How do you explain Judith Curry?

You are probably being too kind, Greg. The fact that Judith gets her science from ancient stolen emails says it all. Remember she also gets her climate science from defamatory publications of right wing smut bloggers (who are not climate scientists). And from plagiarising statisticians (who are not climate scientists). I doubt she's ever read an IPCC report, going by her ignorance of them; and very few climate science papers (maybe the one's she's co-authored, but there's no guarantee of that, either.)

You ask: How do you explain a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier?

I don't know. Can you think of an example of a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier? Dr. Curry is certainly not one of these mythical beings. She is behaving as all good scientists should - always questioning, never accepting the status quo if your findings take one in a different direction.

Tom, she and you both are pretty much always wrong with the science part, and you are a known defender of science denialism. So, no.

Sou: Probably!

Thanks for the excellent post, Greg.

"Good scientists" never blindly accept that "their findings" are of sufficient quality to rely on without calibration against corresponding peer-reviewed findings, and "always question" those findings -- most especially if 97% of their peers contradict their own findings. (To do otherwise is nothing more than a form of "accepting the status quo".)

Tom's description of how scientists should evaluate their results amounts to "whatever you want the results to be".

This is not surprising, as it is keeping in line with his view that "Science is like politics: The most strenuously argued opinion carries the day."

Um, no.

Yup. Pretty much nails it. She is a climate change denialist.

Greg,

Dr Curry is a practicing scientist who also provides climate related information that is deemed commercially viable. In other words she actually produces something.

Exactly what are your qualifications?

Apparently all you can do to counter Judith is to try to discredit her by calling her names.

PS - you agreeing with Miriam O'Brian is a text book example of the echo chamber effect. Perhaps the two of you should get a room. I'm sure the experience would help perfect your name calling skills, as that is stock in trade for both of you.

Well golly. In my opinion Dr Curry is not wrong. Telling lies is not "being wrong."

To answer Tom's rhetorical question, quite a few scientists going "emeritus" spring to mind like Linus Pauling (Vitamin C), and Kary Mullis (what nutty thing hasn't he espoused at one time or other).

If Dr Curry came up with that interpretation through examination of evidence then she's lying when she says she examined the evidence. It is quite clear that the offending sentence is a construct of creative editing, and not in the emails themselves--something she would have known if she examined the emails.

Also, it took her this long to (pretend to) examine the evidence? That seems all rather bizarre.

Simple venality explains it, I think. Occam's razor slices it pretty well.

A while back The Daily Show had a piece two teams of correspondenst were divided into "Team Evil" and "Team Stupid" to try and explain some Fox News behavior. They had a robust but inconclusive debate. It would seem that their services are once again required.

The backfire effect? There does seem to be some evidence that, well-educated or not, she's a bit thick.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Judith_Curry

Greg took a while ... but let's go back to
April 2010
An inconvenient provocateur.

and later...
href="https://curryquotes.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/curry-on-plagiarism/">Curry quotes.

and later yet she wrote:
Putting Climategate genie back in the bottle. which gave credibility to Peter Wood.

Read that, then read Bottling Nonsense, Misusing a Civil Platform and maybe the detailed Bottling Nonsense – Peter Wood and the National Association of Scholars.
Wood had some history of attacking climate science of which Curry was unaware.

Is there not a danger that those who spent their entire time at uni and a fair part of their career in physical science subjects (as opposed to social science) are being a bit naive? To people like the Koch brothers, a person with a degree of scientific credibility pushing their agenda is well worth paying for. The subject isn't a scientific one, it's a political/socio-economic one. As a Government & Public Policy undergrad, I wrote a dissertation on nuclear waste disposal policy. Underground radioactive waste facilities weren't located in areas with the most stable geological profiles, their location was determined by the local employment profile (ie if there were lots of nuclear industry employees in a location, that's where the dumps were located). Try looking at issues in a wider context. My science education stopped when I got an 'O' level in Physics.

I don't think it's emerititus, which usually develops slowly at a somewhat more advanced age than hers and has a distinctive air of cranky grandpa to go with it.

I have to either agree with Adam R. ('simple venality') or else fall back on 'ego' and 'personal/professional jealousy'. As a mainstream climate scientist she's clearly a second-rater; among the pseudoskeptics she's a star, treated with fawning respect on her widely read blog and getting to appea in front of Congress and the Senate.

Don't underestimate simple things like that. Or that once she staked out her position and started personal attacks on her colleagues five years ago there was probably no turning back. To mix metaphors, she burned her bridges after crossing the Rubicon.

It's not just a Judith Curry thing...I think people often forget that scientists are human and fall along a distribution curve like everyone else. Scientists get angry, irritated, jealous, passionate, fall in love, despise people, get blinded by political ideology, and all the other things most people do. We all have biases and values. Some scientists are just idiots and have found a way to do some good research and spit out a dissertation but can't work out very basic ways to think about the world. Roger Pielke Sr. has boatloads of publications but can't seem to grasp on Twitter that people don't owe him all their time.

Motives may be part of the story for some individuals, but it seems like an unnecessary ingredient in the overall collective behavior of the "qualified, denier" crowd. To keep searching for the cause of cases like Judith Curry is just another way "we" often forget about the humanity of scientists and expect robots. Judith just happens to be a more vocal voice among many scientists who do not reason very well.

For me, the definitive proof that Dr. Curry had gone over the the dark side was her endorsement of Mark Steyn's latest book. But this event is ironclad confirmation.

It's amazing to think that she once wrote a well-respected textbook, and now apparently has trouble parsing a few sentences (or chooses to misinterpret them.)

Its interesting how Judith Curry ends her Steyn article also by saying "Its a sad state of affairs for climate science that this book had to be written ...)" and she then blames Michael Mann for its being written, but not Mark Steyn the person who wrote the book. Denial central.

Let's assume that Dr Mann chose engineering rather than physics as his field of study. Now there isn't any doubt Dr Mann is a very intelligent individual and I would consider it a safe bet that he could reach a similar level of accomplishment (i.e. PhD) in Engineering.

The question is - who here would trust driving over a bridge that he was the primary design engineer for? Imagine for a moment that his design calculations were reviewed, with the reviewing engineer identifying significant flaws. With the bridge being built anyway because it was politically convienent. Still want to drive over it?

Why is it so difficult to understand people concluding that use of terms such as "hide" and "trick" is not conducive to open and honest activity. Trying to spin it by claims of context is exactly that. Spin. Your average 4th grade student (whom I've mentored in science) would understand the meaning both of the terms used by Mann and Jones and the methods used.

If you truly believe that human influenced changes to our climate are one of the greatest threats facing mankind, respond to the skepics with facts supporting your position. And by facts I mean actual measurements or data. Not some model output.

I accept it's warming. I believe humans contribute to it. What I have yet to fully accept is that the warming we are seeing is dire and requires immediate, often drastic, action. The reason I don't is that no one can provide evidence that it is, beyond some model output. So if there is no evidence of dire events, what exactly would it be that I am in denial of?

timg56, the people living in New Orleans before 2005 were in denial that their city was at dire risk of significant destruction if the sea levels rose to a level they were capable of (during a large hurricane).

Certainly by the time Katrina was spinning, it was "dire and required immediate, drastic, action".

There were models that showed New Orleans going under water. (E.g., "This risk of devastation had been known for some time; previous studies by FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers had warned that a direct hurricane strike on New Orleans could lead to massive flooding, which would lead to thousands of drowning deaths, as well as many more suffering from disease and dehydration, as the flood waters slowly receded from the city.") But no "evidence" (yet) beyond the model outputs.

Did they heed the warnings by building up and fortifying their dikes? Moving to higher ground? Etc.? Or did they take your attitude of "I'll do something once I have evidence"?

So why not ask the 700 people who died there what they did once they had their "evidence". How'd that "wait and see" attitude work out for them? Or the thousands of others who survived but had their homes & businesses wash away? How'd that attitude work for them?

timg56, models are showing us that AGW is going to raise sea levels to the point where this is going to be happening over a wide range of coastal cities -- without requiring a Cat 5 hurricane.

Do you need more dead bodies to figure it out? More ruined lives and destroyed economies? That's what you're in denial of...

Tell us: Do you buy insurance of any kind? WHY?

Desertphile:
Flaws:
1) A well-organized marketing campaign was created to promote a wrong, and fraudulent (1:100) paper by McIntyre & McKitrick(2005), mostly for consumption by people who had no clue about statistics, but fro whom the misleading cherry-picked graphs seemed to mean something.

2) Then, McIntyre wrote falsehoods in support of a false narrativ. Unfortunately, he isn't an academic, so there's no one to lodge false citation/fabrication complaints with.

3) Then, McKitrick used that, and the pair on 05/11/15 gave the presentation that became the "blueprint" for tjhe Wegman Report, including Deming(2005) in JSE to be Deming(1995) in Science. JSE is my favored "dog astrology journal": they apparently never looked, but rather used a 3-month-early copy from Fred Singer's website.

Of course, there are multiple reasonable ways to do PCA, assuming you do all the steps to capture the variability, and MBH98/99 did.

MBH didn't "hide the decline", ie., the divergence.

I don';t know why Phil Jones called it Mike's Nature trick, given that exactly the same thing was done in the SAR (1995) with a graph that came from Bradey and Jones((1993)..
I'm surprised that Jones, et al(1998) didn't do the same thing, but if there had been no MBH98/99, the graph from that almost certainly would have gotten the modern temperature record added and been the cenrterpiece reconstruction for the TAR ... really, it's pretty much the same.

Thanks for the article Greg.
The interesting question is: why is this old, long discredited zombie being reanimated now? My suspicion is that as the claims of the climate "skeptics" crash and burn from the development of the science and evolution of the climate system, they double down on the nonsense.

I see my post provoked the typical response from alarmists - smearing good scientists with personal attacks and other logical fallacies. At least you folks are consistent.

Whatever her motivation, Judith Curry has jumped the megalodon.

Greg, if you are deeply shocked by Curry's 23 word polemic, ellipsis , what ever do you make of Oreskes & Conway fast forwarding thorugh three paragraphs to splice together a pseudoqute from yours truly ?

IMHO both are guilty as charged.

timg56, your scientist/engineer confabulation is spurious. Engineering primarily operates on established principles, whilst science works to discover new ones. Nice attempt at a logical fallacy though.

FWIW, I'd happily trust engineer Mann to build a bridge. He demonstrates preeminent expertise in his filed, so a bridge built by him would likely withstand anything thrown at it.

His hockey stick certainly has.

Weren't the authors of the emails in question British? I used to be a computer engineer, and early in my career I was mentored by a group of expat Brits. Brilliant engineers, and I greatly benefited from the association. They often used terms that have negative connotations in the U.S., like "trick" and "scheme" to mean perfectly innocuous things. "What's your scheme for getting 'round the power restrictions?" meant "How are you going to reduce the power consumption of your design so it meets requirements?" And "You rewired the backplane to reduce the crosstalk? That was quite a trick!" was an expression of honest appreciation for a good engineering approach to a problem with the technology we were stuck using. I get really tired of fellow Yanks clutching their pearls at what is just ordinary British English.

timg56:

Why is it so difficult to understand people concluding that use of terms such as “hide” and “trick” is not conducive to open and honest activity.

Why are you so determined to interpret an innocuous figure of speech as a revelation of ill intent? As has been repeatedly explained, Phil Jones's use of the phrase "Mike's trick to hide the decline" meant nothing more than "Mike Mann has figured out how to reconcile the paleo-ecological record of temperature derived from proxy metrics, with the modern record of direct thermometer readings." What prevents you from taking that explanation at face value, other than conspiracist ideation?

timg56:

Your average 4th grade student (whom I’ve mentored in science) would understand the meaning both of the terms used by Mann and Jones and the methods used.

Those poor kids. Your engagement with them is to be excoriated, not admired. Their lack of experience with metaphor and other adult idioms leaves them vulnerable to your hateful slant on the culture and practice of science. If any of them aspire to become scientists, they'll have a difficult time unlearning the fervid denialist nonsense you're putting into their innocent heads. Shame on you!

Tom Harris: Intentional distortion of a fact to come to a preconceived conclusion is not what a good scientist does.

Mal: rerread Greg's post.
"hide the decline" had nothing to do with MBH.

Guys, just ask Tim to explain what "trick" he believes Mike Mann used. Not Phil Jones, but Mike Mann.

The follow-up question would be to ask why he got this incorrect impression, because it is likely that Tim does not even know what Mike's trick was, but rather believes it is the same as Phil Jones did (for a cover graph of a quasi-scientific report).

Context matters. That's not "spin". "Spin" is what happens when you remove the context or create a new context. I often use tricks in my scientific work. Those range from rhetorical tricks to get the students to think themselves rather than me giving the answer, to tricks to minimize the number of experiments while maximizing the information to get out of those experiments.

And sometimes I use terminology that isn't quite appropriate for the situation, but I know my direct colleagues know what I mean, which I believe was the case for Phil Jones and the word "hide".

Evil woman.

How do you explain Judith Curry?

Perhaps her face-paint contains lead.

John Mashey:

Mal: rerread Greg’s post.
“hide the decline” had nothing to do with MBH.

Huh? I said nothing about MBH. It was perhaps careless of me to quote Phil Jones using the elided form created by quote-mining AGW deniers. My explanation of what he meant is correct, however.
In the OP, Greg quotes Jones's email, from Mann's book:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Greg follows with Mann's explanation of what Jones meant:

Indeed, “Mike’s Nature trick” and “hide the decline” had nothing to do with each other. In reality, neither “trick” nor “hide the decline” was referring to recent warming, but rather the far more mundane issue of how to compare proxy and instrumental temperature records.

I'll accept criticism for incautiously propagating the AGW-denier meme about Jones's email, but I'll stand by my interpretation of what he meant.

John, like many blog commenters, I often struggle to make myself clear. Your own output, as valuable as it is, would be even more valuable with professional editing. I don't fool myself about the relative worth of our respective contributions, but I do ask for your reciprocal forbearance.

A somewhat cranky Tom Harris wrote: "I don’t know. Can you think of an example of a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier?"

Sure, Tom, lots. Pick any creationist who earned a legitimate degree: Kurt Wise, Mike Behe, Jason Lisle, Andrew Snelling, Jon Wells - and the list goes on. Creationists both deny and lie about science, yet they plugged away at their degrees like the rest of us.

The more interesting question to explore, IMHO, is what motivates Curry to do what she does? She clearly understands the science and can analyze data. What's the motivation for being a contrarian? It baffles me.

I agree that the whole sentence has been grossly elided and misinterpreted by Curry, Muller, et al (btw has Muller ever apologized/retracted?) but I have to disagree with " “Mike’s Nature trick” and “hide the decline” had nothing to do with each other." The 'trick' is to privilege the more accurate instrumental record over the unreliable northern tree ring proxy data that diverges from 1960 onward (graphing that data would have shown temperatures *declining* during the period); the *effect* is to 'hide' that decline (so that the graph accurately reflects reality -- i.e., temperatures *rose*). So surely the two phrases have *something* to do with each other , even though there is nothing nefarious about them .

Anthropogenic global warming is real.

But it has nothing to do with CO2. It is caused by the removal of dimming anthroogenic SO2 aerosols from the troposphere.

The real deniers are those who will not face this fact. And the earth is suffering the consequences of their
misguided views.

Sadly, the saga continue. Curry has joined forces with right-wing pundit, Mark Steyn, who just wrote a homophobic screed against Mr. Mann and Mr. Laden.

Judith Curry called the piece "entertaining."

No joke. See https://tonyhellerakastevengoddardisnotasociopath.wordpress.com/2015/08…

mal @ 36
Peace. Most of us could use editing on comments, especially via smartphones. :-)

I am especially sensitized to misquotes of climate scientists from experience watching Steve Schneider get misquoted endlessly, sometimes accidentally.

But it is hard to correctly explain what someone meant by a quote when they never wrote that quote in the first place.

Jones said A and B, which together were fraudulently misquoted by many, now including Curry, as X = (part of A + part of B) which had a very different meaning.

In the full quote, "Mike's Nature trick" (A) definitely means MBH98 (and of course, same used in MBH99).

Your explanation was correct to explain A, but not X.
Since you are certainly not a denier, I'd guess that's what you were thinking of, but it didn't match the misquote.

John Mashey commented that he didnt "know why Phil Jones called it Mike’s Nature trick, given that exactly the same thing was done in the SAR (1995) with a graph that came from Bradey and Jones((1993)"

It's a good question and published explanations don't explain that point. One possibility is tha Bradley & Jones and other reconstructions related proxy temperatures to the modern instrumental record with a simple "composite and scale" method, while MBH98 introduced a "climate field reconstruction" method in which principal components analysis (PCA) was used to relate the different temperature and proxy records.

This isn't the much criticised PCA reduction step used to avoid over-representation of tree-ring networks in areas with many proxy records, but it's an innovation by Mann that Jones might have thought worth using to get the correct relationship between sparse proxy records and relatively prolific instrumental records.
However, it's not explained that way in any official accounts as far as I've seen.

http://www.nature.com/climate/2010/1001/full/climate.2010.134.html
Marc Roberts's cartoon: "It's a trick!"
http://throbgoblins.blogspot.com/2009/12/devil-in-details.html
"This cartoon originally appeared in Nature Reports Climate Change, and belongs to them - so no reproducing it without their permission. It's an illustration for a review of the year' science, by Kurt Kleiner. With thanks to Olive Heffernan."

"Can you think of an example of a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier?”

Judith Curry, despite Mr. Harris' protests.

I was of course very surprised to learn that skeptics believe that 'hide the decline' refers to actual declining global temperature and not the decline in proxy temps from the briffa study. I was surprised because every skeptic I've ever seen post on the 'hide the decline' topic has know precisely what it was about. Judith Curry's blog post on 'hide the decline' certainly doesn't make this mistake.

If the best evidence of Judith being a 'denier' that Greg can whip up is that he thinks she believes something she clearly doesn't, then maybe he need to look a little deeper before writing.

Dave S:

"This isn’t the much criticised PCA reduction step used to avoid over-representation of tree-ring networks in areas with many proxy records, but it’s an innovation by Mann that Jones might have thought worth using to get the correct relationship between sparse proxy records and relatively prolific instrumental records.'

Jones was just drawing a friggin' graph for a cover for a report, nothing more. Yes, he wanted it to represent best knowledge at th time, but, in the end, it was a report cover.

Jones et al(1998) seems a worthy read, good to compare against MBH, with much discussion of plusses and minuses of various proxies.

Of course, Fig 7, top half (NH) does not differ significantly from MBH99's reconstruction, except that the latter:
a) had error bars
b) included the modern temperature record.

TAR Fig 2.21 is quite clear:
MBH claimed to represent the NH, Jones et al more extra-tropical, so unsurprisingly, the latter is more variable.

Consider what would have happened had there been no MBH98/99. The IPCC group certainly would have incorporated modern records the way they did in SAR, but Jones et al would have been the latest millennial reconstruction.

1) Jones et al was if anything a bit lower during 1000-1400AD, so it had *even less* of an MWP than MBH99.

2) It was lower during 1850 ... which would have made for an even more dramatic rise for Industrial Revolution times :-)

3) Of course, Jones et al is mostly contained within the MBH99 error bars, and again, there are differences of latitude balance.

Then, it is clear that many people absolutely certain there was something wrong about the MBH PCa methodology don't even understand error bars, much less the ways that different centerings (or even uncentered) get to similar final results. :-)

"The ‘trick’ is to privilege the more accurate instrumental record over the unreliable northern tree ring proxy data that diverges from 1960 onward (graphing that data would have shown temperatures *declining* during the period)"

Steven Sullivan, note that this only applies to the one series from Briffa. MBH98 does not contain such a divergence, and the data goes up to ca. 1980. Mike's "trick" was to plot the instrumental record overlaid onto the reconstruction; the former went up to 1998, and it was on that basis that MBH99 concluded the (then) current decade was likely warmer than any prior decade.

“Can you think of an example of a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier?”

Richard Lindzen (primarily climate science, but also some rather questionable views on smoking)
Fred Singer (ozone, climate, smoking)

But the most recent high profile example is Luc Montagnier, who has gone increasingly in the direction of homeopathy and even presented work at an Autism One conference, the annual meeting of the vaccines = autism crazies.

I can easily come up with more names if someone desperately needs them.

Marco,
As Phil Jones said, he applied the 'trick' from 1980 onward for Mike's series, and from 1960 onward for Keith's (Briffa).

It's a kerfuffle over nothing. Or, rather, it's a kerfuffle over the details not being made explicit for a *cover graphic* (as opposed to the same graphic within scientific text). Deniers seem to think that if the world leaders and opinions makers who were profoundly swayed by the WHO *cover graphic* actually read the details in the figure legend elsewhere -- i.e., if they were clear the recent part of the graph is actually derived from *more reliable data* -- they'd somehow be less convinced of AGW. This strikes me as farcical if not idiotic.

“Professor Curry advocates unwise policy based on false claims and bankrupt morals.”
http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/curry-for-dinner/

Curry commented on Tamino's RealClimate post on Andrew Montford's “The Hockey Stick Illusion.” Gavin Schmidt replied to Curry's comments. Here are some excerpts:

“Judith, the fact is that endless repetitions of allegations of corruption do not make them true.” #74

“You are misreading the IPCC reports...”
“This is simply not true.”
“Again, this is not true.”
“This is nonsense.”
“I don't quite get what point you are making.”
“Absolutely untrue in all respects. No, really, have you even read these papers?”
“Judith, I implore you to do some work for yourself instead of just repeating things you read in blogs. (Hint, not everything on the Internet is reliable).”
“Oh please. Why didn't the first multi-proxy paper deal with all issues and try all methodologies and come to all the conclusions? Because that is not the way science works.”
“The reason this has become 'contentious' has nothing to do the MBH and everything to do with people not wanting climate change to be a problem. Icons that arise for whatever reason attract iconoclasts. Noise in the blogosphere does not correlate to seriousness in climate science. As your comments make abundantly clear, you have very little knowledge on this issue and have done no independent investigation of the wild claims being made. Yet the more smoke there is, the more you appear to want to blame MBH for the fire. A 'certain amount of spin'? Seeing conspiracies everywhere you look is not 'spin', it is paranoia. Real scientific controversies get resolved in the literature for the people who actually care about getting things right. For those that don't, continued repetition of long debunked talking points seems to be their only tactic. I, for one, am pretty tired of that and heartily bored of pointing them out.” #168

“Thanks for passing by. In future I will simply assume you are a conduit for untrue statements rather than their originator. And if we are offering advice, might I suggest that you actually engage your critical faculties before demanding that others waste their time rebutting nonsense. I, for one, have much better things to do. #185
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delu…

Curry's endorsement of Montford's unqualified opposition to climate science is from 2012. In her 2014 congressional testimony, she not only distorted the results of scientific research, she also contradicted the findings of one of her own papers.

http://rabett.blogspot.dk/2014/01/curry-vs-curry.html
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/true-lies/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/one-of-the-problems-with-judith-…

John Mashey:

Jones said A and B, which together were fraudulently misquoted by many, now including Curry, as X = (part of A + part of B) which had a very different meaning... Your explanation was correct to explain A, but not X.

There is peace between us, John. I sympathize with your sensitivity to misquoting, and I should have made it clear that the AGW-denier meme is a deliberate distortion of what Jones actually said. The specific meaning of the elided quote is that it was clearly intended to focus conspiracist suspicion on Mike Mann, thus exposing it as an element of the Serengeti strategy along with making the hockey stick a convenient denier icon. In the broader denier-verse, however, its meaning is not substantively different from that of a more accurate quote an underhanded denier might have mined from Jones's purloined email.

What if the quote had been "Keith's trick to hide the decline", closer to what Jones wrote? It still wouldn't mean what timg56 insists it does. Without knowing context, no rational adult acquainted with idiomatic English would simply assume "trick to hide the decline" meant either Mann, Briffa or both were plotting with Jones to falsify the temperature record, anymore than he would imagine the three of them hiding under his bed.

timg56's adherence to his conspiracist delusion, despite all the contextual information now available to him, makes his reference to the 4th-graders he's tutoring all the more appalling. One can only hope those 4th graders have outgrown the childish fear of monsters under the bed, and will reject the pernicious nonsense he's pushing on them.

Timg56 #20

“Why is it so difficult to understand people concluding that use of terms such as “hide” and “trick” is not conducive to open and honest activity.”

The word trick is also defined as follows,

5. a clever or ingenious device or expedient; adroit technique:
the tricks of the trade.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trick?clickid=96fc6f6d69fa52df63…

As documented in Peter Hadfield's video, the scientific literature is replete with precisely that meaning of the word:
Climate Change -- Those hacked e-mails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&index=6&list=PL82yk73N8eoX-…

The word hide was equally noncontroversial, and repeated investigations into the emails found no evidence of wrongdoing.

Among your comments in WUWT one can read the following:

timg56
April 21, 2014 at 12:41 pm
Rud,
RE: how the whole scam was brought down by a few Internet blogs and bloggers despite no organization and meager resources compared to billions spent by governments
That is one of the amazing parts of the story for me. It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find out which side of the debate the money is on, yet people stick to the big oil storyline with a persistence that is hard to understand.

The first paragraph, which is by Rud, continues, “because they exposed the fundamental flaws in the foundations of the CAGW edifice.”

Your conspiracy mongering includes the septic classic that scientists fudge the data:

“timg56 | June 4, 2015 at 11:57 pm |
Mosher,
I missed your last paragraph.
In certain fields what you describe can be called fraud. Adjusting ones interpretation of data is one thing. Adjusting the data is another.
https://archive.is/vo5ZX

(Is it also fraud when Anthony Watts demands adjustments to compensate for UHI? Are satellite measurements necessarily fraudulent because the raw data is useless without adjustments?)

To conclude, you ignorantly object to the use of “trick” and “hide” as an indication of incompetence and malfeasance, while at the same time deliberately trying to deceive readers by misrepresenting where you stand. I don't think anyone familiar with the tactics of climate septics would be surprised.

People also need to realize that Phil Jones is British, and the use of 'trick' in British English can be completely benign in such context. But the people who need to realize such things, never will; it's not to their advantage to do so. Judith Curry seems to have blinded herself to any such consideration. And shame on Richard Muller, too...the two of them have been 'alarmists' on this score.

#54 Mal
Yes, I agree.

“It is difficult to get a person to understand climate science when their callous self-indulgence depends on their not understanding it.”
-- Upton Sinclair

How do you explain Prof Curry?

I don't care. I'm ignoring her from now on.

http://dosbat.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/prof-curry-joins-prof-wadhams-in-m…

Why would you go to such lengths to hide the truth? Now you try to use your deceitfulness to slander a real scientist, Judith Curry. My Lord Greg, if you can't see what is written in easy to understand English and then you believe you have the right to call someone stupid.

"From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx [Michael E. Mann], mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx [Malcolm Hughes]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx [Keith Briffa],t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx [Timothy J. Osborn]
 
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
 
Cheers
Phil"

And John Swallow is yet another one who just doesn't understand facts. Mann did *not* hide any decline, nor did he append instrumental data to his reconstruction. Anyone who makes that claim is either incredibly stupid, suffering from extreme confirmation bias, or incredibly malicious. Which of the three describes you, John?

John Swallow:

Why would you go to such lengths to hide the truth? Now you try to use your deceitfulness to slander a real scientist, Judith Curry. My Lord Greg, if you can’t see what is written in easy to understand English and then you believe you have the right to call someone stupid.

I'll parse John Swallow's comment carefully, so I don't libel him:

John Swallow appears to be another paranoid conspiracist afraid of monsters under his bed.

The "Mike's trick to hide the decline" meme arose when a private email message was stolen by persons still unknown and crudely mined for a stick to beat Mike Mann with, pursuant to a strategy by self-interested parties to poison the well against climate science. As a tactic, it's transparent to any rational adult English speaker with at least minimal knowledge of scientific practice, to whom the full context of Phil Jones's email reveals only a scientist admiring the clever techniques used by two of his colleagues to analyse recalcitrant data. That's what scientists do, after all.

To John Swallow however, AIUI, the full context of the stolen email merely confirms his conviction that for two centuries, many thousands of scientists around the world have conspired to keep him from enjoying the material prosperity he's entitled to. IMO, it's as if he's saying "Evidence be damned! If anthropogenic global warming is real, it means there's still a price to be paid for the comfort and convenience I've bought with cheap fossil carbon. I don't want to be presented with the bill, therefore AGW is a hoax."

AFAICT, in John Swallow's mind any scientist who supports the consensus case for AGW must be in on the hoax, and anything they say, no matter how innocuous it sounds, can only reveal nefarious intent. OTOH, it seems a scientist who inhabits the denier-verse with him can be trusted, and he'll unskeptically accept whatever she says as long as it absolves him of all responsibility for the cost of AGW.

Do I have that right? I don't want to get sued!

Here's what you've tripped over, John: "if you can’t see what is written in easy to understand English".

You make the understandable, but rather incorrect assumption that they were speaking the same dialect of "English" as you (an American) do.

Since your presupposition is incorrect, your conclusion does not follow. It is *not* as easy to understand as you claim it to be, and any assertions of righteousness indignation stem only from your SELF-righteousness on this issue.

The world is not as black & white as you wish it to be, and things in this world do not graciously present themselves to you already massaged and translated into a form compatible with the way you filter and slant your personal perceptual input.

...not that we're calling you *stupid*, you understand...

Oh, and John, your bit about calling Greg deceitful with the justification that he's misinterpreting.... opens you wide up for being labeled a hypocrite. Try not to be so presumptuous in the future. You're better off asking the climate scientists here how to interpret those stolen emails.

John Swallow, I'm curious to know what truth you believe is being hidden. Do you think global temperatures declined after 1961?

Back when I raced, I put plenty on trick parts on my motorcycles. Not one of them was magical or deceptive.

I find it hard to believe any halfway intelligent (or smarter) adult would not know that trick doesn't necessarily mean to deceive. It's possible they could be that ignorant, but it sure seems more likely they are being dishonest in their protests.

The trick is, to treat words like everyone else treats them most of the time and not make up restricted meanings that only work in your own head.

timg56 wrote:
>I accept it’s warming. I believe humans contribute to it. What I have yet to fully accept is that the warming we are seeing is dire and requires immediate, often drastic, action. The reason I don’t is that no one can provide evidence that it is, beyond some model output. So if there is no evidence of dire events, what exactly would it be that I am in denial of?

ting56, I have a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford; I have been following global-modeling efforts for over four decades; a close friend was involved in the early efforts at cloud modeling, so I have a good idea as to why that is so horrifically difficult.

And, I agree with you: of course, global warming has occurred, and of course anthropogenic CO2 has contributed to it. But, how certain can we be of the various estimates as to ultimate consequences? In my four decades of work in science, I have learned to be wary of over-trusting computer models (including ones I worked on myself).

And, therefore, you and I get labeled "deinalists" and, of course, far worse.

Funny world, we live in -- isn't it? -- when we agree that anthropogenic CO2 is contributing to global warming, and yet we still get labeled "denialists"!!

Makes some aspects of twentieth-century history in a couple European countries a bit easier to understand, eh?

Dave Miller in Sacramento

Steven Sullivan at #65 has just pre-empted me.

John Swallow (or any Denialatus for that matter) what do you think the "trick" was, and what "decline" do you think was hidden?

Details please. Verifiable details. With references. Primary references.

Please.

I must ask you, Mr. Steven Sullivan , if you believe the emails presented constitute a valid reason to change the climate graph that the IPCC had used that showed the RWP,MWP & LIA and replace it with the Michel Mann "hockey stick"? 
"The hockey stick became a corporate logo for the IPCC , but because it rubbed out the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the historical record, it was subjected to a US congressional inquiry."

date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 19:57:12 -0700
from: "Malcolm Hughes"
subject: Re: Your letter to Science
to: Edward Cook , "Michael E. Mann"
Dear Ed and Mike and others,
All of our attempts, so far, to estimate hemisphere-scale 
temperatures for the period around 1000 years ago are 
based on far fewer data than any of us would like.
(go to link below if you have any interest in the truth) 
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=159 

I'm sure that all of you polemicist on here trying, with no success, to clarify what; "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." means in the mind of a person so naive as to believe that a trace gas, CO₂, controls the earth's climate.

Since you are having such a struggle with " trick" & "hide the decline." I hope you have better luck with semantics when you try to explain what you want Kevin Trenberth & Michael Mann to actually mean.

"<> 
From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , "Philip D. Jones" , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in
Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We
had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it
smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a
record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies
baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing
weather).
Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosustREDACTED[1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing
system is inadequate.
That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO. People like CPC are tracking PDO on a
monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO. Most of what they are seeing is the
change in ENSO not real PDO. It surely isn't decadal. The PDO is already reversing with
the switch to El Nino. The PDO index became positive in September for first time since
Sept 2007. see
[2]http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_o…
urrent.ppt
Kevin
Michael Mann wrote:

extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd,
since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from
what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.

We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for
the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what's up here?

Mike"
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=6347

It is interesting to tie the above observations with current MET observations.
"July 2013 - Global mean surface temperatures rose rapidly from the 1970s, but have been relatively flat over the most recent 15 years to 2013. This has prompted speculation that human induced global warming is no longer happening, or at least will be much smaller than predicted. Others maintain that this is a temporary pause and that temperatures will again rise at rates seen previously."
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/recent-pause-in-warming

John Swallow:

"I must ask you, Mr. Steven Sullivan , if you believe the emails presented constitute a valid reason to change the climate graph that the IPCC had used that showed the RWP,MWP & LIA and replace it with the Michel Mann “hockey stick”? "

Yay! John Swallow believes that limited data from central England trumps the World!

The fact that Central England *is* the World means that the sun has always set on the English Empire after all ...

John Swallow also seems to believe that a few hundred words quoted from e-mail somehow trumps a large numbers of scientific papers, many of which were written by people not part of the e-mail conversation.

Kinda odd. Sort of like John Swallow imagines that e-mail has magical powers ...

Greg Laden said "The trick is, to treat words like everyone else treats them most of the time and not make up restricted meanings that only work in your own head." Greg, here is what a real scientist says about words:
A scientist is a person "who cares deeply and passionately for truth and clarification, for the liberating experience of finding order and beauty in a chaotic jumble of natural events." (Leon M. Lederman, 2001). Nobel Prize in Physics, December 1988.

Tell me how the truth is being sought with the time wasted in trying to define such easily understood words as “trick”
"Full Definition of TRICK
a :  a crafty procedure or practice meant to deceive or defraud
b :  a mischievous act :  prank
c :  an indiscreet or childish action
d :  a deceptive, dexterous, or ingenious feat; especially :  one designed to puzzle or amuse "
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trick

How about "hide"
Definition of HIDE
transitive verb
 :  to put out of sight :  secrete
 :  to conceal for shelter or protection :  shield
:  to keep secret 
:  to screen from or as if from view :  obscure
:  to turn (the eyes or face) away in shame or anger
intransitive verb
:  to remain out of sight —often used with out
:  to seek protection or evade responsibility
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hide

Next we have "decline"
Full Definition of DECLINE
intransitive verb
archaic :  to turn from a straight course :  stray
a :  to slope downward :  descend
b :  to bend down :  droop
c :  to stoop to what is unworthy
a of a celestial body :  to sink toward setting
:  to draw toward a close :  wane 
:  to tend toward an inferior state or weaker condition  
:  to withhold consent
:  to become less in amount 
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/decline

Greg; I'm extremely sure that you can "make up restricted meanings that only work in your own head." but above is what Merriam Webster's dictionary have to say about the words that you feel allows you to call a scientist such as Judith Curry "stupid" while not even being able to define simple straight forward words is amazing.
"If you were looking for that one last fact that determines the balance of argument in favor (vs. against) Judith Curry being either nefarious (as all those who intentionally deny this important area of science must be) or just plain (and inexcusably) stupid (the only alternative explanation for pushing climate science denialism) than that fact has arrived."

I do not use Wikipedia often but this is what they have to say about this person you re calling "stupid".
"Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She is a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee.[1]
Curry is the co-author of Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans (1999), and co-editor of Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences (2002), as well as over 140 scientific papers. Among her awards is the Henry G. Houghton Research Award from the American Meteorological Society in 1992.
Curry graduated cum laude from Northern Illinois University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Geography. She earned her PhD degree in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago in 1982."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry

You feel that you are free to call someone "stupid" because you do not know what the true meaning of "TRICK ", "HIDE" & "DECLINE" are is amazing, but I'm afraid, consistent with what you believe.

I can well imagine that the reason dhogaza is wanting to wander off into the weeds is because of the normal conjecture that the Medieval Warm Period was only in Europe, or some such nonsense, when there is abundant evidence to the contrary.
“We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica,” Lu says. “More importantly, we are extremely happy to figure out how to get a climate signal out of this peculiar mineral. A new proxy is always welcome when studying past climate changes.”
http://asnews.syr.edu/newsevents_2012/releases/ikaite_crystals_climate…

If that source doesn't suit you, try this one
"Ikaite is a low temperature polymorph of calcium carbonate which is hydrated with water molecules contained in its crystal lattice (CaCO3:6H2O). […] Our interpretation, based on ikaite isotopes, provides additional qualitative evidence that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were extended to the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic Peninsula. "
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011AGUFMPP51A1819L

How about this one?
"This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X12000659

Perhaps dhogaza thinks that droughts only occur in Europe
"Modeling of severe persistent droughts over eastern China during the last millennium
[…]These six droughts are identified both in the proxy data and in the modeled data and are consistent with each other in terms of drought intensity, duration, and spatial coverage." 
http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/9/6345/2013/cpd-9-6345-2013.html

John Swallow is just trying mud at a wall, hoping something will stick and nobody notices he ignores all the rebuttals. John Mashey has already debunked his claim about the first reconstruction used by the IPCC, but that won't stop John Swallow to repeat it over and over and over and over again, because repeating a falsehood enough times maybe will make it true...

This is the area covered by CET, but of course, as discussed here,
the MWP part of that graph was Lamb's 1965 *estimate*, not measured temperatures.

Lamb(1965) was long deprecated before MBH98 came out.

Smoking was considered just fine in the 1930s, so people can ignore all the research since and make sure their kids and grandkids start early. good for the economy.

Desertphile:

So, all of the world’s geophysicists, atomic physicists, and chemists, as well as astronomers, geologists, climatologists, and scientists in other venues are all wrong.

Again, as a conspiracist John Swallow presupposes that all the world's scientists aren't just wrong, but have been conspiring for 200 years to make him pay the full cost of the goods and services he enjoys.

That's why he can't help but see evidence of the conspiracy in every utterance by the climate science cabal. He can't admit, even to himself, that his comfortable lifestyle was purchased at a price that left the cost of climate change for others to pay, whether they can afford all those goods and services or not. He's determined not to take responsibility for the bill in arrears, or even for his share of the costs going forward, so he's receptive to the most unsubtle

Who else noticed how a discussion about Dr. Curry's inexplicable behavior was hijacked to any and every topic other than her behavior?

(I somehow managed to press Submit Comment prematurely)

...deceptions from the people who've made private fortunes by socializing those costs.

Swallow,

Trick. Interesting your blatant cherry picking of a limited subset of the very definition that you point to. If you read the whole entry, you'll see that it can mean exactly what people hear are telling you, plus a whole lot more.

Again, since you work so hard to make things what they aren't:
http://throbgoblins.blogspot.com/2009/12/devil-in-details.html
The usage is common as in, "The trick is to lift with your legs." You've almost certainly used it in a similar way yourself... that is if you are a native English speaker and don't have a severe mental impairment.

It is you, with your poor grasp of vocabulary, your juvenile, transparent sophistry, and your petty contempt for the intelligence on the people here, who are indulging your inner liar in order to deceive.

John Swallow, you've faithfully regurgitated the usual denier talking points from Climategate, but amid all that I see no answer to the simple question that was posed to you: what *truth* do you believe was hidden by 'Mike's Nature trick'?

Hey, John Swallow, have you seen this one? It's recent. Delia Oppo (PI of the Rosenthal et al paper) is a co-author:

Robust global ocean cooling trend for the pre-industrial Common Era
Helen V. McGregor, et al
Nature Geoscience (2015) doi:10.1038/ngeo2510

"There is no obvious global scale Medieval Climate Anomaly(2, 17), although alternate choices for the centre of each bin might allow for better definition of the Medieval Climate Anomaly" interval (Supplementary Fig. S5)."

http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2510.html

John Swallow, you've faithfully regurgitated the usual set of denialist talking points from Climategate, but still not answered the simple question: what truth was being hidden by using 'Mike's trick'?

"The belief that there is only one truth to the meaning of phrases contained in stolen climate science emails, and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world."
-- Max Born

Steven Sullivan said: "John Swallow, you’ve faithfully regurgitated the usual denier talking points from Climategate, but amid all that I see no answer to the simple question that was posed to you: what *truth* do you believe was hidden by ‘Mike’s Nature trick’?"

Anyway Steven, it is well known that the truth means nothing to those of you who erroneously believe that a trace gas that is absolutely necessary for all life on earth, other than around deep sea volcanic vents, CO₂, controls the earth's climate & that is what makes this discussion about the false "hockey stick graph" so important to people like you because if CO₂ did not cause the RWP, the MWP & the LIA then how could it be causing the climate we have today?
Now to the question that I will have Michael E. Mann answer for himself:

"rom: "Michael E. Mann"
To: Keith Briffa , "Folland, Chris" , 'Phil Jones'
Subject: RE: IPCC revisions
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 12:35:24 -0400
Cc: tkarl@ncdc.noaa.gov, mann@virginia.edu
Thanks for your response Keith,
For all:
Walked into this hornet's nest this morning! Keith and Phil have both
raised some very good points. And I should point out that Chris, through no
fault of his own, but probably through ME not conveying my thoughts very
clearly to the
others, definitely overstates any singular confidence I have in my own
(Mann et al) series. I believe strongly that the strength in our discussion
will be the fact that certain key features of past climate estimates are
robust among a number of quasi-independent and truly independent estimates,
each
of which is not without its own limitations and potential biases.
And I
certainly don't want to abuse my lead authorship by advocating my own work.
I am perfectly amenable to keeping Keith's series in the plot, and can ask
Ian Macadam (Chris?) to add it to the plot he has been preparing (nobody
liked my own color/plotting conventions so I've given up doing this myself).
The key thing is making sure the series are vertically aligned in a reasonable
way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith's,
we need to align the first half of the 20th century w/ the corresponding mean
values of the other series, due to the late 20th century decline.
So if Chris and Tom (?) are ok with this, I would be happy to add Keith's
series. That having been said, it does raise a conundrum: We demonstrate
(through comparining an exatropical averaging of our nothern hemisphere
patterns with Phil's more extratropical series) that the major
discrepancies between Phil's and our series can be explained in terms of
spatial sampling/latitudinal emphasis (seasonality seems to be secondary
here, but probably explains much of the residual differences). But that
explanation certainly can't rectify why Keith's series, which has similar
seasonality
*and* latitudinal emphasis to Phil's series, differs in large part in
exactly the opposite direction that Phil's does from ours. This is the
problem we
all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this
was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably
concensus viewpoint we'd like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al
series.
So, if we show Keith's series in this plot, we have to comment that
"something else" is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Perhaps
Keith can
help us out a bit by explaining the processing that went into the series
and the potential factors that might lead to it being "warmer" than the Jones
et al and Mann et al series?? We would need to put in a few words in this
regard. Otherwise, the skeptics have an field day casting
doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates
and, thus, can undermine faith in the paleoestimates. I don't think that
doubt is scientifically justified, and I'd hate to be the one to have
to give it fodder!
http://www.assassinationscience.com/climategate/1/FOIA/mail/0938018124…

Steven Sullivan: I question just what you will get from this from Mann since you can't seem to define "trick" &" hide"; therefore, what chance would you have of understanding this?

"Keith’s series… differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably concensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series." (Mann, Sep 22, 1999, 0938018124.txt)

"I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple… [There are] some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter." (Briffa, Sep 22, 1999, 0938031546.txt)
"For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike appears to and I contend that that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) that require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future background variability of our climate." (Briffa, Sep 22, 1999, 0938031546.txt)

I'm certain that you will have an explanation for what follows:
I'm guessing that since it took people so long to warm up after the horrible last two winters this must have them wondering:
"It’s nearly Memorial Day, it snowed in Wisconsin and there’s ice on Lake Superior
Satellite image revealing ice on Lake Superior on May 13, 2015 (NASA)"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/05/19/… 

"A brief snow event in Alberta, Canada gave residents in Calgary an unwelcome taste of winter Friday. Mon 10:27 AM, Aug 24, 2015
Thick snowflakes fluttering to the ground melted in just moments, but snow blanketed the Rockies and foothills at higher elevations."
http://www.wtvy.com/news/headlines/August-Snow-in-Canada-322657281.html

"So, all of the world’s geophysicists, atomic physicists, and chemists, as well as astronomers, geologists, climatologists, and scientists in other venues are all wrong.
Okay, I give up now: please explain to all of these wrong scientists why Earth is currently warming anomalously. Thank you in advance."

It appears that Desertphile is not an independent enough thinker to go on his own knowledge and must follow the crowd, so to speak. This is what got the Catholic Church in trouble back in the 1600s.
"The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both psychologically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith."
Formal Church declaration in its indictment of Galileo
What do you, Desertphile, think the prevailing believes were at the time when Galileo was on trial for heresy for maintaining what Copernicus had postulated that the earth was not the center of the universe that was outlined in his book " Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems"? I do hope that you know that Galileo suffered greatly for maintaining his believes and was proven to be absolutely correct regarding what he believed and that means that consensus is NOT science. You can not even produce any repeatable experiment that demonstrates that CO₂ has anything to do with the climate; therefore, your believes are faith based.

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual."
Galileo

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." Mark Twain

“Scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the unpardonable sin.” Huxley

As Bertrand Russell said: “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of facts." Mark Twain

"I love liberty and I hate fraud. "Mencken and after the almost 19 years of no warming that you, Desertphile, can not understand, the anthropogenic global warming hypotheses is nothing but fraud with no scientific facts to back it up.

I looked up "cognitive dissonance" in the dictionary, and it referred me to John Swallow for examples of extreme & debilitating cases.

You didn't answer the question, John Swallow, you just barfed up some more chunks of increasingly loony denier meme and email misinterpretation.

Here, let me pose the simple question another way. Which of these is *the truth*:
The overall trend in global temps from 1961 -1999 was
a) a decline
b) an increase
c) 'flat'

Btw, regarding Briffa's reservations in 1999 -- Briffa, Jones, and Mann co-authored two papers on paleo data and recent warming in 2003 -- you know that , right?

Then again on Northern Hemisphere paleo reconstructions in 2005 -- you know that right?

Then again on a review of paleoclimate data in 2009 --- you know that, right?

Clearly they're in cahoots, part of the conspiracy! The obvious question is , who paid Briffa off? Was it Al Gore?

"Okay, I give up now: please explain to all of these wrong scientists why Earth is currently warming anomalously."

To which Swallow, unable to provide any reasoned answer whatsoever, essentially claims to be Galileo based on nothing.

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
~ Carl Sagan

Apparently Swallow *still* hasn't figured out that the Galileo Gambit is an unimaginative mantra of the denialist orthodoxy, as well as a LOGICAL FALLACY.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galileo_gambit

John Swallow also still does not provide any evidence whatsoever that Mann tried to hide any 'decline' in his reconstruction using a "trick".

Oh, and "I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified".

That horrible Mike Mann! Talking about science! He should be saying what I want him to say, not interpret data like a scientist!

John Swallow #74 is a despicable liar. He has deliberately left out the definition of trick that disproves his argument. If we limit ourselves to his dictionary of choice, we find that trick can be defined in six different ways. Swallow claims that he presents the “Full Definition of TRICK,” but he only includes definition 1, and thereby distorts the way in which the word is used in the email.

This, from Swallow's dictionary of choice, is definition 3:

a (1) :  a quick or artful way of getting a result :  knack (2) :  an instance of getting a desired result
b :  a technical device (as of an art or craft)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trick

In comment #55 I have already called attention to this meaning, and pointed out that it is commonly used in the scientific literature:

“The word trick is also defined as follows,
5. a clever or ingenious device or expedient; adroit technique:
the tricks of the trade.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trick?clickid=96fc6f6d69fa52df63…

As documented in Peter Hadfield’s video, the scientific literature is replete with precisely that meaning of the word:
Climate Change — Those hacked e-mails
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg&index=6&list=PL82yk73N8eoX-…”

So it turns out that the one who maliciously hides and distorts is Swallow, and this turns out to be yet another example of how climate septics cherry pick to get the results they want.

Re. John Swallow's contention #75 that Lu's research proved that the MWA was global, here's Lu's own rebuttal:

Zunli Lu:
“It is unfortunate that my research, “An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula,” recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has been misrepresented by a number of media outlets.
Several of these media articles assert that our study claims the entire Earth heated up during medieval times without human CO2 emissions.  We clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the Antarctic Peninsula. The results should not be extrapolated to make assumptions about climate conditions across the entire globe. Other statements, such as the study “throws doubt on orthodoxies around global warming,” completely misrepresent our conclusions. Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend.”
https://www.skepticalscience.com/scientist-sets-record-straight-on-mwp-…

This (from Wikipedia), goes a ways towards explaining what John would have us swallow (hook, line, & sinker):

"Important research generated by the theory of Cognitive Dissonance has been concerned with the consequences of exposure to information inconsistent with a prior belief. A key tenet of cognitive dissonance theory is that those who have heavily invested in a position may, when confronted with disconfirming evidence, go to greater lengths to justify their position.

"Dissonance is felt when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one's belief, the dissonance can result in restoring consonance through misperception, rejection or refutation of the information, seeking support from others who share the beliefs, and attempting to persuade others."

Sounds like a ghastly condition. I imagine the mental self-torture must be very stressful and involve a lot of energy to sustain...

John Swallow #71
“...the mind of a person so naive as to believe that a trace gas, CO₂, controls the earth’s climate.”

In a comment on a post by Andrew Lacis, Judith Curry wrote:

“From the perspective of comparative planetology, I think that Lacis makes a plausible argument, from which I infer that without CO2 in the atmosphere, the Earth’s climate would more closely resemble the climate of its moon rather than the current Earth’s climate. For reference, the surface temperature of the moon can swing between -150°C during the night and 120°C during the day. (pay attention, greenhouse effect deniers).”
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/20/co2-control-knob-fallacy/

In general, scientists accept basic physics.

Patrick Michaels
"It's hardly news that human beings have had a hand in the planetary warming that began more than 30 years ago. For nearly a century, scientists have known that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide would eventually result in warming that was most pronounced in winter, especially on winter's coldest days, and a cooling of the stratosphere. All of these have been observed...”
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/live-climate-change
http://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-michaels

Richard Lindzen

“The claim that the earth has been warming, and that there is a greenhouse effect, and that man's activities have contributed to warming are, in fact, trivially true statements. They are not argued...”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Sh1B-rV60&feature=player_embedded (45:35)

Lindzen, of course, is wrong. They are argued by septics like John Swallow who believe themselves capable of correcting almost 200 years of atmospheric science.

I observe that the linkage between smoking and disease is no better proven than human contribution to climate change.*

Given that, anyone who rejects the latter can well encourage their descendants to smoke during that critical age range of adolescent brain development when nicotine addiction is still possible.

*AGW at least has physics conservation laws to help, whereas a lot of the smoking research was statistical epidemiology and mice. Nobody has ever done the definitive experiment: start with 20,000 12-year-olds and make sure randomly-chosen half of them smoke, and then follow both groups for rest of their lives. (Nobody ever will, either.)

To paraphrase, "Nobody has ever done the definitive experiment: start with 20,000 12-year-olds and make sure randomly-chosen half of them live in a world with historically average CO2 levels, half with CO2 levels well above 400 ppm, and then follow both groups for rest of their lives. (Nobody ever will, either.)"

Which is exactly the study that the Science Deniers require to be performed in order to lend credence to their alarmist conspiratorial claims.

I assume that by going to that ever present Bible that you people use for altered and false data, Skeptical Science,
Cosmicomics [#102] has felt they have really uncovered great and relevant information. I wonder if Cosmicomics can link the supposed statement made by Zunli Lu: "Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend.” & answer just what can we believe that Zunli Lu said when the study said: "This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula." & "We suggest that the ikaite record at Firth of Tay provides an additional piece of evidence to support the expression of the MWP in Southern Hemisphere and the northernmost AP also bears the imprint of the LIA."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X12000659

Am I to assume that Cosmicomics' & Zunli Lu's kind of science is something that they can sign onto and then turn around and refute? If Zunli Lu did not believe his science like the co-authors listed below do because none of them refuted it, why was he dishonest enough to sign on to it and why didn't he remove himself from the team? I'm sure that Cosmicomics will offer up a legitimate answer to those question, in time.
"An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula"

Authors:Lu, Z.; Rickaby, R. E.; Kennedy, H.; Pancost, R. D.; Shaw, S.; Lennie, A. R.; Wellner, J. S.; Anderson, J. B.
Affiliat on:AA(Earth Sciences, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA; zunlilu@syr.edu), AB(Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom; rosr@earth.ox.ac.uk), AC(School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor University, Anglesey, United Kingdom; h.a.kennedy@bangor.ac.uk), AD(School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom; r.d.pancost@bristol.ac.uk), AE(School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom; s.shaw@see.leeds.ac.uk), AF(Diamond Light Source, Didcot, United Kingdom; a.lennie@minweb.co.uk), AG(Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA; jwellner@uh.edu), AH(Department of Earth Science, Rice Universityy, Houston, TX, USA; johna@rice.edu)
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011AGUFMPP51A1819L

Cosmicomics [#101] now feels compelled to call me a "...a despicable liar. He has deliberately left out the definition of trick that disproves his argument. If we limit ourselves to his dictionary of choice, we find that trick can be defined in six different ways." When one opens the Merriam-Webster site this is what one is greeted with and how can one be called a liar over presenting the FIRST definition of the word "trick"?

SAVE
Dictionary
1trick
 
Tweet
noun \ˈtrik\
: an action that is meant to deceive someone
: something done to surprise or confuse someone and to make other people laugh
: a clever and skillful action that someone performs to entertain or amuse people
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trick

I doubt that Cosmicomics , given their frame of mind, can ever come to understand that we use words to say what we mean and to mean what we say such as in this instance:
"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil”

I offer up this quote again for Cosmicomics' reading pleasure and really wonder if the above email from "Phil" would have required those reading it; to whom it was sent, that they were required to look up the meanings of "trick", "hide", "decline", "real" & "estimate" to fully understand what was intended to be meant in the email.
'A scientist is a person “who cares deeply and passionately for truth and clarification, for the liberating experience of finding order and beauty in a chaotic jumble of natural events.” (Leon M. Lederman, 2001). Nobel Prize in Physics, December 1988.'

According to Cosmicomics, one needs to have their copy of Merriam-Webster Dictionary at the ready, at all times, to find that "truth and clarification" that this true man of science, Leon M. Lederman, talks about.

Cosmicomics is truly a joy to behold and to watch in action because they put on a real demonstration of ignorance of the facts: "(pay attention, greenhouse effect deniers).” I understand from this that Cosmicomics does not understand that it is H₂O, in its various forms in the atmosphere of earth, (News flash, Cosmicomics, like CO₂ its not on the Moon) is what causes at least 98% of the greenhouse effect on earth.
Regarding the part about Patrick Michaels: It is H₂O that is doing what he describes; but, Cosmicomics seems to miss that part of the equation, among many other things, I might add. That H2O is what causes the green house effect should be realized by anyone that has ever noticed that the coldest nights of the winter occur when there is no cloud cover and this is why the deserts can get to 130⁰F during the day and freezing at night, no cloud cover is the answer and it has nothing to do with CO₂ that is a natural, trace gas that currently constitutes just 4 one-hundredths of 1 percent of the planet’s atmosphere & that is far less than during other climatic epochs. If Cosmicomics finds that difficult to understand, they can see for them selves how H₂O, either because of the albedo or the greenhouse effect, influences the earth's climate.

This New York Times site is interesting to show just how much of the earth is cloud covered.
“One Year of Clouds Covering the Earth
At any moment, about 60 percent of the earth is covered by clouds,(According to a NASA web page 70% of the earth is covered by clouds) which have a huge influence on the climate. An animated map showing a year of cloud cover suggests the outlines of continents because land and ocean features influence cloud patterns.”
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/01/science/earth/0501-clouds…

“Based on the laws of physics, the effect on temperature of man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels is minuscule and indiscernible from the natural variability caused in large part by changes in solar energy output.” The fact that Mars, Pluto and Jupiter are currently heating up strengthens the view that the sun is largely responsible. Man’s CO₂ emissions are also paltry compared to the amount released into the atmosphere by vegetation and the oceans. Can you understand that, Cosmicomics?

Then Cosmicomics continues on to say: "Lindzen, of course, is wrong. They are argued by septics like John Swallow who believe themselves capable of correcting almost 200 years of atmospheric science."
I can only assume that Cosmicomics, in the most direct and understandable for him way for them, is referring to John Tyndall & his 1859 experiment that proved that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas.
"Tyndall concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling surface air temperature by inhibiting leakage of the Earth’s heat back into outer space. He declared that, without water vapour, the Earth’s surface would be ‘held fast in the iron grip of frost’ – the greenhouse effect."
http://understandingscience.ucc.ie/pages/sci_johntyndall.htm

I really doubt that Cosmicomics is interested in learning about John Tyndall at this site where he describes his research in his own words.

XXIII. On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction.—The Bakerian Lecture.
By John Tyndall, F.R.S. &c.(1)
http://tyndall1861.geologist-1011.mobi/

The Gish gallop and Dunning-Kruger is strong in this one...

#107

Swallow believes that he has a better understanding of Lu's research than Lu does. That the MWA had various local manifestations doesn't mean that it was global. It has been well established that the LIA was caused by volcanic activity.

As Lu, the lead author, set the record straight, there was no reason for the other authors to add to what he said. If they felt that Lu had distorted their results, they would have spoken up. Swallow has no evidence of this.

Swallow describes SkepticalScience as the “Bible that you people use for altered and false data.” He can provide no evidence. In this particular case, SkepticalScience has accurately quoted what Lu said.
http://asnews.syr.edu/newsevents_2012/releases/ikaite_crystals_climate_…

#108

Once again Swallow shows that he's a liar and a trickster. He again chooses to deceive by leaving out essential information.

“...how can one be called a liar over presenting the FIRST definition of the word “trick”?

By ignoring that words can have multiple meanings, and by cherry picking the meaning that suits ones ends instead of the meaning that has obtained in similar contexts. Also by sneaking away from his first definition, which included the words, “Full Definition of TRICK,” and replacing it with another.

That Swallow is a despicable liar is also shown by his constant evasions. A number of commenters have asked him, not to define the word define, but to clearly state whether “decline” refers to temperature or something else, and if so what. Instead, he keeps on repeating himself and ignoring the question.

#109

Swallow is too ignorant to understand the difference between forcings and feedbacks, and between condensing and noncondensing greenhouse gases.
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~sgw/ATMS321/2010_Lacis_etal.pdf

Curry and Michaels refer explicitly to CO2, Lindzen implicitly. Swallow can't accept this, so he denies it.

Corrections:
"A number of commenters have asked him, not to define the word define..."

...the word decline

"That Swallow is a despicable liar..."

Although Swallow is a despicable liar, in this context it would have been better to say:

That Swallow is thoroughly dishonest...

"“Based on the laws of physics, the effect on temperature of man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels is minuscule and indiscernible from the natural variability caused in large part by changes in solar energy output.” WTF is a Robert L. Scotto, and what evidence does he present? (And why not give him the credit for his quote?)

"The fact that Mars, Pluto and Jupiter are currently heating up strengthens the view that the sun is largely responsible. Man’s CO₂ emissions are also paltry compared to the amount released into the atmosphere by vegetation and the oceans."

Out--out denial. PLEASE provide citations.

This response is intended for both Desertphile [#115] "Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for “John Swallow” here to tell us all what’s warming the planet anomalously, since it isn’t increased CO2."
& whimcycle [#118] “The fact that Mars, Pluto and Jupiter are currently heating up strengthens the view that the sun is largely responsible. Man’s CO₂ emissions are also paltry compared to the amount released into the atmosphere by vegetation and the oceans.”
"Out–out denial. PLEASE provide citations."

I'm sure that the valid information that I present below is all news to Desertphile & whimcycle because why else would this pair appear to be so left out in the cold when it comes to what should be common sense knowledge of what makes the earth's climate function, unless of course it is because they have been erroneously lead to believe that CO₂, that is a natural, trace gas that currently constitutes just 4 one-hundredths of 1 percent of the planet’s atmosphere & that is far less than during other climatic epochs, controls the earth's climate and not the sun, then further discussion with people this naive is useless.

Solar Cycles causing global warming:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v316/n6029/abs/316591a0.html
 
A Variable Sun Paces Millennial Climate
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/294/5546/1431b
 
Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model
Abstract: "We conclude that the glacial 1,470-year climate cycles could have been triggered by solar forcing despite the absence of a 1,470-year solar cycle."
http://www.nature.com/nature/joiturnal/v438/n7065/abs/nature04121.html
 
Widespread evidence of 1500 yr climate variability in North America during the past 14 000 yr
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/30/5/455

"Indeed, the sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now.  Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years.  “If the sun really is entering an unfamiliar phase of the solar cycle, then we must redouble our efforts to understand the sun-climate link,” notes Lika Guhathakurta of NASA’s Living with a Star Program, which helped fund the NRC study. “The report offers some good ideas for how to get started.”
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclim…

The results of this gross error of scientific judgement is seen in the growing discrepancy between global temperature trends and the model projections. The  NOAA  SSTs show that with CO2 up 8% there has been no net warming since 1997, that ,the warming trend peaked in 2003 and that there has been a cooling trend since that time.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901…

The Maunder Minimum
Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century. Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715 (38 kb JPEG image).
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml

"Even small variations in heating in the outer layers of the Sun can change the amount of light and heat the Earth receives by enough to change our climate."
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1998/ast05oct98_1/
 
 "Our star's output varies on many time scales: from explosive reconnection and convective turnover, to the 27-day solar rotation, to the 22-year solar magnetic cycle, and to even longer, irregular fluctuations, such as the 17th-century Maunder minimum."
[…]
"This means that although the sunspot number and the coronal activity have an eleven-year cycle, the full magnetic cycle is actually twenty-two years. Images: Kitt Peak telescope of the National Solar Observatory."
http://science.nasa.gov/heliophysics/focus-areas/space-environment/

Greg Laden, after reading this remark made by a real climate scientist, Judith Curry: "In hindsight, the way the Climategate emails was rolled out, after very careful scrutiny by the targeted bloggers, was handled pretty responsibly. Lets face it – “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” means . . . “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline.” I really wonder just what makes you tick.
Greg Laden feels that since he may disagree with a real climatologist who "...is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She is a member of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Committee. Curry is the co-author of Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans (1999), and co-editor of Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences (2002), as well as over 140 scientific papers. Among her awards is the Henry G. Houghton Research Award from the American Meteorological Society in 1992." & Mr. Laden's qualifications in this field are: "Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist and science communicator. His research has covered North American prehistoric and historic archaeology and African archaeology and human ecology." & this he believes allows him to say:

This reaction of: "If you were looking for that one last fact that determines the balance of argument in favor (vs. against) Judith Curry being either nefarious (as all those who intentionally deny this important area of science must be) or just plain (and inexcusably) stupid (the only alternative explanation for pushing climate science denialism) than that fact has arrived." brings back memories of when Greg felt he had the right to attack another person with impeccable qualifications in this field ,"Dr. Roy Spence who has a Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin in 1980 and 1982. He then continued at the University of Wisconsin through 1984 in the Space Science and Engineering Center as a research scientist.

CloudGate: Denialism Gets Dirty, Reputations Are At Stake
 Greg Laden on September 2, 2011
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/09/02/cloudgate-denialism-gets-d…;

"He received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal in 1991, the MSFC Center Director’s Commendation in 1989, and the American Meteorological Society’s Special Award in 1996."
http://aqua.nasa.gov/about/team_spencer.php

So Greg, where did you receive your PHD in meteorology from? Where do you display your Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal? Dr. Spencer should not ever even reply to anything that you claim regarding him because you know nothing about any of this, as anyone that follows your blog knows.

Why don't you deal with the facts and forget the ad hominine attacks that are the hallmark for your kind of "science"? That puts you into the same category as cosmicomics who seems to know nothing. I'll bet that, if Danmark is burdened with this person, then he doesn't know, because of drinking too much Carlsberg beer, that the "The concept of p[H] was first introduced by Danish chemist Søren Peder Lauritz Sørensen at the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1909" (so much for a base line for your acidic ocean nonsense)
"Tuesday, August 25, 2015
New paper finds 'robust' relationship between cosmic rays and global temperature, corroborates Svensmark's solar-cosmic ray theory of climate"
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2015/08/new-paper-finds-robust-relati…

I do believe that I have wasted enough time on people who seem to be incapable of reading the written word and want to use that inability as a reason to call people names and question their motives. You are basically a sad bunch of fools.

John, by pointing to Judith Curry's credentials, you are just making it worse for her. Someone with such credentials should have no problem noticing that Mike Mann did not hide any decline. If he did, Steve McIntyre would be all over it, and several other highly credentialed scientists who replicated various aspects of the hockey stick would have noticed. None did. The fact that Judith Curry now spreads this falsehood simply exposes her as incompetent in commenting on anything related to the hockey stick. It shows her to be ignorant. It shows her to be incapable of taking in facts that do not fit with her preconceived notions. Ask yourself this question, John Swallow: why is Judith Curry so incompetent that she makes a claim not a single person who has delved into the intricacies of the hockey stick graph, including strong critics like Steve McIntyre, has ever made?

Ten years ago I thought that all that was necessary was to explain the science. The naivety of that view has been clearly established over subsequent years, including by John on this thread. Some people will never be convinced by an explanation of the science.

Climate "skeptics" can be useful though. I spent some months recently going backward and forward with a "skeptic" on a You Tube channel. He made many claims, and researching his assertions (which proved uniformly to be untrue) improved my understanding of the science.

I note that john continues to studiously avoid answering what was "hidden" by the "decline".

The "Mars is warming" canard was trotted out again?

Wrong:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27234-swiss-cheese-is-not-a-sign…

"New paper finds ‘robust’ relationship between cosmic rays and global temperature, corroborates Svensmark’s solar-cosmic ray theory of climate"

No science paper shows this claim is true; many hundreds of science papers show it is false. Cosmic rays have shown no significant long-term increase or decrease.

Swallow,

Oh the irony! What are YOUR credentials Mr. Argument From Authority? Why doesn't that stop YOU from coming here and smirking-taunting-pontificating-lying!

Why, of all the highly credentialed climatologists out there, do you choose to play up the handful who have been repeatedly debunked?

Your arguments are a mess. Seriously, how did your ability to reason become so corrupted?

Swallow.

Even Judy Curry accepts that AGW is real, and due mainly to anthropogenic CO2 and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases. You know that, right? Her 'skepticism' is about the magnitude of the effects -- basically, she's trumpeting uncertainty while at the same time betting that climate sensitivity is on the *low* end of the estimated range.

She would privately consider your beliefs to be crackpottery, though she's happy to tolerate such crackpots on her dismal comment threads.

Marco[#121] makes this absurd comment: "Ask yourself this question, John Swallow: why is Judith Curry so incompetent that she makes a claim not a single person who has delved into the intricacies of the hockey stick graph, including strong critics like Steve McIntyre, has ever made?" to which the only answer I can come up with is why are you people so disinterested in the subject of the meaning of the words "trick" "hide" & "decline" that you do not feel you need to find the truth for yourselves. That says much about you and your honesty, doesn't it?

"Dear Keith,
You are the only guy who may know  what was and is going on in the northern forests.  With respect to that I do not think that the WMO statement # 913 on the status of the global climate in 1999 is a sufficiently reliable last word. For one thing: the curve attributed to you doesn’t seem to jive with any of the figures of your 2000 QSR paper.  Where from did they get the 0.6 degree departure at 1600 AD?
Another problem:  the ring density and width in the last several decades are both decreasing which at any other
time would be interpretted as a sign of cooling. So why is it shown in the WMO report as an unprecedented warming? As you properly discuss in your papers we just do not know how exactly do the tree rings relate to weather.  In my understanding we are left with the following options:
1) The calibrations of the rings to temperature prior to 1950 are biased, possibly due to the poor coverage of temperature stations.
2) Something other than the temperature influenced the trees in the last several decades and we do not know what.
In either case it is not very responsible to relate the curves to global climate as WMO has done. You are saying it, albeit somehow indirectly but pretty clearly, in all your papers.  Unfortunately it appears that these are tooo long for WMO to read.
Ciao and greetings to everyone down there!
George
I think it’s fair to say that George Kukla was first to spot the Hide-the-Decline." (Maybe, just maybe, if Marco had a real honest interest in this matter they could have found what was actually said regarding this attempt at deception.)
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/

Marco[#121], obviously with out giving the subject any thought, said: "…. why is Judith Curry so incompetent that she makes a claim not a single person who has delved into the intricacies of the hockey stick graph, including strong critics like Steve McIntyre, has ever made?"
This that follows is what Steve McIntyre DID say:
"The overprinted yellow line is a virtually exact emulation of the MBH smooth series: this was obtained by splicing instrumental data from 1981 to 1998 with proxy data up to 1980, followed by truncation after smoothing. (Here to about 1953.) On the right is a graphic also showing the smooth following Mann’s style without splicing instrumental data after 1980.[…]
Left – Excerpt from MBH99 Figure 3 showing emulation of Mannian smooth with spliced instrumental record. Right – also showing (black) the smooth without an instrumental splice.
The trick is clearer in MBH99. The graphic in MBH98 (Nature) is much muddier and doesn’t show the trick as clearly. First, here is the (rather muddy) graphic from MBH98 showing the smooth:
[…]Next, on the left is a blowup of the latter part of the above graph. The overprinted yellow line is an exact emulation of the MBH smooth obtained by splicing instrumental data after 1980 with proxy data up to 1980, followed by truncation after smoothing. (Here to about 1953.) If Mann had not spliced instrumental data after 1980, the smoothed series (following his methodology) would have looked like the version on the right – the orange line showing the result without the instrumental splice.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-tr…

From the fun I am having on here, I well know that none of you, to include Greg Laden, ever want to understand just what was meant by “Mike’s Nature trick”, " Keith’s Science Trick "or "Mann's Nature trick" "...of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."
It is obvious that none of you have any explanation for the historically recorded climatic events in the past, such as the RWP, MWP or the LIA. You are now so desiring for your fictional devil in the sky, CO₂, to be the driver of the earth's climate that you know you can not explain how these documented events occurred when CO₂ could not have been a factor. If you know anything about the science of Paleoclimatology you would know that there was abrupt cooling about 15,000 years ago that then gave way to abrupt WARMING at the end of the Younger Dryas period some 11,600 years ago and this impacted habitats around the world .I assume that you will admit that 20,000 years ago the global mean temperature was 4 ⁰C cooler than today and that lower sea level allows large-scale migrations of people and Asian animals into the Americas.

"Far more serious than “Mike’s Nature trick” is Keith’s Science Trick – the deletion of adverse data (a trick that Mann supported as a Lead Author in IPCC TAR.)
[Note – this section was somewhat rewritten on Sep 5, 2012 adding the figure excerpts in response to a request for clarification of the various tricks.]
Keith’s Science Trick
“Keith’s Science Trick” is first used in May 1999 in Briffa and Osborn (Science 1999) and Jones et al (Rev Geophys 1999). It is nothing more than the deletion of data to hide the decline. The deletion of adverse data to hide the decline was first reported at CA in 2005 here in connection with IPCC TAR spaghetti graph.
In the wake of Climategate, prior incidents of hiding the decline were discussed, including recent analyses of Briffa and Osborn (Science 1999) e.g. here. Following is a graphic showing Keith’s Science Trick – the deletion of adverse data – a practice continued in subsequent spaghetti graphs, including those in IPCC TAR and IPCC AR4."
http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-tr…

It appears that Desertphile [#130] must live in a part of Santa Fe, New Mexico where the sun never shines. "Meanwhile, he still hasn’t explained to all of the world’s unreal scientists why Earth has warmed and is warming anomalously, since they are all wrong about CO2…" It would appear that Desertphile is not capable of understanding that because the sun contains 99.8 % of the mass of the entire solar system, that the information that obviously they & whimcycle [#118] did not look into about that orb in the sky that causes the earth's climate. This valid information has no meaning to this poor uninformed person. The fact is that it is the sun that controls the earth climate; now and for the last 4.5 billion years it has done so; &, if you do not believe this; PROVE IT. I'm reasonably sure that Desertphile has never wondered: "Why Do We have Seasons?"
"As the earth spins on its axis, producing night and day, it also moves about the sun in an elliptical (elongated circle) orbit that requires about 365 1/4 days to complete. The earth's spin axis is tilted with respect to its orbital plane. This is what causes the seasons. When the earth's axis points towards the sun, it is summer for that hemisphere. When the earth's axis points away, winter can be expected. Since the tilt of the axis is 23 1/2 degrees, the North Pole never points directly at the Sun, but on the summer solstice it points as close as it can, and on the winter solstice as far as it can. Midway between these two times, in spring and autumn, the spin axis of the earth points 90 degrees away from the sun. This means that on this date, day and night have about the same length: 12 hours each, more or less."
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lmk/?n=seasons

I wonder if Desertphile were to look at this in realistic manner, such as using light bulbs to measure the insolation for every square meter of the Earth’s surface he would discover in the Northern  Hemisphere that the summer insolation gives 400 W/m2  or 4 light bulbs and it follows that then winter will give 180 W/m2 or less than 2 light bulbs; therefore, this should go along way to explaining what cause the seasons, & that has nothing to do with carbon dioxide.

"The primary cause of variations in Earth’s climate is the regular variations in the brightness of the Sun and changes in Earth's orbit about the Sun. In addition to 40-year cycles and 300-year cycles, other temperature cycles include:
· 19,000 year cycle: Earth's combined tilt and elliptical orbit around the Sun (‘precession of the equinoxes’).
· 41,000 year cycle: Cycle of the +/- 1.5 degree wobble in Earth's orbit
· 100,000 year cycle: Variations in the shape of Earth's elliptical orbit (‘cycle of eccentricity’)"
  http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html and http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/enviro/EnviroRepublish_233658.htm

Get someone to read this to you and then explain what it says so that some day you will be able to understand what makes the earth's climate react as it does.

And John Swallow goes into yet another Gish gallop.

Mann did not hide any decline. Simple fact.

"If you know anything about the science of Paleoclimatology you would know that there was abrupt cooling about 15,000 years ago that then gave way to abrupt WARMING at the end of the Younger Dryas period some 11,600 years ago and this impacted habitats around the world .I assume that you will admit that 20,000 years ago the global mean temperature was 4 ⁰C cooler than today and that lower sea level allows large-scale migrations of people and Asian animals into the Americas."

It is also always funny to see a DK afflicted trying to lecture someone. Anyone who opens a basic climate science text book will be able to tell you all about the reasons for the glacial-interglacial cycles (hint: Milankovitch cycles and resulting greenhouse and albedo forcings/feedbacks). Why can't you do such a simple thing such as opening a basic textbook?

Re. Swallow:

As Swallow endlessly repeats the phrase, hide the decline, numerous commenters have asked Swallow to explain which decline he's referring to. He never has. He doesn't know. He doesn't need to know. For him the decline doesn't need a referent, but in itself is proof of nefarious intent.

Likewise Swallow refuses to recognize that the word trick has multiple meanings, and that the meaning:

5. a clever or ingenious device or expedient; adroit technique:
the tricks of the trade.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trick?clickid=96fc6f6d69fa52df63…

is not uncommon in the scientific literature. But, as this meaning doesn't indicate nefarious intent, Swallow rejects it.

Swallow doesn't seem to know anything about proxy data, why it sometimes is rejected, and why modern records are based on measurements rather than proxies. Swallow sees nothing wrong with using corrupt proxy data if it gives him what he wants.

He also seems to believe that MBH98 is the leg on which climate science stands, so he conveniently ignores that other scientists using other means have come to almost identical results. For Swallow this would not be seen as a vindication of MBH, but as proof of a widespread conspiracy.
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/the-h…
http://environmentalforest.blogspot.dk/2013/10/enough-hockey-sticks-for…
Gavin Schmidt:
“The reason this has become ‘contentious’ has nothing to do the MBH and everything to do with people not wanting climate change to be a problem. Icons that arise for whatever reason attract iconoclasts. Noise in the blogosphere does not correlate to seriousness in climate science.” #168

He also ignores that MBH98 was a pioneer work, and could not be expected to be a perfect, final product. To requote Gavin Schmidt's criticism of Judith Curry:

“Oh please. Why didn’t the first multi-proxy paper deal with all issues and try all methodologies and come to all the conclusions? Because that is not the way science works.” #168
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delu…

He also seems to be unaware that there are “multiple lines of evidence” that prove the reality of anthropogenic climate change.

When it's shown that scientists associated with climate septics clearly state that CO2 exerts a fundamental influence on Earth's climate, Swallow intervenes and explains that they don't mean what they say. They mean what Swallow says.

Even though 2014 probably was the warmest year on record, even though 2015 is on its way to shatter any previous record, and even though the temperature increase since 1997 is statistically significant, Swallow babbles about cooling. Even though the LIA was caused by volcanic activity, Swallow babbles about the Maunder Minimum and sun spots. He understands nothing, yet he feels qualified to lecture others.

Swallow is an exemplary climate septic. He combines dishonesty, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and conspiracist ideation into a solid lump of Dunning-Kruger. To paraphrase Sou:
“[He]'ll be fooled by anything as long as it rejects climate science.”
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/01/hoity-toity-christopher-monckton-sez…

@133. John Swallow :

"

I well know that none of you, to include Greg Laden, ever want to understand just what was meant by “Mike’s Nature trick”, ” Keith’s Science Trick “or “Mann’s Nature trick” “…of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Oh the irony! The lack of self awareness and projectuion really is weapons grade ain't it?

Here's a tip you're no rocket scientist, 2015 has been breaking all those hottest ever year records set, well last year. The past decade has been far hotter and observations have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that Global Overheating is reality.

Look at what NASA says, what NOAAA says, what 98 out of 100 climatologists are saying with the other two being super dubious for allsorts of reasons and unable to back their anti-case with the actual extraordinary evidence required.

Or, y'know don't keep on embarrassing yourself with your Iraqi info minister impression and tiresome Denialist trolling bovine excrement here but really you are fooling no one and just making a utter fool of yourself, John Swallow(s-the Koch's koolaid.)

Oh & John Swallow please see :

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline.htm

The "decline" refers to a decline in northern tree-rings, not global temperature, and is openly discussed in papers and the IPCC reports.

Emphasis added.

As for :

It is obvious that none of you have any explanation for the historically recorded climatic events in the past, such as the RWP, MWP or the LIA.

RWP = Roman Warming period I presume?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period

In a nutshell it was a regional phenomenon with temperatures about the same as today's (or yesterdays in decadal terms?) and is not universally (or even globally) accepted.

Note that natural occurrence of such (regional) temperatures back then does NOT mean natural causation for the current planetary temperature anomalies given the natural factors today should be making us cooler not hotter and climatologists , not being idiots are well aware of this and have taken the natural factors involved there eg. Milankovitch cycles, solar radiation into account.

MWP = Presumably referring to the supposed Medieval Warming Period - ditto.

See also :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY4Yecsx_-s

'23 -- Medieval Warm Period -- fact vs. fiction' by Potholer54 , an excellent informative and entertaining clip which is part of a youtube series that I highly recommend you view in full.

Finally, your LIA lie or at leats irrelevance. Surprisingly enough, pretty much the same applies as again.

The Little Ice Age period was probably a bit more global and probably resulted from a combination of lower solar insolation (Maunder minimum) and the influence of some large volcanic eruptions in the tropics - see :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/02/01/what-caused-t…

Key excerpt :

"However, this study showed that even if the Sun were less active, and therefore not warming the Earth as much, it would have had little effect. The local issues of volcanoes and the additional fresh water were enough to account for the Little Ice Age. The Sun may have played a role, but now it’s less likely to have been a major one.

.. (snip) .. ironically, around the very same time I was posting my article, NASA released more news that the Sun cannot be responsible for global warming.

The big picture here, the thing to remember and take home, is that real scientists are doing real work to learn more about what’s really going on with our home planet. A lot of folks out there are making careers (and a ton of money) trying to sow doubt on that work, twisting it in any way they can imagine to make it seem like either the Earth’s not warming up (but it is) or that humans are not to blame (but we are). The more we study the past, the more we can understand the present and future, despite any attempts at obfuscation."
-Phil Plait, 2012 Feb 1st

(Emphasis added.)

Once again, just because casue X was repsonsible back in the 13th century does NOT mean that cause X is responsible for what is happening today in the 21st century especially when scientists have looked at cause X and can definitively rule it out.

What part of this precisely, John Swallow , do you have trouble grokking?

StevoR:

Oh the irony! The lack of self awareness and projectuion really is weapons grade ain’t it?

AFAICT, John Swallow is sincerely convinced that the AGW-denialist interpretation of "Mike's trick to hide the decline" is the correct one. IMO, that can only be because all his knowledge of peer-reviewed scientific research published since Fourier, and all his understanding of scientific culture and practice, have been absorbed uncritically from denier channels.

McLuhan was surely on to something, but a parsimonious explanation for Swallow's thinking should include a pre-existing inclination of his mind, as well. Lewandowsky is on to something too.

John Swallow still won't tell us what he thinks the 'decline' was...why?

(This comment was sent this morning, Danish time, but seems to have gotten stuck in moderation. The following is slightly revised.)

Re. Swallow:

As Swallow endlessly repeats the phrase, "hide the decline," numerous commenters have asked Swallow to explain which decline he's referring to. He never has. He doesn't know. He doesn't need to know. For him "the decline" doesn't need a referent – the term itself is proof of nefarious intent. One thing we do know is that "decline" can't possibly refer to global temperature, as MBH98 is from the year climate septics claim marked the beginning of "the pause." So decline has to refer to something else. What?

Likewise Swallow refuses to recognize that the word trick has multiple meanings, and that the meaning:

5. a clever or ingenious device or expedient; adroit technique:
the tricks of the trade.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/trick?clickid=96fc6f6d69fa52df63…

is not uncommon in the scientific literature. But, as this meaning doesn't indicate nefarious intent, Swallow rejects it.

Swallow doesn't seem to know anything about proxy data, why it sometimes is rejected, and why modern records are based on measurements rather than proxies. Swallow sees nothing wrong with using corrupt proxy data if it gives him what he wants.

He seems to believe that MBH is the leg on which climate science stands, so he conveniently ignores that other scientists using other means have come to almost identical results. The only possible explanation he can come up with is conspiracy.
http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/the-h…
http://environmentalforest.blogspot.dk/2013/10/enough-hockey-sticks-for…

Gavin Schmidt:
“The reason this has become ‘contentious’ has nothing to do the MBH and everything to do with people not wanting climate change to be a problem. Icons that arise for whatever reason attract iconoclasts. Noise in the blogosphere does not correlate to seriousness in climate science.” #168

He also ignores that MBH98 was a pioneer work, and could not be expected to be a perfect, final product. To requote Gavin Schmidt's criticism of Judith Curry:

“Oh please. Why didn’t the first multi-proxy paper deal with all issues and try all methodologies and come to all the conclusions? Because that is not the way science works.” #168
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/07/the-montford-delu…

He denies ocean acidification, even it's been measured and its effects have been observed on the shells of vulnerable marine life.

When it's shown that scientists associated with climate septics clearly state that CO2 exerts a fundamental influence on Earth's climate, Swallow intervenes and explains that they don't mean what they say. They mean what Swallow says.
And Swallow says that water vapor, which is a short-lived feedback, is more important.

Even though 2014 probably was the warmest year on record, even though 2015 is on its way to shatter any previous record, and even though the temperature increase since 1997 is statistically significant, Swallow babbles about cooling. Even though the LIA was caused by volcanic activity, Swallow babbles about the Maunder Minimum and sun spots. He understands nothing, yet he feels qualified to lecture others.

Swallow is an exemplary climate septic. He combines dishonesty, cherry picking, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and conspiracist ideation into a solid lump of Dunning-Kruger. To paraphrase Sou:

“[He]'ll be fooled by anything as long as it rejects climate science.”
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/01/hoity-toity-christopher-monckton-sez…

“The belief that there is only one truth to the meaning of phrases contained in stolen climate science emails, and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.”
— Max Born, on John Swallow's theory of knowledge

Desertphile:

Meanwhile, I am still waiting for “John Swallow” to explain what, other than increased atmospheric CO2, is causing the anomalous warming….

I predict that in extremis he'll resort to the stock AGW-denier response.

We could play Science Denier Bullshit Bingo, and John Swallow can be the caller. Man, we could do double score cards with his rants...

StevoR [#137] Adelaide hills, South Australia said: "Here’s a tip you’re no rocket scientist, 2015 has been breaking all those hottest ever year records set, well last year. The past decade has been far hotter and observations have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that Global Overheating is reality." I'm sure that StevoR will have a meaningless alarmist reply, which will mean it will be mostly prevarication about this fact:
 "On 13 September 1922, a temperature of 58°C (136.4°F) was purportedly recorded at El Azizia (approximately 40 kilometers south-southwest of Tripoli) in what is now modern-day Libya…………. The WMO assessment is that the highest recorded surface temperature of 56.7°C (134°F) was measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch (Death Valley) CA USA."
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00093.1?af=R&amp;

StevoR does not want to talk about that FACT, I would imagine, or this one either:
"Longest hot spell (world): Marble Bar, W. Australia, 100° F (or above) for 162 consecutive days, Oct. 30, 1923 to Apr. 7, 1924." Notice anything regarding the dates of these records? Anyone heard of the dust bowl in the US & wasn't that in the 30s.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001375.html

"It really was very cold in 1940’s….The Dust Bowl drought 1932-1939 was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world." West.http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml

I guess it is fine that the choir boy for agw can change his mind about the same time that the hockey stick graph came along
"Whither U.S. Climate?
By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makiko Sato — August 1999
What's happening to our climate? Was the heat wave and drought in the Eastern United States in 1999 a sign of global warming?
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s "Dust Bowl" that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath."
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

He sure seemed to change his mind with these aberrations.
StevoR: This below outlines how Hansen and his group of charlatans can make 2014 the "hottest year ever".
Hansen – The Climate Chiropractor
Need your climate adjusted? – call Dr. James Hansen at GISS. Below is a chronology of the destruction and politicization of the US and global temperature record. The Northern Hemisphere used to have a broken hockey stick problem. According to the National Academy Of Sciences in 1975, the hemisphere had cooled 0.7C since the 1930s, and was colder than it was at the turn of century." https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/hansen-the-climate-chiropractor/
"Highest Temperature Extremes"
http://archive.is/oQypU#selection-292.1-355.22

Could deception be why StevoR believes new high temps are being set?
"All Of Paraguay’s Temperature Record Has Been Tampered With" JANUARY 26, 2015
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/all-of-paragua…
StevoR: This below outlines how Hansen and his group of charlatans can make 2014 the "hottest year ever".
Hansen – The Climate Chiropractor
Need your climate adjusted? – call Dr. James Hansen at GISS. Below is a chronology of the destruction and politicization of the US and global temperature record. The Northern Hemisphere used to have a broken hockey stick problem. According to the National Academy Of Sciences in 1975, the hemisphere had cooled 0.7C since the 1930s, and was colder than it was at the turn of century." https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/hansen-the-climate-chiropractor/
Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe. Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/climategate_cru_was_but_the_ti.h…

I know that like the rest of the "alarmist" on here, StevoR, is fine with subterfuge & prevarication because they know the truth does not support their flawed views & that is what this whole discussion is about how the words "trick", "hide" & "decline" can be used by "scientist" who are suppose to deal with precise descriptions of what they see and not resorting to what a definition for a word is that in the last of a list of such definitions.

Desertphile [#143] said, again "Meanwhile, I am still waiting for “John Swallow” to explain what, other than increased atmospheric CO2, is causing the anomalous warming…." and I presume that is because they have never seen the sun before to know what drives the climate. I assume that they do not possess the same innate knowledge to understand that even a chicken seeks shade from that, to Desertphile, foreign orb in the sky that cases the earth to warm.

I hope that Desertphile can go to open this site and see for them selves what temperature decline is from the high for Las Vegas, N. Mexico that occurred in 1932 and then get an idea of what "decline" is.

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=294862&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_mean…
Annual mean monthly mean Maximum Temp (F) 1887-2014
So much for your stupid "….other than increased atmospheric CO2, is causing the anomalous warming…."

I know that Desertphile will never be able to understand this and infer that "lack of warming" is relevant to this discussion.
"Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth's global
energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27,
doi:10.1016/j.cosustREDACTED[1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained
from the author.)
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't." http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=6347

Bold John Swallow seems to have run away ..

We're still waiting for you to answer the questions pose dto you if you can John!

(Hope he's busy reading up and watching some of the sources provided to him here, y'never know but I doubt it. He could of course prove me wrong ..)

Hah! Murphy's law!

So John Swallow you think the Sun is behind the current record temperatures over the last thirty -fifty odd years including times when our daytime star has been through prolonged deep solar minima then?

Just how dumb do you think climatologists are btw? They've already looked at that explanation and its has been scientifically disproven and debunked thousands, probably literally millions of times.

See :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sf_UIQYc20&index=88&list=PL029130BFDC7…

Among so many other sources.

Really please. Do or will you actually look at these resources we're providing for your education as well as rebuttal here?

Cosmicomics[#142] babbles on and then brings up Gavin Schmidt, for some strange reason:
NASA AND NOAA CONFIRM GLOBAL TEMPERATURE STANDSTILL CONTINUES.
• Date: 21/01/14.
• Dr David Whitehouse.
In a joint press conference NOAA and NASA have just released data for the global surface temperature for 2013. In summary they both show that the ‘pause’ in global surface temperature that began in 1997, according to some estimates, continues.
Statistically speaking there has been no trend in global temperatures over this period. All these years fall within each other’s error bars. The graphs presented at the press conference omitted those error bars.
When asked for an explanation for the ‘pause’ by reporters Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Dr Thomas Karl of NOAA spoke of contributions from volcanoes, pollution, a quiet Sun and natural variability. In other words, they don’t know.

http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2013/03/Whitehouse-GT_Standstill…

To think that my tax dollars go to fund these charlatans and keep their billion dollar computers running is sickening, but like is said, garbage in-garbage out, and that is sad because before NASA & NOAA got politicized by these charlatans like Hansen and Gavin A. Schmidt, who said this:
"Today's models are flexible tools that can answer a wide range of questions, but at a price: They can be almost as difficult to analyze and understand as the real world." and I might add, to tell the truth about what the findings are if that truth does not fit the political narrative of the day.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_04/

Oh dear John.
To argue a case on GLOBAL warming using the temperature data from just one location is weird. In making such a move you can't expect to be taken seriously.

I suspect that one of the reasons that we are suddenly talking about reanimated zombies claims like "climate gate" and the supposed problems with the hockey stick is because some of the most treasured "skeptical" talking points are crashing and burning, in particular the "pause since 1997".

Here is a graph to rebut both points. Note how cold it was GLOBALLY in 1932 and that the trend since 1997 is 0.13 degrees per decade.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/12/7/1…

To find any indication of a "pause" in global temperatures since 1997 you have to very carefully choose your end point. For instance the four year period between 1997 and 2001 showed a small decline as shown in the following graph, but that was a very short time frame and it is hardly surprising given the starting point was a massive El Nino.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/12/7/1…
You can find a small seven year decline from 2002 to 2008:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/12/7/1…
But two can play the short term trend game. The seven year trend from 2008 to the present is 0.28 degrees per decade:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/12/7/1… . I don't claim that 0.28 is the long term trend, just pointing out the problems with cherry picking short term trends.

With regard to your claims on Trenberth. His problem was that satellite measurements showed a significant energy imbalance, but our land, ice and ocean measurements weren't accurate enough to track EXACTLY where the extra heat was going. It was a call for programs that would more accurately measure the pathways that the extra heat used. Trenberth does not doubt that the Earth system is gaining extra energy. He suspected that it was being sequestered in the ocean and that it would reappear in increased surface warming in the future. Looking at current global temperatures his claim of increased warming might be occurring now.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5976/316.summary

To supplement Stephen Spencer, this is the full title of Swallow's graph:

USHCN 294862, LAS VEGAS/SEWAGE PLT,NM
Annual mean of Monthly Mean Maximum Temperature (F) 1887 – 2014

Yet another example of Swallow's cherry picking trickery. (Lord, what liars these septics be!) If anyone was in doubt, the reason Swallow can't go beyond the pejorative meaning of trick is pure projection. He's a pathological liar and can't imagine that others aren't like him.
I further note that in his attempt to rebut my comment, he linked to the GWPF, hardly a credible source.

Re. the sun:

Pointing to the sun doesn't explain the differences between the climates of Earth, the moon, and Venus. Pointing to the sun can't explain the difference between incoming and outgoing energy. That the sun is responsible for the increasing energy imbalance of the industrial age has been repeatedly debunked.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-…-
skeptic.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-solar-key-climate.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090511122425.htm
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/11/solar-activity-and-the-so-called-
%E2%80%9Clittle-ice-age%E2%80%9D/
https://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming…

Finally, it should be abundantly clear that Swallow is incapable of explaining what “the decline” refers to, because he doesn't know. He uses expressions that he doesn't understand. What's important for him is not what the word refers to, but that the word magically suggests wrongdoing. His use of decline has no basis in analysis or understanding, but is a mere extension of his projections and related conspiracy nuttiness.

It appears that this was moderated out of the discussion. It contains no foul language and has pertinent points that need to be made. If I can not do that it is good by from me
StevoR [#137] Adelaide hills, South Australia said: "Here’s a tip you’re no rocket scientist, 2015 has been breaking all those hottest ever year records set, well last year. The past decade has been far hotter and observations have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that Global Overheating is reality." I'm sure that StevoR will have a meaningless alarmist reply, which will mean it will be mostly prevarication about this fact:
 "On 13 September 1922, a temperature of 58°C (136.4°F) was purportedly recorded at El Azizia (approximately 40 kilometers south-southwest of Tripoli) in what is now modern-day Libya…………. The WMO assessment is that the highest recorded surface temperature of 56.7°C (134°F) was measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch (Death Valley) CA USA."
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00093.1?af=R&amp;

StevoR does not want to talk about that FACT, I would imagine, or this one either:
"Longest hot spell (world): Marble Bar, W. Australia, 100° F (or above) for 162 consecutive days, Oct. 30, 1923 to Apr. 7, 1924." Notice anything regarding the dates of these records? Anyone heard of the dust bowl in the US & wasn't that in the 30s.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001375.html

"It really was very cold in 1940’s….The Dust Bowl drought 1932-1939 was one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world." West.http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml

I guess it is fine that the choir boy for agw can change his mind about the same time that the hockey stick graph came along
"Whither U.S. Climate?
By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makiko Sato — August 1999
What's happening to our climate? Was the heat wave and drought in the Eastern United States in 1999 a sign of global warming?
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s "Dust Bowl" that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath."
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

He sure seemed to change his mind with these aberrations.
StevoR: This below outlines how Hansen and his group of charlatans can make 2014 the "hottest year ever".
Hansen – The Climate Chiropractor
Need your climate adjusted? – call Dr. James Hansen at GISS. Below is a chronology of the destruction and politicization of the US and global temperature record. The Northern Hemisphere used to have a broken hockey stick problem. According to the National Academy Of Sciences in 1975, the hemisphere had cooled 0.7C since the 1930s, and was colder than it was at the turn of century." https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/hansen-the-climate-chiropractor/
Highest Temperature Extremes
http://archive.is/oQypU#selection-292.1-355.22

Could deception be why StevoR believes new high temps are being set?
"All Of Paraguay’s Temperature Record Has Been Tampered With" JANUARY 26, 2015
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/all-of-paragua…

StevoR: This below outlines how Hansen and his group of charlatans can make 2014 the "hottest year ever".
Hansen – The Climate Chiropractor
Need your climate adjusted? – call Dr. James Hansen at GISS. Below is a chronology of the destruction and politicization of the US and global temperature record. The Northern Hemisphere used to have a broken hockey stick problem. According to the National Academy Of Sciences in 1975, the hemisphere had cooled 0.7C since the 1930s, and was colder than it was at the turn of century." https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/hansen-the-climate-chiropractor/
Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe. Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/climategate_cru_was_but_the_ti.h…

I know that like the rest of the "alarmist" on here, StevoR, is fine with subterfuge & prevarication because they know the truth does not support their flawed views & that is what this whole discussion is about how the words "trick", "hide" & "decline" can be used by "scientist" who are suppose to deal with precise descriptions of what they see and not resorting to what a definition for a word is that in the last of a list of such definitions.

StevoR #151

“Just how dumb do you think climatologists are btw?”

I don't think Swallow thinks climatologists are dumb. His view is that they are nefariously clever:

“ 'Today’s models are flexible tools that can answer a wide range of questions, but at a price: They can be almost as difficult to analyze and understand as the real world.' and I might add, to tell the truth about what the findings are if that truth does not fit the political narrative of the day.”

In his view climatologists distort the truth to serve a political agenda. He has no evidence for this, but it confirms his belief in an ongoing conspiracy. He presents total distortions as proofs, when they confirm his bias:

“When asked for an explanation for the ‘pause’ by reporters Dr Gavin Schmidt of NASA and Dr Thomas Karl of NOAA spoke of contributions from volcanoes, pollution, a quiet Sun and natural variability. In other words, they don’t know.”

For someone like Swallow evidence and logical coherence are irrelevant. Complexity is proof of ignorance. Every kind of nonsense can be encompassed by his conspiracist ideation.

“The prominence of conspiracist ideation in science rejection is not unexpected in light of its cognitive attributes: For example, if a scientific consensus cannot be accepted as the result of researchers converging independently on the same evidence-based view, then the belief in a scientific conspiracy can provide an alternative explanation for the consensus [18,20,21]. Moreover, because conspiracist ideation need not conform to the criteria of consistency and coherence that characterize scientific reasoning [30], its explanatory reach is necessarily greater than that of competing (scientific) theories [31]. Conspiracist ideation is also typically immune to falsification because contradictory evidence (e.g., climate scientists being exonerated of accusations) can be accommodated by broadening the scope of the conspiracy (exonerations are a whitewash), often with considerable creativity [32]. Those cognitive attributes render conspiracist ideation ideally suited for the ongoing rejection of scientific evidence...

Finally, in a reversal of conventional scientific reasoning, evidence against conspiracy theories is often construed as evidence for them, because the evidence is interpreted as arising from the conspiracy in question.”

The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0075…

In short, Swallow is nuts, and a rational dialogue with him is an impossibility.

What decline are They hiding, John Swallow?

#157

Once again Swallow refuses to tell us what decline he's talking about.

In addition he shows that he doesn't know the difference between weather and climate.

In addition he once again shows that he doesn't know the difference between global and local.

He continues to use fraudulent information from discredited sources that has been thoroughly debunked.

http://www.factcheck.org/2015/02/nothing-false-about-temperature-data/

“Christopher Booker win’s the irony of the year award with his piece on adjustments to the temperature record. That’s quite a feat considering it’s only February. His complaint overlooks the clear historical fact that skeptics, above all others, have made the loudest case for the need to adjust the temperature series. Over the years, it’s been skeptics, who have made a vocal case for adjustments . More disturbing is the claim that these adjustments are somehow criminal. We dealt with these type of claims before and completely debunked them.”
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/guest-post-skepti…

Brainlessly in thrall to conspiracist ideation, he believes without any credible evidence that temperature adjustments invariably make the temperature hotter.

3. Are warming and cooling adjustments equally prevalent?
"Not exactly. When we turn off all adjustments, we find a slightly GREATER global warming than without! The main effect comes from the ocean data, which is the most difficult to adjust. Take out adjustments, and global warming is stronger; but that is not scientifically justifiable."
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/04/prof-richard-muller-not-adjusti…- temperature-records-would-be-poor-science/

“...most mitigation sceptics have not been told that the sea surface temperature is adjusted to make the trend smaller. That does not fit in their war on science to prevent mitigation.”
Victor Venema, comment
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/guest-post-skepti…
(Venema is a climate scientist)

Bernard J. [#159] "What decline are They hiding, John Swallow? & the forever intellectually challenged cosmicomics [#160] & [#157] "Once again Swallow refuses to tell us what decline he’s talking about." & "Finally, it should be abundantly clear that Swallow is incapable of explaining what “the decline” refers to, because he doesn’t know." It is fair to say that neither, because of being so brainwashed to believe in this hoax at a trace gas, CO₂, that makes up .04% or less than 4/100ths of 1% of ALL the gases in the atmosphere controls the earth's climate. It is a sure thing that Bernard J. & the intellectually challenged cosmicomics have no idea what a part per million is & therefore can never provide an experiment that shows that CO₂ does what they are trying to maintain that it does. To try to discount the sun shows a total lack of good old fashion common sense and logic, which for them has always been in a state of steady decline if they are asked to explain what caused the last ice age and how the earth came out of this devastating cold period that I assume they would like to see repeated because they hide under their beds to escape their devil in the sky, CO₂, that they believe is going to fry the earth, even though it never did even when CO₂ was at over 1900 ppm during the Jurassic Period.

A part per million is like 1 drop of ink in a large kitchen sink.
A large kitchen sink is about 13-14 gallons.
Some other things that are one part per million are…
One drop in the fuel tank of a mid-sized car
One inch in 16 miles
About one minute in two years
One car in a line of bumper-to-bumper traffic from Cleveland to San Francisco.
One penny in $10,000.
The Eiffel Tower in Paris is 1063ft high . If the height of the Eiffel Tower represented the total size of the atmosphere then the natural level of CO2 would be 3.4 inches of that height and the amount added by humans up until today would be an extra 1.5 inches.

This was my answer given some time ago to your question about decline that only shows a lacking in the ability to understand anything.

"I think it’s fair to say that George Kukla was first to spot the Hide-the-Decline.” (Maybe, just maybe, if Marco had a real honest interest in this matter they could have found what was actually said regarding this attempt at deception.)
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/

"If Mann had not spliced instrumental data after 1980, the smoothed series (following his methodology) would have looked like the version on the right – the orange line showing the result without the instrumental splice."

http://climateaudit.org/2011/03/29/keiths-science-trick-mikes-nature-tr…

Since Bernard J. [#159] & the forever intellectually challenged cosmicomics can not seem to understand the written word, I will give them this version of what the "decline" is.

Things start rolling 9 AM (UK time), when Tim Osborn sends the new Briffa and recalibrated Jones (1998) time series to Phil Jones along with the suggestion to hide the decline.
"It is ready calibrated in deg C wrt. 1961-90, against the average Apr-Sep land temperature north of 20N.  It goes from 1402 to 1994 – but you really ought to replace the values from 1961 onwards with observed temperatures due to the decline."
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/

Note that Jones clearly explained what he means by “Mike’s Nature trick”. Mann has claimed that his “Nature trick” was nothing more than clearly showing observations and reconstructions on the same graphic with proper labeling. But the direct comparison of observations to reconstructions is as old as statistics – and Jones and Briffa had themselves made such comparisons in prior articles without regarding clear labeling as anything more than elementary hygiene. In this email (which is often shortened in quotation), Jones says that Mann’s “Nature trick” is “adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s”, as originally explained in November 2009 here.
Two hours later Michael Mann, who according to his legal documents “had absolutely nothing to do” with the graph (that is still worth a mention in his CV ), responds. He completely agrees with the text adding that it will “help to bolster the claims to be made in IPCC [AR3]”:
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/
Apart from throwing Jones under the bus Mann’s defence line of this “overly simplified and artistic depiction” (per Mann’s Reply Memorandum) has been that the “simplified” figure was produced with a “largely nontechnical audience” in mind. The modern Arabian Nights tells us:
"That, in short, was the “trick” that Jones had chosen to use to bring the proxy temperature series in his comparison up to the present, even though the proxy data themselves ended several decades earlier. There was one thing Jones did in his WMO graph, however, that went beyond what we had done in our Nature article: He had seamlessly merged proxy and instrumental data into a single curve, without explaining which was which. That was potentially misleading, though not intentionally so; he was only seeking to simplify the picture for the largely nontechnical audience of the WMO report"
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/

 In a remarkable letter, worth reproducing in full, late George Kukla writes in January 2001 to Keith Briffa, in which Kukla asked Briffa about the inconsistency between the WMO presentation of the data and the decline shown in Briffa’s technical papers, describing the WMO presentation as “not very responsible”:
"Dear Keith,
You are the only guy who may know  what was and is going on in the northern forests.  With respect to that I do not think that the WMO statement # 913 on the status of the global climate in 1999 is a sufficiently reliable last word. For one thing: the curve attributed to you doesn’t seem to jive with any of the figures of your 2000 QSR paper.  Where from did they get the 0.6 degree departure at 1600 AD?
Another problem:  the ring density and width in the last several decades are both decreasing which at any other
time would be interpretted as a sign of cooling. So why is it shown in the WMO report as an unprecedented warming? As you properly discuss in your papers we just do not know how exactly do the tree rings relate to weather.  In my understanding we are left with the following options:
1) The calibrations of the rings to temperature prior to 1950 are biased, possibly due to the poor coverage of temperature stations.
2) Something other than the temperature influenced the trees in the last several decades and we do not know what.
In either case it is not very responsible to relate the curves to global climate as WMO has done. You are saying it, albeit somehow indirectly but pretty clearly, in all your papers.  Unfortunately it appears that these are tooo long for WMO to read.
Ciao and greetings to everyone down there!
George"
I think it’s fair to say that George Kukla was first to spot the Hide-the-Decline.
http://climateaudit.org/2014/09/22/black-tuesday-of-climate-science/

Specious reasoning from ignorance and incompetence.

1. You totally misread and cartoonishly caricature what people are saying about the role of the sun. Heat from the sun is trapped on Earth, and we've known that CO2 plays a roll in this since Arrhenius 1896. Nobody disputes this, and nobody, NOBODY, discounts the role of the sun!

2. You haven't demonstrated any link between ppm and the so-called decline.

3. You assume that the scientifically literate audience here doesn't know about ppm. But it is you who demonstrates that you have have ABSOLUTELY NO understanding of even the most basic chemistry when you argue that small amounts can never, ever be harmful. But consider this, it is estimated that one gram of crystalline botulinum is toxic enough to kill a million people. That's an LD50 of 1-3 nanograms/kilogram.

Argument from personal incredulity is not logically valid reasoning!

4. You are not capable of judging the pros and cons of Mcintye.
At all. So let me just lay some basic scientific metaliteracy on you. McIntyre works in mineral exploration and POLICY (agenda) NOT climate SCIENCE. And he has not published a credible, peer reviewed take down vis a vis "the decline."

But if you like blogs, actual scientists have shredded his b.s. to bits, stomped them into powder, burned the remains, dissolved the ashes in acid, and shot it into the sun where it was plasmatised. Try Google.

@John Swallow : protip : Please use > & < greater and lesser than signs (but inthe other other order as brackets and put 'i' inside them for italics or blockquote inside them to get italics and :

quotations like this one.

It won't make what you say any truer but at least it'll make it easier to read and on our eyes 'k please? Its not that hard.

Oh, and then, of course, I stuff it up because the second bit to stop the italics and blockquotes continuing is this / backslash thingamajig / character.

Thence you get italics plus :

blockquotes

Sigh. Because its too late at night for me here and I already suck badly at typing.

Its still easier than I'm making it look although, yegods, I'd love to have an editing ability on this blog!

Oh FFS!

John Swallow seems to be saying that because CO2 is a trace gas it cannot have any effect on the atmosphere. In the linked video Andrew Dessler explains how increased CO2 warms the planet. This is a more technical description of the Greenhouse Effect than the usual one involving blankets. It assumes a little physics knowledge and secondary school maths.
https://youtu.be/4PAbm1u1IVg

I have been wondering what John might object to in the video (assuming he watches it). Here are some possibilities: he might object to the use of the Stefan-Boltzmann law, he might object to the value of 240 watts per square metre, he might have difficulty with the maths that Dessler skips over to derive the temperature.

All greenhouse gasses together make up a very small fraction of the atmosphere yet as Dessler demonstrates without them the temperature of the planet would be 255 K (ie -18 C, or 14 F). Small amounts can indeed have a large impact.

StevoR [#138] directs me to his most reliable source, but it is not mine or anyone else's who wants to get the truth about basically anything. "Oh & John Swallow please see" :
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline.htm
The “decline” refers to a decline in northern tree-rings, not global temperature, and is openly discussed in papers and the IPCC reports. (As if that would matter to anyone seeking the truth)
"Finally, your LIA lie or at leats irrelevance. Surprisingly enough, pretty much the same applies as again."
"The Little Ice Age period was probably a bit more global and probably resulted from a combination of lower solar insolation (Maunder minimum) and the influence of some large volcanic eruptions in the tropics – see :
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/02/01/what-caused-t…
Key excerpt :
“However, this study showed that even if the Sun were less active, and therefore not warming the Earth as much, it would have had little effect. The local issues of volcanoes and the additional fresh water were enough to account for the Little Ice Age. The Sun may have played a role, but now it’s less likely to have been a major one."
[…]" It’s been thought that the cooling started around then, but it’s been hard to pin down until now."
More importantly, this narrows down the cause of the LIA: four tropical volcanoes erupted violently in that period. The ash would have darkened the atmosphere, letting slightly less sunlight down. Some of the gases emitted by volcanoes also cool the air. It seems clear these volcanoes are what triggered the Little Ice Age. But why did it last so long? (I assume that StevoR is wanting to discount that much atmospheric CO₂ comes from volcanoes.)
"Outgassing of volcanoes and mid-ocean ridges is the largest source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, releasing carbon dioxide from deep within the Earth that had been trapped there since the planet's creation. CO2 is released from subduction zones through metamorphism of carbonate rocks subducting with the ocean crust. Not all of this CO2 enters the atmosphere. Some of it dissolves in the oceans and some remains in biomass of organisms."
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Carbon_cycle

"So an active Sun, it’s thought, may warm the Earth a teeny bit more." (Ah, those scientific terms. Now in addition to "Hide", "Trick", and "Decline" now you throw in "teeny".)

(I'm sure that StevoR did not want this excerpt to show up!)
"And when did the cold period finally stop? In the 19th century, at the same time as the rise of the Industrial Revolution. We’re now at or exceeding temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period that existed right before the Little Ice Age."

(It is great that StevoR directs me to a biased sources for his "Scientific" appraisals, some what like skeptical science in that regard)

"This work is extremely important, of course, because it has a direct impact on understanding the Earth’s climate. Even more obviously, if you’ve been reading my blog for more than about ten seconds, is that a lot of climate change deniers like to point to the Sun as being the culprit in the rapid warming of the Earth over the past century. However, even before this study was announced, we knew that’s dead wrong: there is nothing to link the Sun to the current rise in temperatures."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/02/01/what-caused-t…

(StevoR, are we facing that ice age that you people were predicting back in the 1970s?)
"Ring of Fire In 2008, 72 volcanoes erupted around the world -- that's a lot of fire, and slightly above average.
2009 got off to a fast start, too, with Mount Redoubt letting loose in Alaska, Japan's Mount Asama raining ash on Tokyo and an undersea volcano in Tonga breaching the surface and growing an island. But none of these is likely to break into our list of Top 10 Volcanoes in Geologic History." http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/top-10-volcano-e…
"This date in science: Largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. On April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora sent so much crud into the atmosphere that it blocked the sun. What became known as the Year Without a Summer came a year later, in 1816."

StevoR [#138] site that he highly recommended lead me to this site below.
"James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led the research.Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics published the study last December." 

"The fact that we still see a positive imbalance despite the prolonged solar minimum isn't a surprise given what we've learned about the climate system, but it's worth noting because this provides unequivocal evidence that the sun is not the dominant driver of global warming," Hansen said.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/energy-budget.html

Could this possibly be the same James Hansen who had said this?
"Whither U.S. Climate?
By James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Jay Glascoe and Makiko Sato — August 1999
What's happening to our climate? Was the heat wave and drought in the Eastern United States in 1999 a sign of global warming?
Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared with repeated droughts during the 1930s "Dust Bowl" that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath."
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

This has to be the same James Hansen who, like so many others, seem to be in this for the money that is being lavished on the true believing alarmist.
James Hansen is ‘First millionaire bureaucrat’: NASA’s James Hansen earns up to $1.2 million in 2010.
James Hansen has become one of the most financially rewarded government employed alarmists.

“Climate scientist Hansen wins $100,000 prize” http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63636N20100407

The Heinz Center for Science, Economy and the Environment (run by John Kerry’s wife Teresa Heinz) gave Hansen $250,000 in 2001 for promoting the AGW scare [http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3671] (Enron’s Ken Lay was one of the founding board members of the Heinz Center (http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0407/12/lkl.00.html], and Enron was one of the biggest promoters of the Kyoto cap and trade.)

George Soros’ Open Society Institute gave Hansen $720,000 to promote alarmist claims
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/26/nasa-s-hansen-men…

It is interesting to tie the above observations with current MET observations.
"July 2013 - Global mean surface temperatures rose rapidly from the 1970s, but have been relatively flat over the most recent 15 years to 2013. This has prompted speculation that human induced global warming is no longer happening, or at least will be much smaller than predicted. Others maintain that this is a temporary pause and that temperatures will again rise at rates seen previously."
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/recent-pause-in-warming

#134 I wonder if Desertphile were to look at this in realistic manner, such as using light bulbs to measure the insolation for every square meter of the Earth’s surface he would discover in the Northern  Hemisphere that the summer insolation gives 400 W/m2  or 4 light bulbs and it follows that then winter will give 180 W/m2 or less than 2 light bulbs; therefore, this should go along way to explaining what cause the seasons, & that has nothing to do with carbon dioxide.

John... One question:

Why are you so desperate?

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

"I remember how John Cook was thinking that Professor Richard Muller from Berkeley was an all right guy after his BEST report that seems to have changed now:"

Really? That's odd. I was under the sure impression that the SkS link you gave us, discussing Muller's errors, was from March 2011, whereas the BEST results did not come out until much later in 2011.

Maybe in John Swallow-land the time runs backwards?

It is interesting that John continues to argue that small amounts cannot have large effects, but has not noticed the video that I posted showing how spectacularly he misunderstands the role of CO2. In case your missed it John, here is the link again:
https://youtu.be/4PAbm1u1IVg

Richard Muller has been mentioned so here is a video of him explaining why John is wrong:
https://youtu.be/wfn9FaJKPwo

#170
“...this should go along way to explaining what cause the seasons, & that has nothing to do with carbon dioxide.

This is a strawman. No one has claimed that the seasons are a result of CO2.

#172
Another statement by Richard Lindzen refutes Swallow and confirms that Lindzen accepts the importance of CO2 for our climate:

"There has been a large increase of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases due to emissions resulting from human activity over the past 150 years [...] Global average surface temperature has very probably warmed by about 0.7°C in the same period [...] Increasing carbon dioxide alone, and in the absence of climate feedbacks, should cause about 1°C warming for each doubling."
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2012/04/climate-scientists-take-on-lind…

Stephen Spencer beat me to the Muller video. The following is from a July 2012 op-ed:

“CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...
What has caused the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions (exponentials, polynomials), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population. By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.
Just as important, our record is long enough that we could search for the fingerprint of solar variability, based on the historical record of sunspots. That fingerprint is absent. Although the I.P.C.C. allowed for the possibility that variations in sunlight could have ended the “Little Ice Age,” a period of cooling from the 14th century to about 1850, our data argues strongly that the temperature rise of the past 250 years cannot be attributed to solar changes. This conclusion is, in retrospect, not too surprising; we’ve learned from satellite measurements that solar activity changes the brightness of the sun very little.
How definite is the attribution to humans? The carbon dioxide curve gives a better match than anything else we’ve tried. Its magnitude is consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect — extra warming from trapped heat radiation. These facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism, but they raise the bar: to be considered seriously, an alternative explanation must match the data at least as well as carbon dioxide does.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-…- skeptic.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

More on the sun:
“The Sunspot Number, the longest scientific experiment still ongoing, is a crucial tool used to study the solar dynamo, space weather and climate change. It has now been recalibrated and shows a consistent history of solar activity over the past few centuries.
The new record has no significant long-term upward trend in solar activity since 1700, as was previously indicated. This suggests that rising global temperatures since the industrial revolution cannot be attributed to increased solar activity.”
http://astronomynow.com/2015/08/08/corrected-sunspot-history-suggests-c…

Solar activity can't explain the increase in global temperature, but CO2 emissions can – maybe not according to John Swallow, but according to physics and measurements.

As Swallow has uncritically cited the Homewood claim of fraudulently manipulated temperature data #157, which later was spread by Christopher Booker

(Re. Booker's scientific credibility, see:
http://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/the-telegraph-christopher-booker-… ),

I thought it might be relevant to provide some additional observations on the accuracy of temperature data from real skeptic Steven Mosher:

“The Homewood approach (and by extension Delingpole and Booker) is pretty simple. Look for stations that are warmed and complain. Of course, he fails to look at the entire picture, fails to look at the large parts of Africa (20% of the globe) that our algorithm “cools” Further since there are 40000 stations you can bet the algorithm will present cases that are “wrong” (different from a different algorithm) or hard to explain ( a site might be compared to 100’s of neighbors). Its always going to be possible to find these cases.What do you conclude from finding 5, 10, 15, 500, cases that we warm? Nothing if you are skeptical.
When a “skeptic” finds one these cases, its instructive to watch what they do.
They immediately draw a conclusion. The conclusion is “the whole is untrustworthy”
That’s not skepticism. By looking at the whole we know that the scientifically interesting result ( the world is getting warmer) STANDS. it stands with adjustments. It stands with no adjustments. Any local detail that may be wrong or questionable is not material to this conclusion.”
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/guest-post-skepti…

John Swallow may also enjoy spending his days in an atmosphere with 400 ppm HCN. Can't do nuffin', 'cause it's so little in this enormous 'open' atmosphere. OK, it will kill him within an hour, but really that didn't happen, 'cause John Swallow says 400 ppm of a gas can't do nuffin'.

He must also enjoy 400 ppm ozone, 'cause again it can't do nuffin', even though it is estimated that 50 ppm is enough to kill a human in an hour.

Let's not even discuss the enormous impact of the small amount of ozone in the stratosphere. John Swallow thinks it doesn't protect us against the harmful UV radiation of the sun. Scientists beg to differ...

John's amusement factor has long since gone to zero, but his ability to generate rambling objections to "counter" the science does demonstrate the immense problem that exists in countering such utterances: the number of ways to distort results, ignore facts, and fail to mention established results is immense.
At what point does replying directly to nonsense like that become too time-consuming to be justified? (So when should the focus go back to direct, concise, discussion of the science in general in order to release a more direct message?)

Dean, you have a point. Swallow cannot understand or construct a connected argument. He will occasionally respond directly to a point but will then spit out a series of non sequiturs composed of debunked talking points. Nor can he grasp simple analogies, apparently. Overall, the best he can come up with are shallow rationalizations.

He may be a troll, but as best as I can determine, Swallow is either a propagandist bent on permanently ensnaring the dumbest of the dumb, or he is one of the ensnared. Most certainly it's the later, since this venue is not fertile ground for propagandists.

Let's see now, the subject was Judith Curry...

>How do you explain Judith Curry?

I suggest Mann envy.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

BINGO!

With the "but it was warmer in the US before", John Swallow filled my climate denier bingo card.

It's time to bury John Swallow. He's brain-dead.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

OK, I'd like to amend my previous comment. Swallow goes Gish Galloping nuts when it looks like the commentariat is bored and about to abandon the thread. Classic (and desperate) troll maneuver to regain attention.

"The record for Europe was recently changed for some reason from this: Europe 122⁰F Seville, Spain 26 4 Aug 1881. Possibly James Hansen had some influence on the record & massaged it like he did with the GISS records."

Anyone else got bingo, now?

Or are you just missing the "Al Gore is fat"?

Postmortem:

“Could this be why we have this happening in Greenland?
'Current Surface Mass Budget of the Greenland Ice Sheet
The continuing cold weather in Greenland from September 1, 2014, to August 2015 has led to strongly growing sea ice, as the accumulated mass balance of the Danish Meteorological Weather Service impressively shows:' ”
http://www.dmi.dk/en/groenland/maalinger/greenland-ice-sheet-surface-ma… #185

If you click on Swallow's link you won't find the passage he quoted, but you will find this:

“Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet. Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance. The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.”

The English translation of the original Danish text isn't completely accurate. This is the original:

“Hen over året sner det mere, end der smelter, men kælving af isbjerge indgår jo også i indlandsisens totale masseregnskab. Satellitobservationer over de seneste ti år viser, at iskappen faktisk ikke er i balance. Kælvingen overstiger overflademassebalancen, og Grønland mister derfor masse med ca. 200 Gt/år.”
http://www.dmi.dk/groenland/maalinger/indlandsisens-massebalance/

A key word is indgår, which has been incorrectly translated as adds. The correct translation is: “but calving of icebergs is also included in the total mass budget of the ice sheet.”

In any case, it's clear that Greenland is losing an enormous amount of ice.

As Swallow's link didn't show what he claimed, I googled his text. It didn't lead to DMI, but to the climate septic site, NoTricksZone, which in another passage turned the SMB loss into a gain:

"In the 2014/2015 season the daily course and accumulated ice mas development on Greenland measured in gigatons since September 1, 2014 is showing a mass growth (lower chart) of around 200 gigatons, or 200 cubic kilometers.”

Turning minus into plus and lying about sources is what septics do.

Furthermore, I urge readers to compare the link Swallow presents as the source of the following quote with the link I provided.

“The Homewood approach (and by extension Delingpole and Booker) is pretty simple. Look for stations that are warmed and complain.”

My comment: #178
Swallow's misrepresentation: #190

John, John, John! I will just respond to the comments you made to me, and leave the rest to others.

That water vapour is a major greenhouse gas is well known to climate scientists; as you rightly point out that fact has been known since Tyndall's work in 1859; but water vapour is a FEEDBACK not a FORCING. The fact that you seem to consider yourself an expert on climate science but don't know about that fundamental distinction is amazing.

The basic idea is that increased CO2 warms the atmosphere, and this warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour (which is a strong green house gas). This increase in water vapour in the atmosphere acts as an amplifier or feedback to increase the warming that has already occurred due to the increase of CO2. Your claim that Dessler does not understand this process is amazing as he clearly does understand it, as the video below shows. (The first minute describes the water vapour feedback, though the rest is about the stratosphere).

https://youtu.be/EDI8DkyqA74

Muller seems to have been something of a "skeptic" at one stage as he probably bought into the "climategate" nonsense that you have been spouting - as shown by your video. He also received funding from the Koch brothers. Anthony Watts was excited when he announced BEST because Watts expected Muller to show that the surface measurement groups like Giss and NOAA were wrong. Muller, irrespective of his personal leanings, employed competent and honest people to work on the project and discovered that the other surface temperature measurement groups were correct. Unlike people like you he followed the evidence, announced his results and the video that I posted resulted. The way Watts, Joe Nova and other people of their ilk turned on Muller after he announced his results was a thing to behold. Part of the motivation of those on this thread who are correcting your misunderstandings is that you might behave like Muller and when you find that the evidence does not support your predilections change your mind and accept the overwhelming evidence in support of standard climate science. This is very likely a forlorn hope!

Here is a page that shows how closely BEST results compare with Giss, NOAA and HadleyCRU and the close fit of the CO2 curve with the temperature record.
http://berkeleyearth.org/summary-of-findings/

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

Sophistry generator ad nauseam. Googling around, it seems this one has been at it for quite a while.

For instance:
"On the three different occasions when I have; at different locations, two of which were in Nepal and the other on Kilimanjaro in 2011,been at or above 18,000 feet, it took no experiment to show one that there is only about 1/2 as much atmosphere at these altitudes as at sea level by just trying to get enough O2 to exist; but, there were always clouds over head and snow on the ground."

is also found here:
http://www.cfact.org/2014/01/23/watch-cfacts-marc-morano-debate-bill-ny…
here:
http://phys.org/news/2014-04-statistical-analysis-natural-warming-hypot…
and here:
http://climatecrocks.com/2013/01/25/the-weekend-wonk-how-climate-denier…

John Swallow, John Doug Swallow, jdouglashuahin, whatever, has been cut-and-pasting this stuff and more all over the place for a few years now, which accounts for some of his disjointed "reasoning." This is a dedicated, blethering bampot at best.

DNFTT

John.
You are determined to avoid learning about this topic.
In the first 70 seconds of the Dessler video that I posted, he describes the Water Vapour (WV) feedback in the troposphere. In that part of the atmosphere the WV feedback doubles the warming initiated by CO2. You ignored that section on basic theory and only took notice of the last section which was on the WV feedback in the Stratosphere. This is relatively new science. You quoted Dessler's view that the Stratosphere WV feedback constitutes 5-10% of additional warming (due to greenhouse gasses) and seem to conclude that, that figure is all of the additional warming caused by WV. You ignore the major effect explained in the first 70 seconds which is the WV feedback in the Troposphere.

WV can't be a FORCING as WV added to an atmosphere that is not warming will precipitate out in a week or so. When CO2 is added, the higher level of CO2 will remain for centuries. So, adding CO2 warms that atmosphere and then more WV is added to the atmosphere (a warmer atmosphere can hold more WV) and the increased WV reinforces or amplifies the warming already started by CO2.

Your comments that the atmosphere cools and gets less dense with altitude are correct but you fail to understand that those two properties of our atmosphere are two important elements of Greenhouse theory, yet you want to raise them is a confused and unclear way as evidence against basic Climate theory. The importance of these two properties to Greenhouse theory are clearly explained in the video on the Greenhouse effect that I posted in comment #167. I will re-post it here:
https://youtu.be/4PAbm1u1IVg

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

I suspect we are all bemused by John's muddled posts on this thread.

I think his problem comes from a fundamental issue with climate "skeptical" arguments. When you ask a mainstream climate scientist for an explanation you will get a clear and consistent argument based on almost two centuries of evidence and theory. More of that later. When you ask for a "skeptical" explanation of climate theory you will get a range of different and mutually inconsistent ideas. For instance, Willy Soon will tell you it is all down to the sun, David Archibald will hold forth on the coming ice age, Roy Spencer (no relation) will tell you about natural cycles, Henrik Svensmark will tell you about cosmic rays and Richard Lindzen will talk about the cloud feedback. These theories contradict each other. If Soon is right then Spencer, Lindzen, Archibald and Svensmark are all wrong. If Spencer is right then Soon LIndzen, Archibald and Svensmark are wrong - and so on. But they reserve their attacks for mainstream science not the "Skeptical" arguments that contradict their favourite theory. Why would this be the case? I think the answer is clear - they use the methods pioneered by the Tobacco companies, sow doubt. Throw enough dirt and people who are not particularly interested or ignorant will not notice the absurdities and inconsistencies, and assume because of all the noise that there is a problem with mainstream science.

So what arguments do mainstream climate scientists present:
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We have known this since 1859 and those findings were reinforced by the US Air Force during the 1940.
2. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing. We have known this since 1958.
3. Almost all of the extra CO2 in the atmosphere has come from human activities. There are multiple lines of evidence for this dating back to the early 1980s.
4. The Earth has been warming because of 1, 2 and 3. We have known this (from multiple sources) since the 1980s.

Note that I did not mention the hockey stick or climate models in the argument above. Although they are useful adjuncts to climate science they are not necessary to establish a powerful argument.

Interestingly, it is still possible to mount an argument that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not a problem while still accepting the science I outlined above. You could argue that climate sensitivity (CS) is low so the climate will not change much with additions of CO2. The value of CS has not been established with the same certainty of the points 1 to 4 above. The IPCC, for instance, give a wide range of CS from 1.5 C to 4.5 C.

CS is an interesting topic that some of you might want to comment on. I think that the crucial issue that will be resolved in the next few years is the value of the cloud feedback (CF). Lindzen has spent many years trying (unsuccessfully) to prove that the CF is strongly negative. Dessler and others are producing evidence that CF is positive.

Here is is a video by Dessler on CS which you might find interesting:
https://youtu.be/mdoln7hGZYk

Here is a longer video describing mainstream climate science:
https://youtu.be/7ImRv58XJO8
It includes a more detailed section on CS, which starts at 16 minutes 30 seconds and finishes at about 27 minutes 30 seconds.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

Stephan, 

'Bemused' isn't really the word. It's an issue of identifying trolls, and then dealing with them so that you don't waste your time enabling them.

For instance, this thread has been dragged off topic (Judith Curry) by someone who is spamming this site with what is essentially innuendo and collages of anti-science porn; who demonstrates no ability or inclination to actually have a discussion; who has apparently made a habit of doing this elsewhere; and who has now gone so far as to gratuitously inject some red state bile about the president, which tells you a lot about his agenda.

The standard advice in these type of situations is:
Do Not Feed The Troll (DNFTT)
But don't take it from me. This wisdom has been passed down from wiser heads than mine:

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
― Mark Twain

"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."
― George Bernard Shaw

"Do not cast your pearls of wisdom before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces."
-- Jesus of Nazareth, from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:6

Any way, Stephen Spencer [#196], please explain how this trace gas that makes up .04% is doing all of this forcing and at what altitude.

Swallow, that alone indicates that you do not understand what is going on in the atmosphere, hint in bold, let alone anywhere else. The difference between forcings and feedbacks for one.

But then your

how this trace gas that makes up .04% is doing all of this forcing

is a strawman, for nobody is claiming that CO2 is doing all the forcing. The sun is for one - but that is a negative forcing from reduction of solar radiation latterly. CO2 causing warming produces more water vapour which yes is a GHG and acts as a feedback - not a forcing. In considering water vapour thus we do not include clouds which can have a positive or negative feedback depending on type and altitude.

I suggest you go find the segment where Ben Santer beats down the arguments from absurdity of Pat Michaels during the November 17, 2010
Global Climate Change, Panel 2 session, note mention of another negative feedback. Richard Alley is also worth your paying close attention to.

Obstreperous Applesauce at #204, you are correct. He is incorrigible, and when we point out what the evidence from genuine scientists he will link to cranks like tallbloke or jonova.

I was caught up in a long thread attempting to point out reality to people like Swallow at You Tube. (The thread was at the Muller video I linked to.) They made outrageous claims that I showed to be incorrect but they just then came back with more nonsense. I think that the fundamental problem is that, if science dating back to 1824 is correct then their whole world view (small government, free markets, continuing exponential growth) collapses. Consequently they are highly motivated to attack the science. But as I said they cannot provide a coherent theory to explain what is happening in the science. Note that I challenged Swallow to provide such a coherent explanation and he just came back with some nonsense on the cloud feedback.

On the you tube thread I mentioned I eventually came the the same conclusion that you have, and announced that I would not be responding to any more comments on the thread. One of the people responded with a triumphalist post claiming that I was leaving because they had won the argument. I expect that Swallow will make the same claim, and then find another thread to derail and spread his anti-science nonsense.

Back to Curry, briefly. Why have zombie arguments like "climategate" and "the hockey stick is broken" been reanimated? The Steyn / Mann court case is part of it, but as well it is clear that their most treasured arguments (particularly "the pause") are crashing and burning and instead of admitting that they have been talking nonsense all this time they double down on the absurdities.

It has been interesting to communicate with you, but I will not be feeding this troll any more. Good bye.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

Stephen Spencer #207

While I agree with Obstreperous Applesauce about John Swallow,
I would add that I found your comments educational, well-informed and well-written. You strike me as an exceptionally kind and decent person. I hope you'll continue to comment on this blog.

It has been a pleasure discussing issues with you as well.
I have only recently found Greg's blog, and I will continue to read his posts and probably comment as well.
I just will do my best to ignore Swallow and people like him.
My last post made my position on climate "skeptics" clear, but with regard to Curry, I am at a loss. Even if you ignore the moral issue of her behaviour, self interest would discourage a scientist from smashing her reputation with her peers, all to curry favor with anti science loons.

“...but with regard to Curry, I am at a loss. Even if you ignore the moral issue of her behaviour, self interest would discourage a scientist from smashing her reputation with her peers, all to curry favor with anti science loons.” #209

Self-interest can also be preferring to be a big fish in a small, polluted pond rather than a small fish in a big, clean one. It can also be based on personal animosity, and I think that Curry's animosity towards Mann is obvious. Finally, although we don't know the extent of involvement or the degree of financial remuneration, we do know that Curry has done consulting work for fossil fuel companies. At this point I don't think she gives a damn about what other scientists think. .

Correction:
The quote in my last comment is from #211. A couple of additional comments were interjected while I was typing.

John Swallow's 'Gish gallops' provide an excellent example of why threads need moderating. He's been allowed to repeatedly cut-and-paste pre-assembled, overblown, pseudo-science to the point where he's swamped this thread. And at no time has he paid any attention to the evidence that's been provided by those rebutting his arguments.

John Swallow is a product of the echo chamber that constantly repeats denial memes using every trick in the fake-skeptics' handbook. It's sad that Greg provides this platform for his propaganda tricks and does nothing to hold him to account.

...not global arming any more since the planet hasn’t warmed for over 18 years now according to the satellite readings...

Which 18 year period - exactly, and which satellite data set?
Demonstrate.

Mr. Swallow had moved from the US to Thailand.

Clarification re. #195 – Greenland ice

I wasn't sufficiently sure about the difference between surface mass balance (SMB) and total mass balance. SMB is the difference between the gain from snowfall and the loss from melt. According to a guest post in The Carbon Brief written by scientists from Denmark's Meteorological Institute, the 2015 surface mass gain “was around 220bn tonnes of new ice,” which is “below the average of about 290bn tonnes.”

The total mass balance includes ice loss from calving, and subtracting this loss from the SMB gain tells us whether Greenland is losing or gaining ice.

“Satellite observations over the past decade show that the calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance - and Greenland is losing mass at about 250bn tonnes per year.”
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2015/09/guest-post-the-state-of-the-gre…

So articles or scientific papers that only account for SMB don't give us the whole picture, and blog posts that attempt to prove that Greenland is gaining ice by alone showing the SMB figure are either misinformed or deliberately deceptive.

Wonder which part... The region that's going to be flooded out by AGW-caused sea level rise? Or the region that's part of the Golden Triangle?

John Russell:

John Swallow is a product of the echo chamber that constantly repeats denial memes using every trick in the fake-skeptics’ handbook. It’s sad that Greg provides this platform for his propaganda tricks and does nothing to hold him to account.

I must respectfully disagree with you, John. Greg is performing a public service by allowing Swallow to show the world just what kind of people are drawn to AGW-denial. IMO, Swallow's obsessive fear and distrust of climate scientists results from a deep-seated psychological condition, one that pre-disposes him to accept the most unsophisticated dissimulation by motivated disinformers. He will be seen as clearly deranged by any reality-based witnesses. He is only harming his cause by commenting here.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

John Swallow.

Everything that you have dumped here as "evidence" that global warming is not what the professional science says it is, has been refuted countless times before on the internet.

That you collect and post such huge amounts of mendacious garbage shows 1) your dedication to the cause of confirmation bias, and 2) your assiduous avoidance of the truth.

You're a sad example of a human.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

Obstreperous Applesauce at #204 is correct: DO NOT FEED THE TROLL. He has successfully derailed the thread with his nonsense and is not interested in reality. As well he posts links to delusional and crackpot sites.

This thread is about Curry. I would be interested in opinions about her behavior and that of the small number of genuine climate scientists like her who provide support for "skeptical" absurdities.

One possibility raised by cosmicomics is fossil fuel funding. Increasingly evidence surfaces of fossil fuel funding for "skeptics". Given that they are so happy to read stolen emails, maybe they should prove that they are not taking funding from the fossil fuel companies.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

Guys, I know there are millions of climate denial fake talking points, but really, does no one else already have bingo?

Stuff like "ocean pH is basic, so it is not acidifying" (showing complete and utter ignorance of high school chemistry) and cherry picking single data points to claim sea levels are not rising must be on some people's bingo card?!

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

Migrating Swallow,

I note your now long running avoidance of answering pointed questions. Maybe you think a memory dump of Gish Gallop proportions is adequate enough, it isn't.

I suggest you take note of my #206 and answer the question at #215

I note in one of your later gallops you mentioned Gerlich and Tscheuschner. Now be a good lad and follow that link to enlightenment. You may care to enter 'Gerlich' in Search field at RealClimate and see what pops up. Do note that there is an RC Wiki which carries an extensive list of debunked arguments you will do everybody a favour, including yourself, to go study there.

Of course you could continue to drill your hole with another length of 'Gish Gallop' pipe.

Swallow

...Stephen Spencer mentions real scientist such as Willy Soon, David Archibald,...

Cough...!

You just have to be 'a poe', nobody in their right mind would otherwise post a comment like that.

How much intellectual weight can a John Swallow carry? Whether he's an American John Swallow or a Thailand John Swallow, the answer is evidently precious little. If this blog was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he would long since have been cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.

"These people frighten the shit outta me."

We have a strong concentrations of anti-gay folks, as well as anti-vaccination folks, in SW Michigan. They are not pleasant to be around either.

Well, people can believe contradictory things at the same time. We will probably never know what happened to Curry. Maybe it's a question of funding, or maybe she was just walking down the street one day and got hit on the head with a coconut.

For a while my operating theory was that, at base, she is a slider. Someone of modest abilities who gamed the system just well enough to secure a position, then raised her profile without thinking about it too much. The rest is history. More sloppy sliding.

I haven't entirely abandoned that notion...

@ ^ Obstreperous Applesauce : "Well, people can believe contradictory things at the same time."

True.

But at some point reality is going to make itself undeniably clear. Beyond any doubt.

Even for the Curries, even for the Moncktons & Inhofes.

If they are still alive by then, I wonder how they will react? Also how we will react.

I wish I could say that say was still decades away. It isn't. I don't think so.

I don't know who the last denier will be.

I do know that science and the laws of physics particularly aren't going to be denied and knowing that the estimates of the climatologists are conservative and that what's already in the pipeline (as the saying goes) is, well flipppin' ominous as an understatement...

I really want to cry. I despair and I cringe away.

Most of all I pity the next generation or so including my five year old niece and apologise to them. I'm sorry, I tried.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

John Swallow @238:

“The linear mean sea level trend in this on is flat and the trend is .09+/-0.96mm/yr”

I was unable to find this (with and without the typo) on the website you indicated. Please could you give an exact cite. Elsewhere they give rather different figures and also imply that they have made no correction for local subsidence/elevation.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

This comment has been deleted because the commenter is an unrepentant ass who has nothing intelligent to say.

> Who else noticed how a discussion about Dr. Curry’s
> inexplicable behavior was hijacked to any and every
> topic other than her behavior?

https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Arodeo+clown

BINGO!

Second climate denial bingo card filled up. This time with a mention of Al Gore's TV station and "Shell and BP founded the CRU" (which is a boldfaced lie).

John Swallow, clearly you have completely immersed yourself in science disinformation and conspiracy crap. That you have swallowed that crap completely is evidence of your desperate need for the science to be wrong. Now you are trying to convince people who clearly know far more than you do, to swallow the same crap you are regurgitating as if they hadn't heard it all before. Posting a gish gallop of crap that has long been refuted is not in the least convincing. All you have done is confirm yourself, beyond any doubt, as a motivated science denier who doesn't even know the basic science involved.

Yeah. Enough is enough.

> Enough is enough

Actually he reached "enough" years ago; you can with a little searching find the same "John Swallow" screed on other blogs, over and over and over.

He's not even typing, he's just copypasting himself.

Sorry - my brain must be going to mush! I thought the data John Swallow gave for sea level in Thailand was intended to be global data.

Coming back to Judith Curry, the first time I read anything of hers was that Italian flag nonsense, in which she started by likening the different colours to the level of certainty of one's position on a topic, but got confused and partway through switched to having them represent one's actual position. On the few occasions since then that I've read her work, there seems to have been innuendo ('Here is an interesting paper . . .') with deniability (I never said I agreed with it). I suspect she is well out of her depth.

Earlier in this thread I pointed to the Panel 2 section of the November 2010 House Science and Technology Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing where Pat Michaels was well countered by Ben Santer and Richard Alley made Rohrabacher look like what he is. I wonder if Swallow ever bothered to go watch that session.

Of course others of now dubious reputation were in the other panels, Lindzen (Panel1) and Curry herself in Panel 3. Lindzen's ponderous sonorous delivery tends to send me to sleep (I guess that is one aim) and Curry is simply baffling. With all three their oral testimony diverged from their written testimony.

Here for the record is link to video of Panel 3 which included Curry.

“Capitol Weather Gang has reactions from 20 scientists [link], including a few sensible ones (such as moi).”
Judith Curry
http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/16/warmest-year-pause-and-all-that/
(Modesty personified.)

I think the noose around Curry's credibility is starting to tighten.

“The stadium wave signal predicts that the current pause in global warming could extend into the 2030s,” Wyatt said, the paper’s lead author.
Curry added, “This prediction is in contrast to the recently released IPCC AR5 Report that projects an imminent resumption of the warming, likely to be in the range of a 0.3 to 0.7 degree Celsius rise in global mean surface temperature from 2016 to 2035.”
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/10/the-stadium-wave/

This appeared on Curry's blog in October of 2013. The following year, 2014, was probably the warmest year on record, though there's a small chance that that distinction belongs to another year.
Thus far it looks as though 2015 will surpass 2014 by a significant margin.

Curry did her best to dance around the 2014 result, and wound up partnering with Ted Cruz:

“Senator Ted Cruz is  (R-Texas) was just named to be the chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness.  The folks at Slate are not happy: Yup, a Climate Change Denier Will Oversee NASA.  What Could Possibly Go Wrong?  They are particularly up in arms over this statement from Ted Cruz:
The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that—that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened...
So, what is wrong with Cruz’s statement?  Well, assuming that by ‘recorded warming’, he means the satellite-derived lower atmospheric temperatures his statement is absolutely correct.  If he is referring to globally averaged surface temperatures since 2000, there is only a very small amount of warming; this small amount of warming is indeed contrary to the theory of AGW...
Bottom line:  There is nothing irrational or particularly incorrect about Senator Cruz’s statement.”
http://judithcurry.com/2015/01/16/warmest-year-pause-and-all-that/

The year still has four months left, but the trend would have to change considerably for 2015 not to surpass 2014, and I think that most “sensible” scientists would be forced to conclude that either 2014 or 2015 is the hitherto warmest. As these years follow on recent contenders from 2005 and 2010, I wonder what dance Curry will perform to slip away from acknowledging that her “pause” is dead and that “the theory of AGW” is very much alive.

Will she once again seek climate wisdom at the feet of Ted Cruz?

Funny to watch people keep trying to save Judith Curry from herself. How can a trained climate scientist be a climate change denier? It's like asking how the nice young lady who lives next door and grew up in a respectable middle class home can be a prostitute. "It can't be true, can it? Not she, certainly! It just doesn't make sense!"

Consider a scientist who is brought up through the ranks within the petroleum industry, who later leaves their employ and starts publishing about the evidence that global warming is man-made and mainly due to burning fossil fuels...

Do you suppose there's a hew and cry within that industry about "How do explain a person trained in petroleum engineering drifting off and becoming more and more of a climate change scientist?"

Do they write blogs to bemoan such a person becoming enlightened as to the consequences of their actions, finding their morals and getting in touch with the responsibilities of what they've been supporting, and realizing the magnitude of the destruction of lives, property, and ecosystems?

Do they make comments about their industry payoffs not being enough? That they've lost their connection with the dark side? That capable, corruptible souls are getting harder to find these days? That the ease of publishing the truth as revealed by science is getting to be really annoying?

Just to let you'all know, John Swallow, a.k.a. J. Doug Swallow, and other pseudonyms apparently, has resigned as a commenter on this blog. He has revealed to me that his commenting here was an experiment. I assume you'all signed permission and disclosure forms.

Interesting. This must be one of the first cases in history where the rat was conducting the experiment on the scientists.

Brainstorms #21 sez:

Certainly by the time Katrina was spinning, it was “dire and required immediate, drastic, action”.

There were models that showed New Orleans going under water. (E.g., “This risk of devastation had been known for
some time; previous studies by FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers had warned that a direct hurricane strike on New Orleans could lead to massive flooding, which would lead to thousands of drowning deaths, as well as many more suffering from disease and dehydration, as the flood waters slowly receded from the city.”) But no “evidence” (yet)
beyond the model outputs. ...

... So why not ask the 700* people who died there what they did once they had their “evidence”. How’d that “wait and
see” attitude work out for them? Or the thousands of others who survived but had their homes & businesses wash away?

... models are showing us that AGW is going to raise sea levels to the point where this is going to be happening over a wide range of coastal cities — without requiring a Cat 5 hurricane..

Apparently, It did not require a Cat 5 in New Orleans either as the windspeeds over the Parishes proper did not exceed
CAT 2. -- I didn't say it was 'chemtrailed' to protect valued real-estate just before landfall.

Yet, in a way, you are correct about the effects. And yet, as the 'overtopping' was not that severe, I wonder if the major
breach, whether by bomb or barge, would have occured if not for the need to practice operation 'Garden Plot' and go
door to door confiscating weapons of the high-and-dry, looting, pillaging, and sacking a major city by 'law enforcement' and government 'way to go, Brownies' otherwise.

True, *they got theirs* -- That'll learn'em though it was no Gilbert, nor Mitch, nor Dean, nor Camille, nor Hugo, nor Andrew upon landfall.

'Brainstorms'?? At least, that would be a more plausible made for TV PSA than Sharknado.

*sb 1,464 people?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Katrina_in_New_Orlea…

Also prescient warning =/= 'evidence'

Ahh, Brainstorms #257

This business of cheeze and squeeking was just a front; *They* have been experimenting on you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZPPEVn_SVo

I can think of several possible motivations for such an experiment. At the risk of being way off target, I'll lean optimistic and hazard the guess that John Swallow sought to test the reactions of "warmist" blogs versus those of "Denialist" blogs to comments that contradicted their central precepts.

I think we came off rather well. Perhaps John Swallow will let us know in the fullness of time.

@256. Greg Laden :

Just to let you’all know, John Swallow, a.k.a. J. Doug Swallow, and other pseudonyms apparently, has resigned as a commenter on this blog. He has revealed to me that his commenting here was an experiment. I assume you’all signed permission and disclosure forms.

Nope. Never saw those.

What scientific journal will his results be coming out in, when, and what exactly did he prove? He share any results with you?

'Experiment' -- the way delinquents pull the wings off flies. Hardly a surprising comment from a troll, which you would expect to be narcissistic and sadistic.

And look, we're still talking about the noisy little nothing...

A just in case resource: Michael Mann on the meaning of trick etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3j9j6WNpRM
From around 26:20 to 32:30.

Trick, n
A reference in informal communications to clever or skillful technique that makes pinheads spin.

From "The Devil's Dictionary".

More from the linked to video #264: a reference to the economic possibilities for climate scientists who reject mainstream climate science. Starts around 55:10.

Perhaps Professor Curry is RIGHT! That notion seems to be anathema to many involved in the Climate Change Controversy.

Also perhaps the character assassination method of rebuttal lacks scientific credibility.

What I am saying is that anthropogenic global warming is NOT PROVEN. I admit it is moderately likely, But I reject the notion that the matter is settled. Whatever else it is, it is certainly NOT settled.

Actions such as the NOAA Climate History Reset activate my skeptical nature.

Yes, and skepticism is NOT a crime against Science. Lack of skepticism is a crime against Science.

Professor Curry, right or wrong, deserves to be rebutted on the issues themselves. Saying crap such as she has "abandoned science" is pure scientific McCarthyism and has no place in legitimate inquiry.

Perhaps she is right. Perhaps she is wrong. But personal attacks against her and other climate skeptics do nothing to enhance the position of the "orthodox" Climate Science Community.

I suggest that you read this talk on "Pathological Science" by Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Irving Langmuir. It was given on December 18, 1953, so it was in no way tilted to support Professor Curry's position.
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/Langmuir/langmuir.htm

There is a strong similarity between Langmuir's description of "Pathological Science" and the current "climate orthodoxy".

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/Langmuir/langB.htm#Characteristic%20S…

David, the science is settled. Your skepticism is misplaced.

"Professor Curry, right or wrong, deserves to be rebutted on the issues themselves."

"... again and again and again and again, constantly, all the time, without end, forever, by everyone, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of times" you forgot to add.

How can it be settled when the outstanding climate models disagree with each other?

How can it be settled when previous predictions have failed to materialize?

How can it be settled when it was found necessary to retroactively change data to agree with theory instead of the reverse?

Read Langmuir and you will see how serious the current McCarthyism is destroying scientific credibility.

"Read Langmuir and you will see how serious the current McCarthyism is destroying scientific credibility."

Explained here:

http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/Lskyeta…

@272. David F Mayer :

"How can it be settled when the outstanding climate models disagree with each other?"

Because the models differ on details not underlying trend. Its like a group of deciding to get a pizza and then arguing over which pizza to get -meatlovers, vegetarian, BBQ chicken, Hawaiian etc .. - We know they're getting pizza -that's settled, the exact flavours and toppings are what's still not set. Get it now?

"How can it be settled when previous predictions have failed to materialize?"

Er, a lot of the key predictions haveactually happened -decreasing Arctic sea ice, increased global average temperatures, disappearing glaciers, shifts in flora and fauna, etc ..

How can it be settled when it was found necessary to retroactively change data to agree with theory instead of the reverse?

Er, what? What are you referring to there? Citation badly needed.

@David F Mayer

Can I respectfully suggest that you widen your reading? If you're going to follow Judith Curry, then a little more scepticism would perhaps prove useful.

"Precipitate actions?"

Given the decades of denial and successful resistance to doing anything at all, I would suggest that outsized fear of "precipitate action" is particularly unproductive, and precisely part of the problem.

FUD propaganda + naïveté = FUBAR

So if we're doing the right thing, what's all this "precipitate action" business? You think we souldn't speed up doing the right thing because...?

DFM; Yeah, I kinda figured from that jumble that you were all about anti-government. Just wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth.

"I merely claim that the matter is NOT PROVEN, NOT SETTLED.

Professor Curry may be right. She may be wrong. But she deserves the respect of critics and not personal attacks."

Assertion by meme and a tacit admission that you don't know how science works, the history of Curry being debunked, or what you're talking about.

RTFM before you spout off.

DFM: deserves the respect of critics

Respect must be earned. It can also be betrayed, and consequently lost.

"We need to:
1. Continue massive deployment of renewable energy sources already underway.

..."

Not if it is up to Judith Curry! To her doing nothing is just as viable a policy option, as she has stated (but no, she really is not giving any policy advice - that would be activism, and she's against that...).

#267, 270, 272,

You've requested some links, and I've provided some reflecting on Curry's credibility here:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/08/20/how-do-you-explain-judith-…

An evaluation of Ted Cruz's scientific credibility can be found here:
http://climatefeedback.org/how-much-do-the-us-presidential-candidates-k…

For more on Curry's track record, please see:
http://rabett.blogspot.dk/2014/01/curry-vs-curry.html
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/one-of-the-problems-with-judith-…
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/true-lies/
http://skepticalscience.com/curry-ohc-corrections.html
http://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/curry-for-dinner/

“What I am saying is that anthropogenic global warming is NOT PROVEN. I admit it is moderately likely, But I reject the notion that the matter is settled. Whatever else it is, it is certainly NOT settled.” #267

At this level climate science is as proven and as settled as it can be. We know that more energy is entering the atmosphere than is leaving it, and we know the radiative quality of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Other possible causes for this imbalance have been examined, and rejected.

The conclusions below are from America's and Britain's leading scientific bodies:

“Scientists know that recent climate change is largely caused by human activities from an understanding of basic physics, comparing observations with models, and fingerprinting the detailed patterns of climate change caused by different human and natural influences.”
“The observed global surface temperature rise since 1900 is consistent with detailed calculations of the impacts of the
observed increase in atmospheric CO2 (and other human-induced changes) on Earth’s energy balance.”
Climate Change: Evidence & Causes
http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/exec-office-other/climate-c…

“1. Climate scientists agree: Climate change is happening here and now. Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. This agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists, content analyses of peer-reviewed studies, and public statements issued by virtually every membership organization of experts in this field.”
WHAT WE KNOW: THE REALITY, RISKS, AND RESPONSE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
http://whatweknow.aaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/whatweknow_websit…

Your knowledge of climate models and temperature data is deficient. If you're interested in links to science-based sources, I'd be happy to provide them.

Hi all, retired civil engineer here. My question is, did anyone ever try to refute Prof. Curry"s statement that her skepticism about Global Warming conclusions was that , the very complex mixture of elemental components of the Big Conclusion, were EACH evaluated with the usual type of "confidence level " analysis, but that the FINAL mixture of them improperly hid the fact that some important ones , with very low probabilities , were lumped together with the others, which should have dragged down the "confidence level" of the Whole, but unaccountably did NOT. What about that?!

"What about that?!"

What about it? It's not true. The claim resides on an incorrect assumption, that all the factors are independent and do not cross-correlate.

The error bars in temps does not combine with the error bars in sea ice cover to produce an even less likely estimate of how climate is changing.

If you wanted to find out, go and read the actual IPCC report, not the summary for policy makers.