The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA's year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures preferred by skeptics and gathered by scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Was this data raw numbers or "adjusted" data?

This seems to be obvious that since the late 1800s temperatures have increased. You can not come up with any other conclusion. Seems kind of a biased set of data to give you a desired result.

They should have gone farther back in time to show a few warming and cooling periods at the least.

It seems to me that skeptics frequently claim that others cherry pick that data to make it seem like there is warming: for example, making comparisons with a particularly cool phase in the 1940-50s.

However, surely skeptics like Easterbrook are guilty of far more cherry picking. To find this mysterious "cooling" trend, you have to use satellite data, not ground data, and you basically have to use 1998 as your base year. If you use 1997 or 1999, no cooling trend can be found. Doesn't it just make more sense that 1998 was an outlier among a trend of continued warming (as these statisticians found)?

The earth is stable. The alarmists are not. Could we stop wasting so much of our treasure on frivolous climate research please? Let's focus on the real cancer, okay Gaia worshippers?

Pretty good article. This quote is a nice smackdown of deniers:

"To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous," said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.

As some of us know, Caldeira has been badly misrepresented by a pair of sensationalist authors in a recent book.

Clearly, any claims that the Earth is cooling is not supported by any statistical analysis. Those making this claim have their own political agenda.

The article's weaknesses:

1. One could ask why the author's focus is on a 10-year period, which has modest meaning from a climate change perspective.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/what-the-ipcc-models-really-say/

2. Any statistical decadal analysis is going to indicate warming (not just "no cooling") so the author could have gone further. While one could analyze 1999-2009 and take a look at the linear trend, such an analysis varies depending on what start year is used. Deniers always choose 1998, the 2-3 sigma super el Nino event. Starting in 1997, 1999, 2000 indicates warming, and doesn't work for them. It's better to compare the 5-year mean as the start and end points. Compare the 5-year mean surrounding 1998 with the 5-year mean surrounding 2007 (2009 est.) for example.

3. The author could also note that deep ocean heat content has a somewhat more sustained warming trend during this period.

4. The author could note that the lower troposphere satellite record has had a limited history and poor track record involving huge corrections and has the inherent difficulty of estimating global mean temperature change through brightness over time at various heights. I think he did mention that scientific research prefers the surface record (very good observation for a mainstream media writer), but didn't clarify the reason.

I admire Borenstein's relentless research and focus on the facts. Many mainstream media writers are too lazy and easily prone to being duped by the political crowd. The author here took the time to gather the facts.

Whew!! Good news, I was getting kind of worried that the Earth was cooling. Looking forward to a tropical world.

We will see if Darwin was right about evolution, I have a feeling he is.

From the article: ""To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous," said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford. ""

I quite agree you can't prove evidence of "cooling" in just a decade. But is the above sentence (found in the article itself) correct--do we really know within the required plus or minus one degree or so C the average temperature of the earth (surface?, one meter high, one kilometer high?) say in the decade 1310-1320?

And is three decades long enough to prove global warming?

the earth is going to get better over the next two years,and go back to normal.it's hard to explain but it will ,north and south poles will be fix,just got to have faith.don't worry so much,it will happen

Is this the data that comes from the USHCN network? If it is, then there is no surprise that we are seeing warming; 89% of the stations show a warming bias of 2C or more.

Of course, the data could have come from the global data set. But Phil Jones, the keeper of the data at CRU, claims to have lost the original data so we cannot tell if the reported trend is real. Without the raw data to verify the reported trend it is hard to make a definitive statistical statement about the real trend. And let us keep in mind that the 'adjustments' for the UHI effect are about twenty times too low. Dr. Jones, who provided the paper on which the IPCC based its claim of 0.05C per century has just produced a study that has the Chinese UHI effect at 1C per century. If the data is corrected to reflect this new number the warming will not be as severe.

Of course, we also have the inconvenient admission that the 1930s in the US were warmer than the 1990s. It is rough to argue for unprecedented warming when the best records (which are still horrible) show that temperatures have not risen for seven decades.

And what about the divergence between the satellite/radiosonde data and the surface record? How can we take NOAA seriously when in addition to missing the 2C bias for the majority of the network it fails to explain the divergence from the more accurate satellite record? Keep in mind that these are the same people that missed the fact that the use of the wrong month's data produced a 10C anomaly in Siberia last fall. The error was pointed out by outsiders who were more curious than the people who handled and put together the data.

Finally an accurate refutation of all the 'cherry-picking' that deniers have to use to make their claims.
"Saying there's a downward trend since 1998 is not scientifically legitimate, said David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor and one of those analyzing the numbers for the AP."

So I guess the AP is also part of the conspiracy, like they need to get money for further climate studies. All of the deniers arguments are falling apart when subjected to unbiased analysis.

Thank you Brett for informing the public of needed information.

*Skeptics-( Go to 'Watts Up with That' if you want to sing in the 'denier choir'.)

You can make statistics say anything you want. In the above diagram the years go back to 1880. At that point the earth was still coming out of the "little ice age". Of course the long term trend will be up. But go back over a 1000 years to the Mediaeval warm period and the trend will show you something much different. In fact it will show us that the earth does not have an established average temperature. It is always going up or down. A question: who caused the global warming a 1000 years ago? Can we call that the average? If so we're still way below average....

Seriously, unless we can find manmade, man collected, man observed data going back through the last ice age, then all and I mean all statistical data would be incomplete;
Period! Instead of scaring the population and trying to wrest power and control from "free" peoples and markets, we should be concentrating on "understanding how (it) "climate" works.
Scientists were so sure that iguanodon had a horn, but really it was a spike on his thumb. Why? Rush to judgement.

I have said it a million times, nature does what nature does, it does not care that we are here. Remember, we were suppose to starve, then the next ice age, then run out of oil, now global warming.
Given time nature will prove that Al Gore and his frauds were wrong. They thought that the climate had a horn. When really it was a spike.

More bogus nonsense! When did 2003 become the warmest year? What happened to the warm period in the 1930s and 40s?. As the predicted warming falis to materialize, the alarmists become desparate and resort to outright lies!
No one is burning up, islands are not being flooded by rising oceans, polar bears are not drowning. It's time to stop the nonsense!

How nice; Associated Press asks the NOAA what its station data is showing and claims no warming is happening.

But we have a big problem with the NOAA data and the credibility of its analysts. For example, an independent audit of the USHCN network showed that 89% of stations showed readings that were too high by 2C or more. The NOAA/GISS analysts missed this fact even though the bias is more than three times the warming claimed since the LIA. The global data is even worse. Not only do stations suffer from the same problem as those in the US, but there is a great deal of discontinuity, undocumented station moves, etc., that are not accounted for. There is also a huge credibility issue. Phil Jones, the keeper of the data, had denied access to outside reviewers for more than a decade before he was finally cornered and had to do something other than pretend that the data was supposed to be kept secret from everyone else. Dr. Jones recently claimed that the original data did not exist because it had been lost or destroyed. In the absence of verification, the global reported temperature is unacceptable as valid and governments will have to spend some of the money they allocated to climate change to reconstruct the data set so that it can be confirmed by someone other than Dr. Jones and his assistants.

Let us keep in mind that Dr. Jones has another problem on his hand. The temperature that he reported assumes that the effect of urbanization only biases readings by around 0.05C per century. That was based on 1980s studies done on Chinese and Russian stations that had questionable histories that did not match the continuity claims made in the 1990 paper. The problem is that Dr. Jones just wrote another paper in which he claims the UHI effect in China is around 1C per century, or twenty times the adjustment made to the global data set. If we apply the larger number to the surface data all of the warming since the 1930s disappears. This would agree with the admission made by Hansen and GISS that for the US the 1990s were the warmest decade and that 1934 was the warmest year on record.

I also note that AP had not sent the satellite data to the NOAA for statistical analysis. While there is an issue about how RSS and UAH process the data both sets agree that there has been a cooling trend since 1998 and that there isn't any statistically valid warming since 1995.

Of course, if AP had wanted to really do a proper analysis it would have done as Hansen and Ruedy proposed and checked the heat storage in the upper oceans, which is where the radiative imbalance would show up. Had that happened AP would have learned that the raw ARGO buoy system data shows cooling since 2003, when the system became operational.

Sorry Brett but instead of hyping analysis that is clearly not independent and is full of flaws you should look at the actual data and all of the issues associated with it and processing algorithms that spit out the results.

If I recall correctly you were presenting the Mann/Steig/Briffa results as being valid even though there was sufficient evidence to show that the studies used inappropriate data and had a number of simple errors that were missed by the authors and reviewers. We now know that those studies were either the work of people who were totally incompetent or committed academic fraud. We have already seen that when the data had to be presented for independent review the full data set for Polar Urals, foxtail and bristlecone pines, and Yamal proxies showed no cagtastrophic warming in the 20th century. We now have new papers that show that in specific cases that have been evaluated the growth has a higher correlation to CRF than it does to temperature. That means that the dendro support for the AGW theory no longer supports it. In fact, it falsifies it.

I suggest that you use your blog to bring attention to the data integrity issues in the global data set that are very similar to the dendro data. We know that science is about visibility and transparency. Unless the data is permitted to be evaluated by outsiders and the methods are allowed to be reviewed in detail the reported temperatures are totally meaningless because they cannot be said to be scientifically valid. If the AGW theory is valid its proponents should have nothing to fear by allowing access to the data. If it isn't we need to stop spending valuable time, energy and resources arguing about a myth.

I predict there will be much gloating here from the AGW zealots who will point to this story as proof that they have been "right all along".

Before the gloating goes too far...think about the real meaning of this article - you can come up with different results and conclusions depending on how you analyze the data. This is even true when the data being analyzed is fairly well accepted as accurate, as is the case with the satellite-measured temperature data.

This is exactly what those of us with an open mind have been saying for years while the AGW zealots were bleating "case closed". Add to it the fact that much of the data cited by the AGW crowd is not nearly as accurate to begin with, either due to faulty assumptions or flat out manipulation due to bias, and you are left with a theory that is far from proven reality.

Could one show graphs that separate the land and sea temps? You have in the past.

I find it curious that the sea temp is rising yet no one can promote a valid reason why the oceans are warming.

To me it is clear as the oceans warm so does the earth.... wonder why!

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

Of course anyone can make statistics say what ever they want by carefully choosing the data and the start and end points.

Try that same annalisys again using 1200 as the start date and you will get an alarming cooling trend.
Even worse if you start in 5500 BC.

Um, excuse me. But the propaganda put forth from the Obama Run ASSociated Press and NOAA still doesn't prove in any way shape or form that CO2 is causing any type of changes in the climate, now, does it??? Hey MarkB, enjoy it while it lasts. Cause the real SMACK DOWN will come in just a little over a year from now. Campaign 2010, Bunky. Take it too the bank....;-D... TAKE BACK AMERICA, BABY!!!! TAKE IT BACK FROM THESE WEASELS!!!!

Remember. Unless you have a melting glaicer or polar ice cap in your neighborhood, it's all back yard weather.

Love and Kisses from the center of the universe,

Knuckles. Proud member of the MOB.

P.S. I really love this CYA comment:

Using the skeptics' satellite data beginning in 1998, there is a "mild downward trend," he said. But doing that is "deceptive."

The trend disappears if the analysis starts in 1997. And it trends upward if you begin in 1999, he said to the AP.

REPLY: Oh, yeah, that's right. Deceptive. LOL...Love it when they are desperate!!!! Just Love It!!!....Hee Hee Hee....

You can get just about any trend you want depending on what data set you use and the time period you start from. Here is a good link to an article that looks at all the different data sets and the heating and cooling trends that can be deduced from them.

http://masterresource.org/?p=5240

The second graph in the article puts this all in context. you can see that the near term temperature trend is negative for all the data sets (from 2002 or so on), and it gets progressively positive the further back in time you go.

That is not much of a surprise.

Good article by statistician Bill Briggs at Wattsupwiththat.com, explaining how statistics analysis works.

It calls into question this report, as being dependent on the model preferences of the analyst.

In other news, amusing behavior from one of the top oil and coal recipients in D.C.:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102702845.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

did we even keep temperature records in 1200? lol...lets go ask the geico cavemen about 5500BC temps

A recent article in the Miami Herald outlines how Florida is reacting to the potential for much of their state being inundated by global warming induced sea level rise: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/breaking-news/story/1303293.html

Please note that hurricane storm surges (almost definite in a century time-frame) and tsunamis (much less likely) can inundate many of these areas even in the total absence of sea level rise.

I assume that when they realize that need to build shoreline protection for these areas they will come hat in hand to Congress asking for 75% funding. As a taxpayer who deliberately lives on high ground outside a floodplain, I find it infuriating that non-essential infrastructure (a port would be essential) is being built in these areas. Instead, they should be for public access and ecosystem buffer areas. If somebody wants to build there, then it should be at-risk.

We go back th the key point that sea level is not fixed at all but is actually quite variable over the millenia and it is risky to live on the edge.

MarkB:
""To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous,"

Indeed. Since the claim that this is the hottest decade in thousands of years is a clear and obvious lie.

One whould at least begin with facts and not propaganda.

Gary: "Of course anyone can make statistics say what ever they want by carefully choosing the data and the start and end points."

"Try that same analysis again using 1200 as the start date and you will get an alarming cooling trend. Even worse if you start in 5500 BC."

Worse yet Gary, you can go all the way back to the Big Bang to try to win your argument of cooling temperatures since it must have been pretty hot at the exact time when the universe exploded into existence.

However, if you go back one more time step to just before the Big Bang, going from 0.0K to the present 287K, that is one major heat wave.

But what does that type of argument of going back so far in time really prove?

Natural events of warming and cooling occur and continue to occur just like wild fires and pollution - from events like volcanoes and sequestered CO2 bursting from lakes and killing nearby civilizations. The thing is the natural timing and occurrences of wild fires, deforestation, altered landscapes, and pollution episodes (the altering the atmospheric composition of various compounds) have been altered significantly since the human population has increased exponentially over time.

Back in 5500 BC, The world's population back then was estimated to be around 12.5 million while it is approaching 6.9 billion today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

That means that in 5500 BC, there was only 0.18 percent of the population we have today. You want to use that earlier time period as a relative comparison to any potential human influences that we have presently? Is it any wonder that the natural cycles of events back in 5500 BC was likely unaffected by man? Again nobody denies that simple fact, but so what. Even back in 1800, the world's population was 978 million or about 14 percent of the current population. Based on that fact, 85.82 percent of the world's current population has occurred in the past 200 years. Yet somehow you don't think that amount of population change has a dramatic effect on the world's environment and resulting consequences?

The most dramatic impact on the timing of those previously "natural only" events has occurred within the last couple of centuries directly because of man's influences and changes to the environment. All of which in total combination having some increasing degree of influence on the timing and magnitude of the continuing sequences of those events over some future time. To simply deny that environmental changes have occurred and continue to occur over a relatively short period of time due to the direct impact increasing growth in human population and needed energy demands means you do not acknowledge or even accept factual information, whether it is in the form of statistical analysis or just pure raw data even when it hits you right in the face.

So in conclusion, natural warming and cooling events have indeed occurred in the past outside of any relatively insignificant human impact. But those naturally occurring events in the past do not negate the potential changes to those "natural events" due to the exponential increase in human population and pollution resulting from the energy supply necessary for the ever increasing population demands no matter how much you want to ignore raw statistical analyses that proves how much your "global cooling" arguments are invalid or without factual basis.

serious questions

What methods, instraments etc. were used to measure tempurature from 1880 to 1940, and then 1940 to 1970, from 1970 until now. Any change in the methods or instraments. Could this be part of the reason for the large differnce in temps?

UK Met Office backpedals on Arctic Ice – “…unlikely that the Arctic will experience ice-free summers by 2020.”

But they do say that “first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080″. By then there will be nobody that remembers this forecast.

Yet on the same day, bumbling Arctic explorer Pen Hadow says in a
UK Telegraph interview:

“To all intents and purposes the Arctic will be ice free in a decade. I do find the implications of this happening in my lifetime quite shocking.“.

Gosh, who to believe? Somebody that fakes biotelemetry data or somebody that won’t hand over climate data for replication studies?

http://wattsupwiththat.com

If you try the same analysis from 1200 you can only get an alarming cooling trend if you omit the last 50 or so years, which is a trick that some climate 'skeptics' have stooped to in an attempt to make the current warming trend go away.

Generally the Milkanvitch cycles should have been causing a cooling trend from roughly 10,000 years ago that should if anything be steepening this century.

Instead man made global warming has overwhelmed this natural climate cycle strong enough to cause ice ages. It is rather academic whether you believe the 'team hockey stick' version with a cooling trend weak enough that you have to go back several thousand years to get similar temperatures, or the 'skeptic approved Loehle' version which says we only have to go back roughly 800 years to get similar temperatures.

A strawman argument in 3 easy steps:

1. Set up the strawman that anyone who does not believe in ANTHROPOGENIC global warming must be claiming that the earth is cooling.

2. Show that the earth is warming over some suitably chosen period (ignore that it has been warming since the end of the last ice age).

3. Use the false logic of "AGW sceptics don't believe the earth is warming. But it IS warming (or at least is not cooling to a statistically significant degree), so therefore the AGW sceptics must be wrong and humans are therefore proven to be causing global warming.

Do I need to point out the logical fallacy?

To MarkB, "Hottest decade ... in many thousands of years." How on earth do you know that?

"MarkB:
Pretty good article. This quote is a nice smackdown of deniers:

"To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous," said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.

So would it be ok to extropolate this and say at this rate we should see a 1.5C incease in global temperatures in 100 years?

The real driver here is the Sun (wow, what a concept).

Solar activity from 1950 to 2000 was very high compared to the last 200 years.

Now, activity is very much reduced by all measures since 1998. The earth will continue to cool as this activity remains low. It is inevitable.

BTW, Solar Irradiance is NOT the same as Solar Activity, so please do not get them confused as so many AGW proponents do.

Thanks!

When temperatures ever rise to Hansen's "Scenario C" prediction from 1987, which is "massive reduction in CO2 case", notify me. In the meantime I have to prepare for this massive October snow storm. Ocean heat content is falling, and satellite data shows a drop in temperatures. Meanwhile we are learning that the climatologists aren't real scientists, they won't produce their data, so their results can't be reproduced (scientific method? What's that?), and when it gets leaked out, we discover huge fraud. This should be a joke, except this "science" is going to cost us trillions.

"Minor" criticisms here...

(1)They avoided the satellite data BECAUSE it showed cooling

(2)They had to have a statistician look at the data to determine if it was warming or cooling

(3)I assume this means that AGW alarmists will stop talking about "accelerating" warming and about warming amounts that have never been seen when much lower amounts apparently can't even be sustained in the climate. About .2C/decade appears to have been the highest but unsustained amount of warming and .5C per century is the actual long term trend. Obviously any talk of 4C per century represents an extraordinary claim and would need ACTUAL evidence (like of it warming, for a start)

Rich: Not all Gaia worshippers are alarmists who are terrified that the climate is changing, thank you very much. How about we do as you suggest though, and work on the real cancer, lack of respect for other people's beliefs and way of life?

Re: the article as a whole

Why is it that pieces of very relevant data keep getting missed or left out?

Why have I yet to see a report on the current warming or cooling trends which ALSO reports on the estimated length of the trend we have been in for some time?

Why has no one considered, in all the frenzy about carbon emissions, the amounts of heat being put out by things like streetlights, friction of tires on roads, and the heat of the human body?

This seems like such a complex thing the way it is presented, but it really isn't. If you put 10 people in a large ballroom, the temperature isn't likely to change and if the room is chilly, the people will feel that. If you put so many people in that room that there's just enough room to dance, the people in the room will feel warmer. Likewise, if you light one lamp in a room, it's not likely to impact the temperature. If you lite up five rows of lights with 100 watt bulbs, it's going to warm right up! We are doing things to generate HEAT. Not carbon, but pure heat. Tires run on the road. One car passes and the road cools. Cars pass around the clock, and the road gets very warm. All this heat has to go somewhere.

I can't possibly be the first person to realize these pieces of data are missing.

I also can't be the only person who recalls that research has shown that the Sahara was once a lush jungle, along with Alaska and Texas and other regions in the US, or that there weren't always polar ice caps. Nor can I be the only person who recalls that we have a national park with a glacier in it because these massive sheets of ice formed and dropped from the north and covered nearly half the planet. The climate changes, and humans didn't make it happen before and we're not making it happen now.

What we better be doing though is figuring out which direction it's going and how we'll survive if our country turns back into a jungle, or if it follows the path of the Sahara.

serious questions

What methods, instraments etc. were used to measure tempurature from 1880 to 1940, and then 1940 to 1970, from 1970 until now. Any change in the methods or instraments. Could this be part of the reason for the large differnce in temps?

It has become very obvious land based temperature is heavily skewed towards urban settings as illustrated in the Anthony Watts survey of US met stations, so I would not expect to see any statistical data from ground stations showing cooling.
Since the mid 19th century there is no doubt that the albedo of the land surface has changed with massive forest clearance, changing lamd use along with a huge growth in urbanisation.Im not of the all or nothing school.
However I Still feel the most influential part of the warming process has been solar activity.
Not only was it the most active period of the millennium, during the second half of the 20th century.It was actually the most active for 8000 years.
Compare us now to the medieval warm period.Radiocarbon dating box cores in the Sargasso sea indicate sea temperatures 1c higher than at present.The citrus belt in China moved 1000 miles northwards.Birch trees and willow grew in Southern Greenland and there were numerous vineyards in Southern England.Solar activity was close to 20th century levels.
I'm just watching data carefully to see the trends in the coming years to get a clear idea of exactly where we are headed for.

Dennis Hlinka:
You ask:
"But what does that type of argument of going back so far in time really prove?"

It proves Exactly the same thing as going back to 1880. Nothing!

That was the point.
Thank you for making it even clearer.

Dennis:
"that proves how much your "global cooling" arguments are invalid or without factual basis."

You make some good points. They work equally well for AGW and Realist.

However to be really clear. "I" have never made any claims about cooling other that saying the planet has cooled in recent years.

Is it the beginning of a 30 year cooling?
Probably.
Does it prove or disprove AGW or NGW?
No.

The two cooling trends of the twentieth century didn't either. Nor did the two small warming trends.

Bottom line?

Nobody knows! Its all just theories and speculation taken up by groups with agendas to gain money or power.

Michael H:
"Instead man made global warming has overwhelmed this natural climate cycle "

That is quite a bold statement with virtually Nothing to support it.

Pure speculation.

I wonder what you will be writing in a few years when the "man made warming" has been completely reversed by natural cooling.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli

"I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live." - Louis D. Brandeis

"Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." -Aaron Levenstein

This is akin to the recent controversy with PriceCooper Waterhouse doing an analysis of costs associated with health care reform.

The earth now is in a ballenced state of climate. However I do believe the earth will start to cool, and rapidly at that. That is if the sun dosent wake up soon. The majority of the warming we have experienced in the past century was due to our climate warming up out of the little ice age, not co2. By my calculations of c02 comcentration, we would have to raise the amount of co2 in the atmosphere by more than 3 times its curren concentration before the Earth would see any warming from co2. And since we have a way to go befor we hit that concentration, and the sun is vertualy dead, we will(at least I think we will)experience rapid coolng not so different from that of the little ice age. It will get colder, just watch.

Bill writes:

""Hottest decade ... in many thousands of years." How on earth do you know that? "

This is indicated by all valid multi-proxy studies.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2008/mann2008.html

Martin Terrell writes:

"land based temperature is heavily skewed towards urban settings as illustrated in the Anthony Watts survey of US met stations"

Unfortunately, the Watts political project doesn't have any scientific basis. Most objective observers know this by now.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/response-v2.pdf

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-man-is-an-urban-heat-island/

In other news, amusing behavior from one of the top oil and coal recipients in D.C.:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102702845.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

REPLY: LOL!!!! Amazing how our Tree Hugging Enviro Zealot friends continue to console each other with rhetoric from writers who were formerly employed by the likes of the NEW REPUBLIC!!!! SMACK DOWN PART TWO, MarkyB!!!! Nice try!

MarkB.
That is an interesting article in the WaPost:
Even very conservative Republican Senators are smacking down famous denier-in-chief James Inhofe:

Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). "If fire chiefs of the same reputation told me my house was about to burn down, I'd buy some fire insurance."

An oil-state senator, David Vitter (R-La), said that he, too, wants to "get us beyond high-carbon fuels" and "focus on conservation, nuclear, natural gas and new technologies like electric cars."

And an industrial-state senator, George Voinovich (R-Ohio), acknowledged that climate change "is a serious and complex issue that deserves our full attention."

The end is near for the climate obstructionists. Maybe now we can start competing with countries who understand something about the 21st century economy.

From:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102702845.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the first witness, turned up the temperature further on Inhofe. He gave a Gore-like tour of climate catastrophe: "the science is screaming at us to take action . . . pine beetles have destroyed 6.5 million acres of forestland . . . 180 Alaskan villages are losing permafrost . . . we have columns of methane rising now in the ocean."

Mountain pine beetles inhabit pines, particularly the Ponderosa Pine, Lodgepole Pine, Whitebark Pine, Scots Pine and Limber Pine. The bristlecone pines and pinyon pines are less commonly attacked. During early stages of an outbreak, attacks are limited largely to trees under stress from injury, poor site conditions, fire damage, overcrowding, root disease or old age. As beetle populations increase, the beetles attack the largest trees in the outbreak area.

Pine beetles have destroyed millions of acres of pine trees in CO and the west because of man, his hubris and his inability to let nature manage the forest itself.

AGW has nothing to do with the fact that fire suppression is causing the beetle outbreak.

I'll dig out the quote from the 1950s Dept of Ag book on forestry for some interesting qoutes.

@Michael haubere:

"Generally the Milkanvitch cycles should have been causing a cooling trend from roughly 10,000 years ago that should if anything be steepening this century."

HUH??

10,000 years ago the massive continental glaciation was just coming to an end with the melting process nearing completion (with a few hiccups like the Younger Dryas). The planet was in the middle of a global warming process that makes what the AGW folks are claiming to be occuring a minor event. By about 5,000 to 8,000 years ago the temperatures and sea levels had rebounded back to close to the levels that we consider to be normal today. At about that time agriculture and civilization began.

Basically, you are claiming that the last glaciation should have begun to re-expand so that we would not have had the current interglacial period and the reason that we have this interglacial period is because of AGW that started even before we had agriculture.

I think you have a minority opinion among both AGW propnents and skeptics.

K. Langlois said: {" ")

"Solar activity from 1950 to 2000 was very high compared to the last 200 years."

Solar activity has been stable and possibly slightly declining in that period, yet temps have been steadily increasing. Sunspot cycles have been getting less intense in the last 30 years or so, and solar irradiance has not been going up.

"Now, activity is very much reduced by all measures since 1998. The earth will continue to cool as this activity remains low. It is inevitable."

And yet, the last ten years have been the warmest on record, quite easily too. The Solar sunspot cycle has had such a weak effect on temps that it's very difficult to even find it in the data, let alone try to use it to explain the warming trend. Since the cycles have not been getting stronger but have actually been slightly less intense, it's unfathomable for deniers to use it as an argument against AGW.

"BTW, Solar Irradiance is NOT the same as Solar Activity, so please do not get them confused as so many AGW proponents do."

Great, but neither is increasing in the last half century, while temps clearly and steadily have been.

El says,

Not all Gaia worshippers are alarmists who are terrified that the climate is changing

And then proceeds to say...

we better be figuring out how we'll survive

Survive what exactly? That sounds kind of alarming!!!

All this heat has to go somewhere.

Yeah, up. Heat always rises. By the way, your warming factors are known as UHI (urban heat island).

How about we work on the real cancer, lack of respect for other people's beliefs and way of life?

Not the cancer I was thinking of, but okay. Let's start with the terrorists who behead and purposely bomb innocent civilians. We'll go from there. Sound good?

nathaniel tabor | October 29, 2009 11:35 AM --- Not at all and the climate is far from equilibrium. Try this quote.

Jim Galasyn:
Fundamentally, climate science is based on well-understood principles of thermodynamics. Before humans burned the sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) and released CO2, Earth was in radiative near-equilibrium with space. Humans introduced a sudden, 500-gigaton excursion in the global carbon budget. Because CO2 is a "heat-trapping gas", Earth is now in disequilibrium with space. To return to equilibrium, the atmosphere must warm.
The rest is details. Interesting details, to be sure, but the basic thermodynamics have been understood since Svante Arrhenius published in 1896.

I remember back in the 60's, Christmas day in Maryland. It was 75 degrees. We were playing outside with our Christmas toys. My dad took photos.
The next year we had three gigantic blizzards, missed two weeks of school

This global warming climate change whatever is really a bunch of baloney. We have better things to spend money on.
The lefties are out of control

Gary:

'That is quite a bold statement with virtually Nothing to support it.

Pure speculation.

I wonder what you will be writing in a few years when the "man made warming" has been completely reversed by natural cooling.'

My statement is supported by the fact that ALL proxy studies over >500 years, including the one that climate skpetics approve of show a cooling trend, and that ALL recent temperature measurements, including the satellite measurements that skeptics say should be used instead of thermometers show the same warming trends.

Your accuse me of baseless speculation, yet it is your claims that man made warming (about 0.5 degrees at least) will be overwhelmed by natural cycles in the next few years (perhaps a maunder minimum and heavy volcanic activity over several decades caused about 0.5 degrees cooling in LIA).

For those who think that using the thermometer measurements make any difference, the satellite trends show exactly the same trend as the thermometer series since 1992. For trends that cover 1992 (eg 1980 to 2009), RSS shows the same as GISS/HADCRUT, and UAH is 20% lower. Satellite instruments changed in 1992, and RSS and UAH differ in the adjustment applied to take this change into account.

In 5 years I'm sure we'll be hearing plenty of claims from climate 'skeptics' that global warming stopped after the 2010 El Nino.

MarkB (could be my son).

Interesting. Thanks. But

a) only northern hemisphere so he is wrong about his own facts.
b) proxy data--how many tree rings do they use?
c)no error range--I'd think 1 degree C is easily within any year, let along any 100-year, error range.
d)looks like a lot of different series but I expect they all work off of common data.

A check would be to use the same proxy method for 2008 as they did for 1008. Do you know if anyone has tried that? How can you really have confidence comparing modern satellite data with whatever they come up for proxies of 1000 years ago?

MarkB:

Bill writes:

""Hottest decade ... in many thousands of years." How on earth do you know that? "

This is indicated by all valid multi-proxy studies.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2008/mann2008.html

Posted by MarkB | October 29, 2009 12:33 PM

George Voinovich (R-Ohio),
David Vitter (R-La),
Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

"RINOs soon to be VOTED OUT as part of the Election Smackdown 2010!"Mark it down, G-Warm. We obstructionists are NOT GOING AWAY ANY TIME SOON, Baby!!! Know it! Because the real obstructionists (You haters of Captitalism) and your agenda will be the ones who feel the wrath of the American voter. Like I said. KNOW IT, BUNKY! By the by. You still didn't answer my question from before. How was the sailing, last summer? Did President Superman keep the sea levels from rising on you????...LOL!!!!

Remember. Unless you have a melting glaicer or polar ice cap in your neighborhood, it's all back yard weather.

Love and Kisses from the center of the universe,

Knuckles. Proud member of the MOB.

NO TO CAP AND TRADE!!! NO TO COPENHAGEN TREATIES (UNLESS THEY INVOLVE CHEESE, AND BEER), NO TO GOVERNMENT CONTROL OF YOU HEALTH INSURANCE...NO NO NO NO, SENATORS, CONGRESSMEN, MR. PRES-I-DENT!!! OR YOU ARE FIRED!!!! F-I-R-E-D, FIRED!!!!!!!

Getting Warm writes:
Even very conservative Republican Senators are smacking down famous denier-in-chief James Inhofe:

Warmboy.

The "conservatives' of which you speak. Lindsay Graham. John McCain Are rinos (republican in name only) They are not traditional conservatives. They see the AGW farce as a political tool. Inhofe is the only Idealogue with whom I agree completely

Mark B

You state, "This is indicated by all valid multi-proxy studies," and then supply a link to a hockey-stick graph dating from 2006.

In case you haven't noticed, the year is now nearly 2010.

I, and others, have informed you on numerous occasions that the hockey-stick graphs have been proven to be invalid. Mann's original data, Mann's "new and improved data," and Briffa's Yamal tree-ring proxies have all be gone over in great detail, and have been shown to be not merely inadequate, but erroneous.

Your loyalty to the hockey-stick is a bit like the loyalty of a good-hearted, trusting Enron employee, I fear. Loyalty is an admirable trait, but at times it can hurt you.

I hope your eyes can be opened. What you need to do is to stop deriding sites such as "Climate Audit" and "Watts Up With That," and instead actually visit such sites. Don't go there just to sneer and swiftly depart, either. Go there to look at the data they have managed to obtain from Climate Scientists who are unwilling to release data.

If you do this you can get to know individual trees Briffa used. You gain a hands-on experience of the sort of data Climate Scientists are using, adjusting, tweaking, and massaging, in order to create the hockey-stick.

This sort of hands-on experience is completely different from the vague and theoretical explanations you get at sites such as Real Climate.

You can even get news of the next hockey-stick "proof," even before it is published, and check out the data it is built upon, which often is data which was discredited in earlier studies, being recycled yet again. (For example, the Tingley and Huybers hockey-stick hasn't yet faced the light of day, and already its dependence on Mann and Briffa proxies is known.)

Unless and until you can debate about the actual trees, the actual data-sets, the actual studies, all your talk is just the rhetoric of a politician; someone who talks knowingly of things he does not know.

MarkB | October 29, 2009 12:33 PM

"This is indicated by all valid multi-proxy studies."

And here is how those proxy studies are holding up to actual measurements.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/30/yamal-treering-proxy-temperature-reconstructions-dont-match-local-thermometer-records/#comments

in which Lucy Skywalker concludes:

"Warmist" treering proxy temperature evidence is falsified directly by local thermometer records."

Does this information make any impact on your modality... at all?? Does it not make you at least somewhat nervous, that you may be misleading? When you say valid... shouldn't it include some validity?? GK

David B. Benson:
nathaniel tabor | October 29, 2009 11:35 AM --- Not at all and the climate is far from equilibrium. Try this quote.

Jim Galasyn:
Fundamentally, climate science is based on well-understood principles of thermodynamics. Before humans burned the sequestered carbon (fossil fuels) and released CO2, Earth was in radiative near-equilibrium with space. Humans introduced a sudden, 500-gigaton excursion in the global carbon budget. Because CO2 is a "heat-trapping gas", Earth is now in disequilibrium with space. To return to equilibrium, the atmosphere must warm.
The rest is details. Interesting details, to be sure, but the basic thermodynamics have been understood since Svante Arrhenius published in 1896.

Posted by David B. Benson | October 29, 2009 7:56 PM

Geez I just don't where to start.

The more I read about global warming the more I understand that the thermodynamics part of is either not understood or the basic thermodynamic principals are incorrectly used.

Perhaps "Box of Rocks" and the commenter formerly known as Steve-the-something-or-other will co-author a textbook titled "Thermodynamics for Denialiers."

I'm not surprised that Box doesn't know where to start -- all the usual starting points end up reinforcing the results he so fervently rejects.

For example, he might start with the "ultraviolet catastrophe", proceed to Planck's law, and --- WHOOPS -- he validates Arrhenius.

I certainly encourage Box to share his new textbook here. I'd love to see his idea of how to "correctly" use "basic thermodynamic principals (sic)."

Bill writes:

"a) only northern hemisphere so he is wrong about his own facts. "

Actually the study I posted covers the southern hemisphere as well, which is fairly new as far as multi-proxy studies go. Data Description: "2,000 Year Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Reconstructions". You'll have to read the full study for details on the southern hemisphere.

"b) proxy data--how many tree rings do they use? "

Note first: "Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used." Regarding the number of proxies used, see the full study:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.full.pdf+html

"c)no error range--I'd think 1 degree C is easily within any year, let along any 100-year, error range."

The shaded area on the graph indicates the error range. Uncertainty bounds are much lower than earlier reconstructions.

----------

Caleb writes:

"In case you haven't noticed, the year is now nearly 2010."

Yep. Recall that the earlier multi-proxy reconstructions held the conclusion that the 1990's are likely the warmest decade in at least 1000 years and likely more. The recent decade will be nearly 0.2 C above the previous one. This fact, and the lowering of uncertainty bounds in recent more comprehensive studies, strengthens this conclusion.

"I, and others, have informed you on numerous occasions that the hockey-stick graphs have been proven to be invalid. "

A band of contrarian loyalists (who don't care to understand the science) uncritically accepting and repeating these claims doesn't make them true.

"Your loyalty to the hockey-stick is a bit like the loyalty of a good-hearted, trusting Enron employee, I fear."

Your loyalty to McIntyre, a dubious blogger and former mining executive with a clear agenda, is a bit disconcerting. What I encourage you to do is subscribe to scientific journals and spend some time reading peer-reviewed climate-related studies, rather than uncritically parroting blogospheric material that supports pre-conceived notions. You will get a much more objective view this way, although with a bit more effort required.

"This sort of hands-on experience is completely different from the vague and theoretical explanations you get at sites such as Real Climate."

The peer-reviewed science (covered reliably by RC), doesn't quite deliver the sensationalist soapbox conspiratorial material contrarians eagerly eat up.

---------

G. Karst,

Why is Anthony Watts and his cult suddenly finding a single anomalous surface station measurement reliable? Could it be because it helps support their political agenda?

Wow.... Are we still on this hockey stick thing? You guys act as though thats the key point that proves AGW is real. "If we could just tear down that hockey stick then their whole plan will fall to pieces.. Mua ha ha ha.. Ahhhh ha ha ha.."

"Let's start with the terrorists who behead and purposely bomb innocent civilians. We'll go from there. Sound good?"

No, this isn't a terrorism blog.

Did I also see something about "I believe in our founding fathers" on another one of your posts in a different thread?

This isn't a forum about American History either.

What does this have to do with the science or lack thereof on AGW. I believe in our founding fathers, water, gravity, and yeast.

Also: "The earth is stable"

Well at least you got this one right. Your cohorts might not be happy with this argument though. Any of the anti-AGW want to chime in on this one since its the basis for most of your argument? You wouldn't want Rich taking all your best points and throwing them out the window would your?

Variability, both accounted and unaccounted, is the strongest argument against AGW. Wow I can't believe you have me doing all the work for you! You are GOOD!

Ryan,

This isn't... about American history

It's not? Are you saying that American records (history) plays no role in this debate?

Are you the moderator of this blog? I assure you that I have been posting here before you.

Let me give you an idea. If you don't want off topic stuff to continue, then don't respond to them.

Here's hoping that you have a wonderfully warm and sunny day :)