The temperature in downtown Moscow actually affects real people. The global radiation equilibrium, as stated on that level as an "average temperature" doesn't.
You have a very good point. We do a good job at this point of predicting global average temperature, but how it will affect this town or that town is still very murky. For instance, over the last few years the Hudson Bay has not frozen over during the winter. Over the same few years the UK has experienced very cold winters. It is hypothesized that the two events may be linked. That is, the wall of ocean heat over the Hudson, which would typically be covered by a sheet of ice, is throwing off the arctic oscillation. The cold air that would typically swoop down over the Hudson is instead swooping down over the UK. This was not predicted.
One thing is certain. If we change the average temperature of the Earth then we should expect more dramatic changes in various pockets of the world. This will happen in chaotic and to some extent unpredictable ways. This kind of change is not going to be a good thing. People who have adapted to one climate will need to adapt to another. This will be expensive.
1. CFC's are much denser than air. The lightest possible CFC, which would be CH2FCl, would have an atomic weight around 62, much heavier than N2 at 28. How can something that wants to stay so close to the ground, even in the presence of normal Brownian motion, affect something so high up?
It is likely for the same reason that short people don't suffocate despite the fact that C02 has a molecular weight of 42 g/mol while oxygen weighs in at only 15.
Ozone goes through natural cycles. These happen regardless of whether we are using CFC's. It is merely luck that the depletion occurred after CFC use and the replenishment occurred after we ceased using. Scientists who advocated CFC control where alarmists out to get research funding. As one industry magazine noted at the time: "The whole area of research grants and the competition among scientists to get them must be considered a factor in the politics of ozone."
We can also look at deserts. H2O is a potent GHG that is largely absent in deserts. For this reason they tend to be very cold at night - even those deserts that are very warm during the day.
We can (and do) measure incoming long wave radiation and we can (and do) measure outgoing long wave radiation. The difference is the measurable effect of GHG in the atmosphere. The disparity is increasing over time.
You are most certainly wrong. Dr Richard Lindzen was a vocal critic of the CFC/ozone link. He was also a vocal critic of the cigarette/cancer link. He is also now a critic of the GHG/warming link. For every crazy opinion there is a credentialed advocate. As it turns out he is most likely Dr Richard Lindzen.
Believe me, there were scientists saying all sorts of things that were not directly supported by the evidence. I am certain that the parent poster is right. For instance Dr Richard Lindzen was very vocal that CFC's were NOT linked to ozone depletion. He was also vocal that cigarettes do not cause cancer and is now vocal that greenhouse gasses do not cause global warming. For every opinion there is a credentialed advocate.
Another consideration is the half life of the gas. For instance methane is quite a bit more potent as a GHG than CO2, but the half life is 7 years compared to about a century for CO2.
The point is, when a government studies how the changing environment will affect their future infrastructure investments, that is not a "stupid scare story". That is called planning ahead, and it is a reasonable thing for a government to do. The alternative is to assume business as usual and deal with the consequences as they arise. That is what they are doing near Illinois at the cost of $1 billion.
I think the point is not that this kind of infrastructure can't be built in hotter/wetter/stormier locations. Just that if you are building infrastructure for one type of place, and you suspect that it will soon be another type of place, then you better plan ahead or plan to rebuild in 50 years.
I'm not sure why you equate losing a few bars of wifi reception to "We're already dead!" This seems like this is a pretty moderate report. It's not outside of the mandate of the government to plan ahead for infrastructure. (In fact it is probably the responsible thing to do)
Given that the earth is warming, and that we have chosen adaptation over mitigation, it seems reasonable and responsible for a government to determine what would be required to adapt. How much would it cost? Compare this proactive approach to the one taken in Illinois. There the US is blowing up a levee, flooding 100,000 acres of farmland, causing 1 billion in property damage, in order to save a town from flooding: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110502/us_nm/us_weather_flooding_decision
We get to choose between mitigation or adaptation. Neither one is pretty. It's better to plan up front either way.
I agree with you. Slashdot approaches a medium for civil debate, but even here I suspect that you will find a majority of people who believe in reducing/eliminating copyright, reducing/eliminating patent protection, legislating away DRM, pro-science, anti-religion, etc. Some of these views can be considered extreme. This is really just another forum for people to have their preconceptions validated. I am not excluding myself.
Part of the problem is that no matter how extreme your point of view, there is an internet forum out there that will validate it. I think that this comes at the expense of the middle ground. There is no platform for reasoned debate. It has become too easy to insulate insulate yourself from opposing viewpoints and to find people who will validate your preconceptions.
Comment 57 of the NYT post has another example: What we got was an email from a gun enthusiast telling us to put plastic bags over our heads and kill ourselves. What was ominous is that the author of that email was a former army special forces who lived near some of the researchers.
We also got 'investigated' by one of the groups whom we invited to participate--a group funded by the gun industry. They used Freedom of Information Act requests to demand all of our emails relating to the research, all of our data, all of our files. As Mr. Krugman accurately points out, none of us assumed that our emails would be a fishbowl for any group of ideologues to plunder for out of context blurbs that could, quite literally in this situation, paint a bullseye on our backs. The process of giving all the information to these groups is immensely time-consuming and burdensome for us and still ongoing. For example, I have over 30,000 emails that need to be searched for the ones in which they are interested. Then, every email has to be examined to see if certain information, like participant names which are confidential, need to be redacted. - http://community.nytimes.com/comments/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/academic-intimidation/?permid=57#comment57
Let the court decide #1. And let the court decide #2
There is no need to invoke the courts. The request is legal. It's just bad form. This is not the way to go about responding to public discourse. If you disagree with what someone publicly says, you can respond publicly. You really oughtn't fish through private correspondence.
We need to find the REAL cause for these three Warming periods, which are not man-made.
IMHO
You will not find a single cause for warming or cooling, and should certainly not look for a single cause to explain ALL warming events. A good reference is the IPCC WG1. This highlights a number of forcings and outlines their impacts on the climate.
We are experiencing basically the same climate now that existed 5000 years ago... what do you blame the climate change of 5000 years ago on?
It was closer to 10,000 years ago that we came to the peak of our current interglacial. We have had almost 10,000 years of relatively stable climate. The reason for the spike in temperatures at that time is attributed to Milankovitch cycles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Note that we are currently at the peak of this interglacial. This same natural cycle will bring us back into icier temperatures in another 10,000 years.
A) There are lots of climate change deniers out there
B) Postmodernism has caused lots of people to think that science is all relative, and the folks in A) have adopted that banner.
I'll really argue the link here- I doubt that *anyone* in A has really, seriously read the literature from B. A is comprised primarily of folks who are either highly religious and refuse to adopt a scientific worldview at all (and would be totally horrified by the philosophy of B if they actually read it) or people who have massive financial incentives
Here is a more critical view of post normal science: http://shewonk.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/pns-pretty-nonsensical-stuff/So now we learn who comprises the extended peer community — all relevant stakeholders. They have “extended facts” that involve local and anecdotal knowledge. But but but you mean non-scientists can put their facts forward on the same footing as scientific facts? Who judges which facts — scientific and non-scientific — are more valid and more relevant to the issue at hand? A vote of hands? Who decides who the legitimate stakeholders are?
This feels all very muddled and unclear, indeterminate.
Your curve clearly ends with an artifact in both quantities plotted caused by the fact that it is averaging zeros from beyond the end. You can't smooth right up to the present!
Nope. The solar activity graph ends 5.5 years early because of the 11 year smoothing. No 0's were averaged beyond the end point. 11 year smoothing was chosen because of the roughly 11 year cycle.
...the earth cools during periods of low solar activity, which is, of course, when actual solar irradiance peaks! In other words, when the sun has no sunspots, it is actually slightly brighter and one would expect (if anything) warming,
Nope. Solar output is roughly 1366.5 Wm-2 during a solar maximum, and 1365.5 Wm-2 during a solar minimum. By the way, if you think that and extra 1 Wm-2 should cause the current warming then you must believe that the earth is very sensitive to forcings. Perhaps you are right. If you are arguing that there is some other mechanism that is not understood, then I'm not sure why you would lend it more credence than the greenhouse effect which is very well understood and has a physical basis that was well understood over 150 years ago. The following graph shows sunspots along with measured irradiance: http://www.climate4you.com/images/SolarIrradianceAndSunspots.gif
you have no idea what temperature it "should" be with or without CO_2.
Inertia is a confounding factor no doubt, but not one that is lost on scientists
Extend the base of the very plot you built to 10000 BCE
I suspect you don't trust proxy's going back 1000 years let alone 10000. Your point about looking at too short a timespan is well taken. You should also consider that for the last 10000 years we have been at the height of an interglacial. The long term trend is down (back into a deep freeze). The medium term (century long) trends have previously matched up fairly well with solar activity. Over the last century this no longer seems to be the case (according to the literature)
But we'll see, very soon. The sun is rising what will probably be the lowest peak in over a century. The Earth has plenty of heat stored up from the heating phase, and of course there will be a lag and significant fluctuations as its chaotic head delivery system self-reorganizes, but by the end of this cycle, we will almost certainly have entered a cooling phase.
I hope you are right. If the literature is right then the next decade will be the hottest on record. My prediction is that skeptics will have dropped the solar output theory and will be claiming that changes in cloud cover is causing the warming (a theory that Dr Roy Spencer is already priming). I hate to have to wait another decade to find out. Predictions of imminent global cooling have been around for decades. I don't think another record hot decade will change that.
I wasn't claiming that the Earth's temperatures were or were not warmer -- I was referring to the fact that Steig 2009 finds substantial warming in Antarctica as an artifact of poor methodology.
Forgive my misunderstanding. I'm still not sure that you are right. O'Donnell finds some cooling areas between 1981-2006, but overall finds a slight warming trend. Both papers find a cooling trend between 1969-2000. Both find a warming trend between 1957-1981.
I see that you favour the idea that solar irradience is responsible for the current warming. You can compare temperature to solar output here: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:132/scale:0.01/from:1875/offset:-0.6/plot/esrl-co2/from:1875/scale:0.010/offset:-3.2 I've included CO2 on the graph as well. It doesn't seem like there is a clear corelation between solar output and temperatures (In fact it looks like they are headed in opposite directions). It is also interesting to note that solar output is highest during the period when both papers found Antarctic cooling (1969-2000). You considered a discrepancy between CO2 and Antarctic temperatures a nail in the AGW coffin. Does the same apply to the discrepancy between solar output and antarctic temperatures? More likely there is something else going on. Perhaps this is in part attributable to recent trends in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM)
Bear in mind that anthropogenic CO_2 over this interval looks nothing like this and is absurdly decorrelated from global temperature across the entire range except the last 150 years, right there in that confounding pesky solar activity grand maximum.
One thing that you should keep in mind is that there are multiple forcings. Solar activity is one of them. CO2 did not change much over the last 1000 years except in the last 150. Therefor CO2 was not a forcing until recently. You should not expect to see a corelation between temperature and CO2 over the last 100 years until recently.
Indeed, the keepers of the global climate models would have you believe that solar state is irrelevant to global temperature in spite of the fact that the overall Holocene data says otherwise quite convincingly.
I disagree with your assesment. Most papers I have read agree that solar output was likely a primary driver of medium term trends prior to the last 100 years, and that the corelation falls apart in the last 50 years as something else has become the primary driver. I think that part of the problem is that most people don't read the literature. They read WWF or greenpeace, or they read skeptic blogs, or at best they read both. This gives a very skewed perspective on what the science really says. The blogs (on both sides) are interested in hits. This is how they make money. The science is not really that interesting and is filled with "however" and "more research is needed" caveats. Reporting on the literature will not result in hits. Instead they weave naratives complete with antagonists. On one side it's the evil oil companies and their puppets. On the other it's the grant chaising scientists. If you believe the naratives it is easy to conclude that any work done by the other side is the result of lies, manipulation, and incompetence. In fact science is iterative. Steig tried a novel approach. O'Donnel likely improved upon it. There will be further work in the field which will improve our understanding further. Booring, but good.
It is also not true that O'Donnel found cooling in Antarctica in his critique of Steig 2009. He found warming. It is also not clear that O'Donnel's methods are better. Perhaps they are, but if so, this doesn't make the authors of Steig 2009 liars or incompetent. There will surely be a response to O'Donnel 2010 that further improves the results. This does not make the authors of O'Donnel 2010 liars or incompetent.
Your finding of more warming in the adjusted data is interesting. Can you share your methods and data? I would like to take a look. Is it possible that you were using ungridded data? Simply taking an average of all stations will bias your results towards oversampled areas.
Slashdot Mirror
The temperature in downtown Moscow actually affects real people. The global radiation equilibrium, as stated on that level as an "average temperature" doesn't.
You have a very good point. We do a good job at this point of predicting global average temperature, but how it will affect this town or that town is still very murky. For instance, over the last few years the Hudson Bay has not frozen over during the winter. Over the same few years the UK has experienced very cold winters. It is hypothesized that the two events may be linked. That is, the wall of ocean heat over the Hudson, which would typically be covered by a sheet of ice, is throwing off the arctic oscillation. The cold air that would typically swoop down over the Hudson is instead swooping down over the UK. This was not predicted.
One thing is certain. If we change the average temperature of the Earth then we should expect more dramatic changes in various pockets of the world. This will happen in chaotic and to some extent unpredictable ways. This kind of change is not going to be a good thing. People who have adapted to one climate will need to adapt to another. This will be expensive.
1. CFC's are much denser than air. The lightest possible CFC, which would be CH2FCl, would have an atomic weight around 62, much heavier than N2 at 28. How can something that wants to stay so close to the ground, even in the presence of normal Brownian motion, affect something so high up?
It is likely for the same reason that short people don't suffocate despite the fact that C02 has a molecular weight of 42 g/mol while oxygen weighs in at only 15.
What month are you living in???
You can read about the whole debacle here: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=341&tstamp=200604
We can also look at deserts. H2O is a potent GHG that is largely absent in deserts. For this reason they tend to be very cold at night - even those deserts that are very warm during the day.
We can (and do) measure incoming long wave radiation and we can (and do) measure outgoing long wave radiation. The difference is the measurable effect of GHG in the atmosphere. The disparity is increasing over time.
You are most certainly wrong. Dr Richard Lindzen was a vocal critic of the CFC/ozone link. He was also a vocal critic of the cigarette/cancer link. He is also now a critic of the GHG/warming link. For every crazy opinion there is a credentialed advocate. As it turns out he is most likely Dr Richard Lindzen.
Believe me, there were scientists saying all sorts of things that were not directly supported by the evidence. I am certain that the parent poster is right. For instance Dr Richard Lindzen was very vocal that CFC's were NOT linked to ozone depletion. He was also vocal that cigarettes do not cause cancer and is now vocal that greenhouse gasses do not cause global warming. For every opinion there is a credentialed advocate.
Another consideration is the half life of the gas. For instance methane is quite a bit more potent as a GHG than CO2, but the half life is 7 years compared to about a century for CO2.
The point is, when a government studies how the changing environment will affect their future infrastructure investments, that is not a "stupid scare story". That is called planning ahead, and it is a reasonable thing for a government to do. The alternative is to assume business as usual and deal with the consequences as they arise. That is what they are doing near Illinois at the cost of $1 billion.
I think the point is not that this kind of infrastructure can't be built in hotter/wetter/stormier locations. Just that if you are building infrastructure for one type of place, and you suspect that it will soon be another type of place, then you better plan ahead or plan to rebuild in 50 years.
I'm not sure why you equate losing a few bars of wifi reception to "We're already dead!" This seems like this is a pretty moderate report. It's not outside of the mandate of the government to plan ahead for infrastructure. (In fact it is probably the responsible thing to do)
Given that the earth is warming, and that we have chosen adaptation over mitigation, it seems reasonable and responsible for a government to determine what would be required to adapt. How much would it cost? Compare this proactive approach to the one taken in Illinois. There the US is blowing up a levee, flooding 100,000 acres of farmland, causing 1 billion in property damage, in order to save a town from flooding: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110502/us_nm/us_weather_flooding_decision
We get to choose between mitigation or adaptation. Neither one is pretty. It's better to plan up front either way.
I agree with you. Slashdot approaches a medium for civil debate, but even here I suspect that you will find a majority of people who believe in reducing/eliminating copyright, reducing/eliminating patent protection, legislating away DRM, pro-science, anti-religion, etc. Some of these views can be considered extreme. This is really just another forum for people to have their preconceptions validated. I am not excluding myself.
Part of the problem is that no matter how extreme your point of view, there is an internet forum out there that will validate it. I think that this comes at the expense of the middle ground. There is no platform for reasoned debate. It has become too easy to insulate insulate yourself from opposing viewpoints and to find people who will validate your preconceptions.
Remembrance Day? That seems in poor taste. I hope they will consider a different launch date for allied nations.
Comment 57 of the NYT post has another example: What we got was an email from a gun enthusiast telling us to put plastic bags over our heads and kill ourselves. What was ominous is that the author of that email was a former army special forces who lived near some of the researchers.
We also got 'investigated' by one of the groups whom we invited to participate--a group funded by the gun industry. They used Freedom of Information Act requests to demand all of our emails relating to the research, all of our data, all of our files. As Mr. Krugman accurately points out, none of us assumed that our emails would be a fishbowl for any group of ideologues to plunder for out of context blurbs that could, quite literally in this situation, paint a bullseye on our backs. The process of giving all the information to these groups is immensely time-consuming and burdensome for us and still ongoing. For example, I have over 30,000 emails that need to be searched for the ones in which they are interested. Then, every email has to be examined to see if certain information, like participant names which are confidential, need to be redacted. - http://community.nytimes.com/comments/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/academic-intimidation/?permid=57#comment57
Let the court decide #1. And let the court decide #2
There is no need to invoke the courts. The request is legal. It's just bad form. This is not the way to go about responding to public discourse. If you disagree with what someone publicly says, you can respond publicly. You really oughtn't fish through private correspondence.
We need to find the REAL cause for these three Warming periods, which are not man-made.
IMHO
You will not find a single cause for warming or cooling, and should certainly not look for a single cause to explain ALL warming events. A good reference is the IPCC WG1. This highlights a number of forcings and outlines their impacts on the climate.
We are experiencing basically the same climate now that existed 5000 years ago... what do you blame the climate change of 5000 years ago on?
It was closer to 10,000 years ago that we came to the peak of our current interglacial. We have had almost 10,000 years of relatively stable climate. The reason for the spike in temperatures at that time is attributed to Milankovitch cycles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Note that we are currently at the peak of this interglacial. This same natural cycle will bring us back into icier temperatures in another 10,000 years.
Warner seems to be arguing two points
A) There are lots of climate change deniers out there B) Postmodernism has caused lots of people to think that science is all relative, and the folks in A) have adopted that banner.
I'll really argue the link here- I doubt that *anyone* in A has really, seriously read the literature from B. A is comprised primarily of folks who are either highly religious and refuse to adopt a scientific worldview at all (and would be totally horrified by the philosophy of B if they actually read it) or people who have massive financial incentives
You may be pigeon holing them a bit. There has been some traction towards post-modernism. Here is Judith curry introducing a post normal conference that focused on bridging the gap between the scientists and their extended peer group (the skeptics in this case): http://judithcurry.com/2011/01/24/lisbon-workshop-on-reconciliation-in-the-climate-change-debate/
Here is a more critical view of post normal science: http://shewonk.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/pns-pretty-nonsensical-stuff/ So now we learn who comprises the extended peer community — all relevant stakeholders. They have “extended facts” that involve local and anecdotal knowledge. But but but you mean non-scientists can put their facts forward on the same footing as scientific facts? Who judges which facts — scientific and non-scientific — are more valid and more relevant to the issue at hand? A vote of hands? Who decides who the legitimate stakeholders are? This feels all very muddled and unclear, indeterminate.
Your curve clearly ends with an artifact in both quantities plotted caused by the fact that it is averaging zeros from beyond the end. You can't smooth right up to the present!
Nope. The solar activity graph ends 5.5 years early because of the 11 year smoothing. No 0's were averaged beyond the end point. 11 year smoothing was chosen because of the roughly 11 year cycle.
...the earth cools during periods of low solar activity, which is, of course, when actual solar irradiance peaks! In other words, when the sun has no sunspots, it is actually slightly brighter and one would expect (if anything) warming,
Nope. Solar output is roughly 1366.5 Wm-2 during a solar maximum, and 1365.5 Wm-2 during a solar minimum. By the way, if you think that and extra 1 Wm-2 should cause the current warming then you must believe that the earth is very sensitive to forcings. Perhaps you are right. If you are arguing that there is some other mechanism that is not understood, then I'm not sure why you would lend it more credence than the greenhouse effect which is very well understood and has a physical basis that was well understood over 150 years ago. The following graph shows sunspots along with measured irradiance: http://www.climate4you.com/images/SolarIrradianceAndSunspots.gif
you have no idea what temperature it "should" be with or without CO_2.
Inertia is a confounding factor no doubt, but not one that is lost on scientists
Extend the base of the very plot you built to 10000 BCE
I suspect you don't trust proxy's going back 1000 years let alone 10000. Your point about looking at too short a timespan is well taken. You should also consider that for the last 10000 years we have been at the height of an interglacial. The long term trend is down (back into a deep freeze). The medium term (century long) trends have previously matched up fairly well with solar activity. Over the last century this no longer seems to be the case (according to the literature)
But we'll see, very soon. The sun is rising what will probably be the lowest peak in over a century. The Earth has plenty of heat stored up from the heating phase, and of course there will be a lag and significant fluctuations as its chaotic head delivery system self-reorganizes, but by the end of this cycle, we will almost certainly have entered a cooling phase.
I hope you are right. If the literature is right then the next decade will be the hottest on record. My prediction is that skeptics will have dropped the solar output theory and will be claiming that changes in cloud cover is causing the warming (a theory that Dr Roy Spencer is already priming). I hate to have to wait another decade to find out. Predictions of imminent global cooling have been around for decades. I don't think another record hot decade will change that.
I wasn't claiming that the Earth's temperatures were or were not warmer -- I was referring to the fact that Steig 2009 finds substantial warming in Antarctica as an artifact of poor methodology.
Forgive my misunderstanding. I'm still not sure that you are right. O'Donnell finds some cooling areas between 1981-2006, but overall finds a slight warming trend. Both papers find a cooling trend between 1969-2000. Both find a warming trend between 1957-1981.
I see that you favour the idea that solar irradience is responsible for the current warming. You can compare temperature to solar output here: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:132/scale:0.01/from:1875/offset:-0.6/plot/esrl-co2/from:1875/scale:0.010/offset:-3.2 I've included CO2 on the graph as well. It doesn't seem like there is a clear corelation between solar output and temperatures (In fact it looks like they are headed in opposite directions). It is also interesting to note that solar output is highest during the period when both papers found Antarctic cooling (1969-2000). You considered a discrepancy between CO2 and Antarctic temperatures a nail in the AGW coffin. Does the same apply to the discrepancy between solar output and antarctic temperatures? More likely there is something else going on. Perhaps this is in part attributable to recent trends in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM)
Bear in mind that anthropogenic CO_2 over this interval looks nothing like this and is absurdly decorrelated from global temperature across the entire range except the last 150 years, right there in that confounding pesky solar activity grand maximum.
One thing that you should keep in mind is that there are multiple forcings. Solar activity is one of them. CO2 did not change much over the last 1000 years except in the last 150. Therefor CO2 was not a forcing until recently. You should not expect to see a corelation between temperature and CO2 over the last 100 years until recently.
Indeed, the keepers of the global climate models would have you believe that solar state is irrelevant to global temperature in spite of the fact that the overall Holocene data says otherwise quite convincingly.
I disagree with your assesment. Most papers I have read agree that solar output was likely a primary driver of medium term trends prior to the last 100 years, and that the corelation falls apart in the last 50 years as something else has become the primary driver. I think that part of the problem is that most people don't read the literature. They read WWF or greenpeace, or they read skeptic blogs, or at best they read both. This gives a very skewed perspective on what the science really says. The blogs (on both sides) are interested in hits. This is how they make money. The science is not really that interesting and is filled with "however" and "more research is needed" caveats. Reporting on the literature will not result in hits. Instead they weave naratives complete with antagonists. On one side it's the evil oil companies and their puppets. On the other it's the grant chaising scientists. If you believe the naratives it is easy to conclude that any work done by the other side is the result of lies, manipulation, and incompetence. In fact science is iterative. Steig tried a novel approach. O'Donnel likely improved upon it. There will be further work in the field which will improve our understanding further. Booring, but good.
Politics and science make poor bedfellows
Here at least we agree :)
It is not true that satellites show cooling from 1980 to 2011. In fact, quite the opposite. They agree with land based measurements: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1980/to:2011/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2011/trend/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2011
It is also not true that O'Donnel found cooling in Antarctica in his critique of Steig 2009. He found warming. It is also not clear that O'Donnel's methods are better. Perhaps they are, but if so, this doesn't make the authors of Steig 2009 liars or incompetent. There will surely be a response to O'Donnel 2010 that further improves the results. This does not make the authors of O'Donnel 2010 liars or incompetent.
The procedure for adjusting is outlined here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ushcn/ushcn.html#QUAL
Your finding of more warming in the adjusted data is interesting. Can you share your methods and data? I would like to take a look. Is it possible that you were using ungridded data? Simply taking an average of all stations will bias your results towards oversampled areas.