence) missing heat! Where is it? It’s a scandal we can’t account for it? I know I know nothing about physics (except from my brothers astro-physics phd) but it reminds me of so called ‘Dark energy” – a conception which means its measurement is precluded, if I misunderstand correctly. Except in this case, it is much more brass tacks – if the heat isn’t in the Ocean – where has it gone? Is it a phantom?

  99. Time for attitude adjustment. Try this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvKyBcCDOB4

    Wait for the commercial to finish. Also check out his live performance. See how sweet life can be.

  100. Climate science, as it addresses questions of warming, suffers from a fundamental confusion between temperatures and joules. ENSO is a natural regularity that redistributes temperatures across parts of the Pacific. Alarmists tell us that ENSO cannot produce energy and for that reason the short term effects of ENSO must balance near zero over the long run. That much I find totally acceptable. But then they conclude that there is no reason to do empirical research on the plethora of phenomena that redistribute temperatures such as ENSO because, well, it all must balance to zero over the long run. That is a critical mistake. All or part of what passes among Alarmists as “global warming” could be the result of interactions among myriad phenomena that redistribute temperatures. Of course this fact cannot be known if scientists continue to refuse to do the necessary empirical work on phenomena such as ENSO.

    Alarmists are obsessed with the additional energy that they believe to come from back-radiation from manmade CO2 in the atmosphere. All of their research and all of their analysis of global warming serves the investigation of this new source of energy and its effects. This focus has prevented empirical study of natural regularities that redistribute temperatures. Until Alarmists allow empirical scientists underneath their tent there will be no serious science of global warming.

    • R. Gates the Skeptical Warmist

      Theo said:

      “Alarmists are obsessed with the additional energy that they believe to come from back-radiation…”
      ____
      Nope. -1000 for you.

      It is the alteration of the thermal gradient between the surface and space, with the main surface being the ocean. The land and atmosphere have a very low energy storage potential compared to the ocean, but as increasing GH gases alter the thermal gradient, the large energy sink of the ocean naturally begins to gain more energy- which is of course exactly what we are seeing. Increased backradiaiton is only one manifestation of the more fundamental thermal gradient and enegy balance issue.

      Measured by the best proxy for overall gains in solar-derived energy in the Earth system (i.e. the ocean heat content), there has been no “pause” for the past 15 years, nor the past 40+ on decadal time scales.

  101. kim | September 24, 2013 at 12:21 pm |

    Peter, Paul, and Mary? Fits.

  102. How long can the pause last? Can it last for ever?

    CO2′s voracious appetite for energy can only be satisfied in two ways: kinetic and vibrational energy. We can forget kinetic, because it is no worse than O2 or N2 and it is less than 1% of the atmosphere. The answer has to be in the vibrational modes, of which there are many. When CO2 leaves the cylinders of your car or the furnace of the power station it is over 1,000C – very hot and most of, if not all. of its vibrational modes will be excited. When it exits the tail pipe or chimney it is still very hot and we would expect it to rise in the troposphere as a plume of hot gas passing its heat to the N2 and O2 as it rises. As it rises in the troposphere (like a hot air balloon) it can more readily radiate its heat into space, because the atmosphere above is thinning. So what proportion of heat is radiated into space, instead of heating our planet?. As the CO2 cools, density increases, it will fall again, maybe having used up all its excitation modes, it can no longer heat the planet. So this simple but apparently little understood chain of events may not be such a threat?

    So this explanation of CO2′s behavior in the troposphere can explain the pause. So long as the hot, new proportion of CO2 from exhaust or chimney remains below the present level the pause will continue. Note that this new metric of CO2, if accepted, focuses not on total CO2, but on the proportion of new,hot CO2.

    Apparently the IPCC now agree that heat is transferred from the N hemisphere to the southern via the ocean depths. This is a fundamental assumption in my model (see underlined above).

    • This silly explanation might apply to a discrete, single pulse of CO2, but the rise is continuous and rather smooth. The temperature pause would require a pause in the CO2 increase to “explain” it. Not there.

      In fact, no fluctuation in either the anthro or natural CO2 pattern is reflected in temperature.