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http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Knock yourself out buddy.

For all the drama of the editor's resignation letter, he seems to be awfully vague about any actual flaws in the paper.

If you want a peer-reviewed rebuttal you'll have to wait till next week when Andrew Dessler's paper is due to appear in Geophysical Research Letters -- the wheels of peer review grind slowly, which is why blogs tend to get used for more instantaneous responses. If you are happy with a non-peer-reviewed rebuttal by two respected climate scientists go here.

Citing argument against it somewhere on the intarwebs as a reason not to publish it is like asserting that no pro-AGW papers should ever be printed because of wattsupwiththat.com.

The difference here is that Anthony Watts is not only not a respected climate scientist but not in fact a climate scientist at all.

Try reading http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedback/ The paper is so full of holes that a freshman science major can take it apart

To help interpret the results, Spencer uses a simple model. But the simple model used by Spencer is too simple ... The model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave.
...
Clouds mainly occur because of weather systems (e.g., warm air rises and produces convection, and so on); they do not cause the weather systems.

I didn't know whether to mod that Informative, Funny or Insightful.

As far as a nice big compiled list of data sources and climate simulator source code downloads try this: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

You may denigrate the source but it's a good chunk of the data and code you've been asking for. The "unwillingness to share data" argument doesn't hold water any more.

It appears to me that Anthony Watts is overstating the meaning of that particular research and much more work needs to be done before solid conclusions can be made. Here's another take on the study. It doesn't sound like this relatively preliminary work is particularly applicable to the real world yet but will point the way toward further research. I look forward to future results from this group.

Some "missing bricks" may cause some leaks but doesn't necessarily cause the whole thing to collapse.
 

It has shown that the current explanations using sulfates and ammonia for nucleation can be boosted by a factor of ten pending on the presence of cosmic radiation. They also say that further research will be required to see what effect cosmic rays have on the nucleation properties of other compounds to get the full picture.

Not.

Thus the nucleation change as a result of real world GCR modulation is going to be much smaller than seen in these experiments, and much less important than the amount of pollutants.

In summary, this is a great example of doing science and making progress, even if it isn’t what they first thought they’d find.

There have already been some reviews of the paper. Here are a couple:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/07/misdiagnosis-of-surface-temperature-feedback/

http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs/global-warming-debunked-or-not/

You want Mann's data and algorithms for the original 1998 hockey stick graph? They are here.

You want the updated data from 2008 and 2009? They are here and here.

More links to other forms of climate data and methods are here.

The arguments that climate scientists are not releasing their data and methods are no longer viable because they have now for the most part.

2. Next you have to prove it will KEEP getting warmer, i.e. that it isn't a cyclical process at work. It has been much warmer than it is now in the not too distant past. The Romans grew grapes and exported wine from England when they ruled there.

Do you have refs for the Romans exporting wine from England?? There's some evidence for a (very) few Roman vinyards in Britain, but I'm not aware of anyone who's demonstrated that the industry was extensive (or good) enough to export to the much larger wine producing regions elsewhere in the empire. In any case, if grapes are a proxy for climate change, then unfortunately for you Britain grows grapes in a much larger scale today.

I mean, really. If you're going to attempt to refute AGW, at least start with some more reliable and documented evidence. (Why is it that denialists never cite references? Hand-waving, apparently, overrules 100 years of scientific research ...)

Show me the computer model run from ten years ago that its creators published that accurately predicted the general climate of eight of the last ten years.

That you would think 10 years of computer model run is meaningful in this context just shows you don't understand what climate models do. James Hansen's projections from 1988 do a pretty reasonable projection for Scenario B. Here's a comment on how good it did.

Some are exposed here.

Well, AGW as a concept may be too general by it's self to falsify but each of the thousands of specific things that go into it certainly are. But I think AGW itself is falsifiable. It's just not immediately falsifiable. If it's going to be falsified that might take another 20 or 30 years (not that I think it will be).

Regarding your weather/climate shot at models, if you flip a coin once it's fifty-fifty whether it comes up heads or tails. But if you flip it 100 times you can say that you are 95% certainty the results will be 50 heads +/- 5 and 50 tails +/- 5 (numbers made up but probably not that far off). So weather is equivalent to a single coin flip, climate is like 100 coin flips.

To answer Nail's response to you, the code and other information for most climate models are now available. You can find links to a number of them here.

Pray-tell, what specifically tells you Mann's original "hockey stick graph" is wrong just by looking at it? There have been over 10 similar studies by independent groups since that was published in 1998 and they all support the same conclusions as the original. Maybe the scientists aren't speaking up because they don't find anything wrong with Mann's work.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/co2-in-ice-cores/

Excerpt:
In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

Not saying you did this, but I love that people jump on the Mars is warming propaganda to try and show that climate science in general is bullshit. It's the same intellectually dishonest tactic that creationists use and frankly anyone who falls for it cannot possibly qualify as a skeptical thinker on the subject.

The "Mars is warming" myth is argument #27 on this excellent list of arguments from "climate skeptics", you may want to check on some other things you've "heard". Of course there's also a WP page describing the main lines of evidence that puts AGW firmly in the "scientific fact" category.

inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth

Oh and Mars' atmosphere is almost all CO2, you didn't hear about this?

If you look in Michael Mann's original and follow-up papers, proxy records (coral etc.) show that eastern asia was cold at the same time Europe was warm. Note that Europe is tiny compared to Eastern Asia. (The other relevant papers are behind a paywall -- blame the journals.) This excellent essay shows the breakdown of temperature by region over time in Figure 2.

Onto the two papers you linked. You must have made a mistake with Stenni et al. because it is irrelevant to the MWP. As for Trouet, et al. (2009), this repeats the same North Atlantic current argument, which is really weak. Not just because you are better off going to China to get the temperature in China, but for other reasons that we could get into.

Also note, that the hockey stick supports the AGW theory, but the AGW theory does not rest on the hockey stick. here is a list of myths about the hockey-stick.

The problem is that the shotgun approach of asserting, say, three dozen models, and then having actual measurements that have significant discrepancies with 75% of them, doesn't really say much. If your model isn't making predictions of any utility, and furthermore, cannot separate correlation from causality.

Not a single AGW model predicted the previous decade of lack of warming, and not a single AGW model can accurately hindcast all previous decades of climate.

Really? I'd say that IPCC AR4 did pretty well predicting the past decade.

Let's say I have a hypothesis that says that global climate change is caused by software piracy, and the predictions of that model I build show a strong correlation to our observed temperatures, within a huge range of error that I build into my model. Does my hypothesis hold? Sure, in the strictest sense of the word. Is my hypothesis really all that useful? Absolutely not.

The sad part, of course, is that so many people do see models as more than what they really are - they assume that these models represent evidence, when in reality, they're simply toys. Especially when you design them to withstand direct refutation by opening their error bars so wide that nearly *any* possible outcome is covered.

You're forgetting that range of error is the measure of how accurate your model is. If you can come up with a climate model which has much tighter confidence intervals than current AGW models but with real measurements still fitting in, you might win the Nobel Prize.

And another thing you're forgetting, one of those "toys" helped put man on the Moon and space probes in orbit of various planets in our solar system, hundreds of millions of kilometers away. Another one of those "toys" made it possible to build most of modern electronics, including the computer you're using right now. Those too are just inaccurate models. But they're accurate enough to be useful.

You're offering a false dichotomy. By constraining your imagination to only those factors in climate models, you prejudge the question (and frankly, you can tweak the model however you want, say by hard coding unjustified feedback from CO2 to H2O). The opposite of "Anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for observed recent warming" is not "The Sun is primarily responsible for observed recent warming", it's "natural forces are primarily responsible for observed recent warming".

Who said anything about constraining imagination? For what it's worth, you're free to add any factor you want or a combination of factors as long as you can provide mathematical description of its effect and accurate measurements of the factor in action, including the number of active sea pirates.

But the thing is, if you scratch anthropogenic CO2 from the model and stick with just natural levels of CO2, whatever changes you do to the equations, you'll always be left with a gaping hole in the shape of anthropogenic CO2. No matter how much you try to make the model fit the past records, it won't be able to recreate or predict new events as well as AGW models do.

You cannot say "I assert human CO2 is responsible. To refute me, you must prove that something else is specifically responsible, otherwise, I win by default." The null hypothesis cannot be so cleverly avoided. Your placement of human CO2 on the pedestal of supernatural primacy that must be disproved, rather than in its proper place as a hypothesis that must compete against the primacy of natural climate change, is unjustifiable.

I don't. I'm saying that right now, we have a pile of evidence as high as Empire State Building which points at anthropogenic CO2 as the main culprit as opposed to purely natural forces. A non-trivial part of this evidence are experiments which go along the lines of "what would the climate look like if we left anthropogenic CO2 out of the equation". And vast majority of those experiments come to the conclusion that it'd be completely different from what it looks like in reality.

Furthermore, why would you assert that we'd have higher warming in tropical regions if the sun was driving warming? The transfer of heat throughout the globe seems to have more to do with ocean currents - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6033/1076.abstract

Ummm... because that's where the the most heat enters our atmosphere and where those ocean currents take heat from? If you don't pump more heat into ocean currents in tropical regions, where do they take the extra heat that they're supposed to deliver into polar regions?

That all being said, given the prediction of the CO2 hotspot, would you accept that the lack of such a hotspot represents a solid refutation of your hypothesis? http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf

I have a question for you: where did the purple region above 16km in the "no hotspot" picture come from? The patterns on page 8 list it under "an increase in non-water-vapor greenhouse gases" and there's no other cause of such cold pattern anywhere else in the list. As for the hotspot itself, the measurements are within confidence intervals of IPCC models (link taken from your article).

If you don't accept that as a solid refutation, are you willing to make other specific predictions about what kinds of patterns we could observe that would prove your hypothesis incorrect? I'm assuming you would have a longer list than "if the tropics warm more than the poles" - that seems like a pretty broad inclusionary criteria that doesn't logically lead to human CO2 based warming exclusively (especially if we could observe similar warming patterns before h

You may not consider RealClimate unbiased and it isn't. It's biased by real science rather than politics. If you want to know what climate scientists are saying instead of what others say they are saying it's the place to get it straight from the horses mouth.

Here is a comment on Spencer's paper. Make up your own mind.

Realclimate has just published an article on Roy Spencer's paper. As I just predicted, there Spencer's model leaves out important known aspects of climate science, like El Nino. Mike also points out that clouds are not forcing factors as Spencer assumes. (I mean really? Clouds have a time-scale of weeks at most. That makes them a feedback.)

Anyway, I suspect this makes no different to your beliefs, but note that there *is* academic discussion, and you *can* follow it.

This data -- or at least the end-result manipulated data -- has been debunked, and the methods used to manipulate it seriously called into question (see the Wegman Report). But the alarmists just keep going along as though that never happened and nothing is wrong.

That's because there nothing wrong with the climate science as the Wegman Report affair demonstrates.

Trenberth takes it on further on RealClimate.

It worries me how many legitimate articles on climate change may be hiding because they are against current predictions and models, and researchers are fearing public lynching . It's truly worrying.

There is no need to worry. Anti-consensus articles have no trouble seeing the light of day even when they are chock full of specious reasoning. Anti-consensus scientists have no trouble getting funding (e.g. Soon, Baliunas, Spencer, Chritie, McIntyre, McKitrick). These articles are thoroughly examined and debunked every time. (See here for an example of scientific discourse on these issues.)

Yeah, you just proved my point.

Seeing the light of the day? Anyone can submit something to ArXiv or I dunno, the "there is no global warning journal brought to you by Big Oil". That's not the point.

What I'm saying is when someone suggests a discrepancy all the "real scientists" go 'Al Gore' on them. It's easy to build consensus removing dissenting voices.

I'm not saying the IPCC is wrong, but there are other factors, mostly unknown, that affect the climate.

Is the climate changing? I don't doubt it.

But I can't support an alarmist position and extrapolation of data based on the limited knowledge we have of climate.

It worries me how many legitimate articles on climate change may be hiding because they are against current predictions and models, and researchers are fearing public lynching . It's truly worrying.

There is no need to worry. Anti-consensus articles have no trouble seeing the light of day even when they are chock full of specious reasoning. Anti-consensus scientists have no trouble getting funding (e.g. Soon, Baliunas, Spencer, Chritie, McIntyre, McKitrick). These articles are thoroughly examined and debunked every time. (See here for an example of scientific discourse on these issues.)

You can verify all of this YOURSELF, with minimal effort.

The only people who receive death threats are legitimate climate scientists, such as Michael Mann.

Here ya go: http://www.realclimate.org/

Usually Spencer's work is revised within about five years or so owing to errors in data reduction. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/how-to-cook-a-graph-in-three-easy-lessons/

So where's the beating? I haven't yet seen a refutation of the data in the study.

Give it more than a few hours. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time. And yes, the author of this study is a well-known denialist who has, in the past, put out quite a bit of just plain wrong stuff. For example:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/04/review-of-spencers-great-global-warming-blunder/

So I would recommend a little bit of patience. Given past experience, my bet is that this study will be thoroughly taken apart by scientists who actually know what they are doing.

I agree that ad hominems are annoying. The point is, if Michael Mann was saying this, there would be some credibility to this claims. Roy Spencer has a history of specious claims and reasoning. His claims will be assess, as they always have been.

At odds 1000-1, I would say that this paper will quickly sink to oblivion in the scientific community because it has elementary mistakes in it. Denialists will use it as proof that they are right, ignore or never learn about any mistakes, and the paper will have its intended political effect. Roy Spencer will continue believing what he does, but not fix his unfixable mistakes because he cannot. Instead, he will seek a new angle to attack climate science.

I could be wrong, but my odds are 1000-1, because we've seen this happen so many times before.

Given Roy Spencer's history in this debate, there will be scathing rebuttal to this paper that points out elementary mistakes that Spencer never bothers to correct.

This is *exactly* how to spread doubt on the issue.

I too hope that the climate scientists are wrong, but Spencer has little credibility. Be that as it may, his arguments will be analysed, because real scientists examine and assess all arguments -- unlike denialists, who just talk.

Yes, but that changes nothing.

Previously, temperature shifted due to ice ages, and CO2 amplified that shift (CO2 being responsible for the significant proportion of the actual temperature increase). This time, we've kicked things off instead.

It's not hard to understand. Recommended reading: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/04/the-lag-between-temp-and-co2/

Heartland Institute is hardly a credible organization. It seems to be a shill for big oil, etc. Here are some interesting articles about Mr. Spencer's institute: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/01/what-if-you-held-a-conference-and-no-real-scientists-came/ http://www.desmogblog.com/500-scientists-with-documented-doubts-about-the-heartland-institute

Anyone who is inclined to give a lot of weight to this "alarmist" press release should first read this, on a previous paper from Roy Spencer. Note this

what he gets through peer-review is far less threatening to the mainstream picture of anthropogenic global warming than you’d think from the spin he puts on it in press releases, presentations and the blogosphere.

Now, also read the paper, and note this

It is concluded that atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations.

Hmm, doesn't sound like the press release or the Forbes article much, does it ?

Use the above and your judgement to figure out just how much weight to give the above.

Why won't people listen to this guy? It's like everyone fell asleep or left after the first half of the movie or something.

For the same reason people doesn't listen to greenpeace.
While he says a lot of things that are true the hit/miss ratio is too bad for anyone to be able to take anything he says at face value.
It's not enough to say a lot of things that are true. If you wan't people to start listening to you you will also have to stop telling things that aren't.

Such as? From a review by actual climatologists:

How well does the film handle the science? Admirably, I thought. It is remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research. Discussion of recent changes in Antarctica and Greenland are expertly laid out. He also does a very good job in talking about the relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity. As one might expect, he uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may have serious impacts on society, but he doesn’t highlight the connection any more than is appropriate (see our post on this, here).

Which is not to say that they agree completely with everything in the book and film:

For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in Earth in the Balance. The small errors don’t detract from Gore’s main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change.

but to cast his "hit/miss ratio" as "bad" seems like unsubstantiated rhetoric to me.

Why won't people listen to this guy? It's like everyone fell asleep or left after the first half of the movie or something.

For the same reason people doesn't listen to greenpeace.
While he says a lot of things that are true the hit/miss ratio is too bad for anyone to be able to take anything he says at face value.
It's not enough to say a lot of things that are true. If you wan't people to start listening to you you will also have to stop telling things that aren't.

Such as? From a review by actual climatologists:

How well does the film handle the science? Admirably, I thought. It is remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research. Discussion of recent changes in Antarctica and Greenland are expertly laid out. He also does a very good job in talking about the relationship between sea surface temperature and hurricane intensity. As one might expect, he uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may have serious impacts on society, but he doesn’t highlight the connection any more than is appropriate (see our post on this, here).

Which is not to say that they agree completely with everything in the book and film:

For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in Earth in the Balance. The small errors don’t detract from Gore’s main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change.

but to cast his "hit/miss ratio" as "bad" seems like unsubstantiated rhetoric to me.

And your appeal for raw data is particularly laughable, given that it's the usual gambit that deniers throw out as if it's all some vast conspiracy and if only scientists would spend every waking moment satisfying specious FOIA requests this conspiracy would be revealed.

That, and the vast majority of the raw data is available:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

As always, there are some proprietary datasets that are not publicly available, but they form only a small fraction of the total data used in most scientific papers.

Go to http://realclimate.org/. Plenty of evidence, and reasoned debate.

No wounded pride here. I just don't think the anthropogenic part of global warming really started until the last half of the 20th Century. Warming before then was primarily from other causes. Climate scientists would tell you the same thing. Those studies you're looking at must just be statistical in nature to have such diverse answers. That is they're projecting warming based on current trends rather than using the physical properties as a basis of their projection.

Here is a graph that plots several model simulations along with a number of proxy reconstructions and the instrument record. I don't see anything terribly out of whack regarding the model simulations regarding the LIA or the MWP. I got it from this blog post.

Here is a discussion of the difficulty of reconciling models and paleoclimate data. It's not as easy as you might think.

There are a myriad of different studies out there and I'm not going to take the time to look them up. Some may start at the height of the LIA (around 1600) but that's not true of all of them. I think most of the ones you're referring to probably started in the middle 1800's which was at the tail of the LIA. Regardless of that if there is a physical basis to the study rather than just statistical modeling they should converge on reality.

No wounded pride here. I just don't think the anthropogenic part of global warming really started until the last half of the 20th Century. Warming before then was primarily from other causes. Climate scientists would tell you the same thing. Those studies you're looking at must just be statistical in nature to have such diverse answers. That is they're projecting warming based on current trends rather than using the physical properties as a basis of their projection.

Here is a graph that plots several model simulations along with a number of proxy reconstructions and the instrument record. I don't see anything terribly out of whack regarding the model simulations regarding the LIA or the MWP. I got it from this blog post.

Here is a discussion of the difficulty of reconciling models and paleoclimate data. It's not as easy as you might think.

There are a myriad of different studies out there and I'm not going to take the time to look them up. Some may start at the height of the LIA (around 1600) but that's not true of all of them. I think most of the ones you're referring to probably started in the middle 1800's which was at the tail of the LIA. Regardless of that if there is a physical basis to the study rather than just statistical modeling they should converge on reality.

No wounded pride here. I just don't think the anthropogenic part of global warming really started until the last half of the 20th Century. Warming before then was primarily from other causes. Climate scientists would tell you the same thing. Those studies you're looking at must just be statistical in nature to have such diverse answers. That is they're projecting warming based on current trends rather than using the physical properties as a basis of their projection.

Here is a graph that plots several model simulations along with a number of proxy reconstructions and the instrument record. I don't see anything terribly out of whack regarding the model simulations regarding the LIA or the MWP. I got it from this blog post.

Here is a discussion of the difficulty of reconciling models and paleoclimate data. It's not as easy as you might think.

There are a myriad of different studies out there and I'm not going to take the time to look them up. Some may start at the height of the LIA (around 1600) but that's not true of all of them. I think most of the ones you're referring to probably started in the middle 1800's which was at the tail of the LIA. Regardless of that if there is a physical basis to the study rather than just statistical modeling they should converge on reality.

Sorry to not answer sooner but I went to a Jethro Tull concert Thursday and got busy a work Friday.

Interesting paper. Thanks for that. But even Usokin himself says not to read too much into it in regards to climate science. To quote from a comment on RealClimate:

Ilya Usoskin responded to yr considerations as follows:

“Dr. Ladbury is right. No statistically significant conclusion can be drawn concerning the shape of the distribution of the Grand Minima shape. But the matter is that the division on Maunder-like and Spoerer-like minima has been done much earlier basing on only a few minima. Our present result is consistent with such a division, although a long-tail continuous distribution cannot be excluded. I also agree that hardly any direct implication for climate studies is apparent, and we were primarily interested in observational constraints for solar dynamo models.”

http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=502 coment 168

The last glaciation started ending about 20,000 years ago. It ended because of changes in insolation but that is probably due more to Milankovitch Cycles than changes in solar state. 9500 BCE was the end of the transition from glaciation to an interglacial. While it is a factor it's not likely that changes in solar state by itself drives the cycles of the ice age.

Hmm... It doesn't appear that Dr. Usokin considered Milankovitch Cycle changes into his work. I wonder if it would change much if he did.

I've never seen any evidence that climate scientists have tried to erase the MWP. Looking at Dr. Usokin's Figure 17 it appears that solar activity wasn't particularly high during that period. That would appear to support that contention that the MWP was more of a regional rather than global phenomenon.

Is it linear when temperatures rise about the same amount for each doubling of CO2? I didn't think that was a linear relationship but you're obviously better trained in statistics than I am so maybe I'm wrong.

GCM's are primarily physical models. Some things that are not well understood are parameterized but the fundamentals are based on known physical relationships. It don't think it's fair to say the climate sensitivity is basically unknown. Oscillations like the PDO may well be a neutral factor over long enough periods as the positive and negative phases cancel each other out. Happy is not a word I would use regarding proxy reconstructions. I would just say they are the best information we have at the moment and are more useful than assuming we know nothing.

Individual scientists and small groups can certainly fall victim to bending science but as the group becomes larger that becomes much more difficult to pull off. Given the global nature of climate research I find it difficult to believe that such a conspiracy could hold together for such a long period of time over so many different research groups. Scientists are too competetive for that. You focus on the MBH vs. M&M controversy but ignore all of the similar reconstructions (at least 10) since then from different researchers using different proxy data that basically support Mann's original graph. Even applying the suggested improvements in statistical analysis didn't change Mann's graph much. It's time to move on.

Until the middle of the 20th Century solar variation was likely the primary driver of temperature changes from the Maunder Minimum. CO2 levels had only risen from about 280 ppmv to 315 ppmv by then. Since then it has risen to 390 ppmv.

I don't think I've ever heard climate scientists use the terms usual or unusual regarding the solar state. They just contended that since the mid 20th Century that solar activity hadn't changed enough to account for the observed warming. And it's true that the last 4 or 5 cycles until the present one have been about equivalent to each

Nope, sorry, nice try. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/05/an-incremental-step-blown-up/

Um... because that theory is not real science and has been completely debunked.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/cosmoclimatology-tired-old-arguments-in-new-clothes/

Actually the point made by that blog post is pretty well refuted in its first comment. The data streams the author was using do not agree with the hindcast of the predictions in question. Using such data isn't going to invalidate a hypothesis like that. Far more detail than that is in this link. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/2010-updates-to-model-data-comparisons/

Essentially, the refutation there is from cherry picking, and doesn't really mean anything at all. I've taken a splash of meteorology classes myself, and believe me when I say labratory experimentation IS a major part of underlying theories in climatology, On the grander scale, models and simulations do get invalidated, improved upon, and tested. It's not ex nihil here.

If you pull up meteorlogical prediction software, you'll get different interchangable modeling algorithms, because different ones have had better historical success making predictions about particular kinds of weather than others. They're never 100% accurate, but there's a reason why it used to be you could get the same accuracy in 1 day forcasts that we now get with 5 day forcasts.

I never claimed current theories are gospel. The claim I'll make is that they make more accurate predictions than anyone else about temperatures, sea levels, and ice cover. The rub of it is, people who don't like global warming theories never give very useful null hypotheses.

common ones:
temperatures are stable: quite certainly not consistant with what we see on a year to year or century to century basis
temperatures are proportional to solar output: works year to year, falls apart decade to decade
natural cycles(always seems to be unspecified): doesn't provide any useful mechanism for making a prediction, going back to my original request for one from you.

As a side note, can you please respond further on my journal? I can't stand this javascript-induced monster of a thread anymore.

Your "model in words" is beyond simplistic

Of course it's simplified. I'm not writing a graduate level text on theory of climate change. I'm responding to a message on slashdot. So I just mentioned the dominant feedback. I didn't mention the positive feedback of ice loss or of methane release due to melting clathrates. And I didn't mention the negative feedback of cloud formation. I didn't, because those are minor effects.

In the end, these things are really complex

and therefore we don't know anything. The mating cry of the denialist.

There hasn't been a global temperature plateau. The thermal energy stored in the oceans keeps rising. The sea level keeps rising almost faster than predicted. The models have done a very good job of matching *the*degree*of*change*.

And, yes, changes in the sun are the number one factor in the climate of our planet.

See, things like this show that you are deliberately lying, and that you probably don't really believe any of what you are saying. Anyone who can use Google can find out that this is false. The sun is responsible for less than 10% of the temperature change since 1700.

No. We're well within the bounds. That plot is comparing three different things without normalizing to a common point (i.e. the temperature in 1990) so it is deliberately misleading. If you actually go to Dr. Best's site you'll see the three adjusted to a common reference, in which case they are much closer to being within the bounds shown. But the bounds shown by Dr. Best are incorrect because they don't allow for error analysis or annual variance. The ones shown at realclimate.org are much more realistic. And Dr. Best has included temperature numbers for 2011 in his analysis apparently at the same weight as full year data. That point will be very inaccurate because it only includes data for a small portion of the year, which could skew the moving average.

I'm not sure "Dr. Clive Best" did a very good job on those graph, from his comments, I suspect he's not using the actual temperature data. If the climate has cooled since 2000, then why are 9 of the 10 warmest years after 2000? In any case, the Real Climate graphs show a different picture.

The following is a link to a blog set up by NASA scientists. It describes what the satellite will see and why it is important. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/06/the-age-of-aquarius/

An Inconvenient Truth had so many anti-scientific mistakes with it (the Drowning Polar Bear Myth, the Global-warming-caused-Katrina Myth, and so forth), that even RealClimate.org's apologetic review of the movie had to admit them

Mis-characterize much?

In your link, RealClimate.org did not mention the Polar Bear issue at all, but here is what they had to say about Gore's treatment of Katrina:

"As one might expect, he [Gore] uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may have serious impacts on society, but he doesnâ(TM)t highlight the connection any more than is appropriate"

Here is a better link from RealClimate.org that does address the polar bear issue, as well as Katrina:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/convenient-untruths/

# Hurricane Katrina and global warming Katrina is used in the film as a legitimate illustration of the destructive power of hurricanes, our inability to cope with natural disaster, and the kind of thing that could well get worse in a warmer world. Nowhere does Gore state that Katrina was caused by global warming. We discussed this attribution issue back in 2005, and what we said then still holds. Individual hurricanes cannot be attributed to global warming, but the statistics of hurricanes, in particular the maximum intensities attained by storms, may indeed be.

# Impact of sea ice retreat on Polar bears As we presaged in August, summer Arctic sea ice shattered all records this year for the minimum extent. This was partially related to wind patterns favorable to ice export in the spring, but the long term trends are almost certainly related to the ongoing and dramatic warming in the Arctic. Polar bears do indeed depend on the sea ice to hunt for seals in the spring and summer, and so a disappearance of this ice is likely to impact them severely. The specific anecdote referred to in the movie came from observations of anomalous drownings of bears in 2004 and so was accurate. However, studying the regional populations of polar bears is not easy and assessing their prospects is tough. In the best observed populations such as in western Hudson Bay (Stirling and Parkinson, 2006), female polar bear weight is going down as the sea ice retreats over the last 25 years, and the FWS is considering an endangered species listing. However, it should be stated that in most of the discussions about polar bears, they are used as a representative species. Arctic ecosystems are changing on many different levels, but it is unsurprising that charismatic mega-fauna get more press than bivalves. In the end, it may be the smaller and less photogenic elements that have the biggest impact.

Here is the summary from that link:

Overall, our verdict is that the 9 points are not "errors" at all (with possibly one unwise choice of tense on the island evacuation point). But behind each of these issues lies some fascinating, and in some cases worrying, scientific findings and we can only applaud the prospect that more classroom discussions of these subjects may occur because of this court case.

Conclusion: In sharp contrast to your wild statement, actual climate scientists found no significant errors in Gore's movie.

For global warming, it means taking two different planet Earths, adding CO2 to one and not the other, and then measuring the temperatures. Can you show me the referreed journal article that describes that experiment being done even once, much less in a reproducable manner as required by the scientific method?

So according to your logic, Newton was just bullshitting when he said the Moon causes the tides because he did not have a control version of the Earth, not only that but every scientist since the 1600's has unquestioningly swallowed Newton's unscientific theory about tides.

But even if your "logic" made sense, it is moot since there are many independent data sets, and there is a physical explaination that you can test yourself with some cheap lab equipment. If the physical explaination is wrong then it means spectroscopy is wrong, which in turn means much of quantum mechanics is wrong, astronomy is wrong, ect. And if you really want to look at other planets (as climate scientists such as Hannsen already have), then please explain to us why the surface of Venus, (AKA our sister planet), is hot enough to melt lead.

The other major faw in your post, is that you don't seem to realise the physics came first (Fourier 1824), then the prediction of AGW based on the physics came in the 1890's, then strong evidence of increased CO2 forcing was found in the temprature records in the late 50's. Then computer models started making many other predictions about the effect of increased CO2 such as polar amplification and stratospheric cooling that have since been confirmed by observations.

I put it to you that you are acting no differently to a creationist when you choose to denigrate an entire branch of science based on ill informed assumptions and your own personal definition of the scientific method, or perhaps your just further evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect.