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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

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Comments 57001 to 57050:

  1. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Al Rodger, Dorset, UK.
  2. Roy's Risky Regression
    Said Nobel laureate wouldn't happen to have been involved with superconductors perchance?
  3. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    "The authors, however, believed that dealing with reviewers #1 & #2 was a waste of time, and decided to submit elsewhere." (alexharv074, #2) As a young engineer I learned that review comments indicate that you need to revise your content. It is very likely that other readers will have the same reactions to your writing. (An early mentor said, "If it can be misunderstood, it will be misunderstood," in encouraging me to address disagreeable comments.) After reading the four reviewers' comments, I see no reason why they should not be addressed. Also, I do not see how reviewers #3 and #4 were any more agreeable than the first two. Even if the authors lost confidence in getting the paper into PNAS, it would be unthinkable to ignore the review comments and turn the same text over to another journal, whether more or less prestigious. And that is beyond the point made by each of the four reviewers that the LC09 critiques were barely addressed.
  4. Roy's Risky Regression
    Alexandre @2 - coincidentally, we do have a post on the works addressing, among other claims, the suggestion that CO2 isn't a significant contributor to global warming because it's not visible. Made by a Nobel Laureate no less. Similar to Dikran's comments @8, the Laureate felt that criticisms of his comments stemmed from a politization of science, rather than the fact that his arguments were just plain ignorant and deserved every bit of criticism they received. Climate contrarians like questioning science - just not the scientific arguments they put forth!
  5. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Steve Jenkins, UK There are many of us in the Transition movement who already feel you are doing heroic work. We are deeply thankful for the work or you and your colleagues.
  6. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Stephan Jansen USA The emails you have received show amazing hatred based on shear ignorance. Keep up the good work.
  7. Dikran Marsupial at 00:23 AM on 7 July 2012
    Roy's Risky Regression
    Cheers Srephen, sadly Salby and Spencer give a couple of good examples of what is wrong with the climate debate: Dr Spencer writes: "And just how strenuous and vehement the resulting objections are to what I have presented above will be a good indication of how politicized the science of global warming has become." Note the lack any suggestion that Dr Spencer may be simply mistaken (no big deal, it happens to us all evey now and again), and that any objections are politically motivated. Regarding the science being settled, Prof. Salby says (at about the 31 minute mark in his Sydney Institute talk) "Science is dynamic, it is predicated on discourse; questioning, that is how we get to the truth. If not for discourse we would still be in the dark ages. Excluding discourse from the equation isn't science, it is advocacy" Rather ironic then, that there have been no replies to my emails questioning the science presented in Prof. Salby's Sydney Institute talk. I fully agree with Prof. Salby that questioning and discourse are vital to progress in science.
  8. Stephen Baines at 00:06 AM on 7 July 2012
    Roy's Risky Regression
    Oh bother...You all know what what I mean, right? Anyway, DM, excellent post. These kinds of mistakes are pretty elementary, but also pretty common. Still, you'd think someone would have mentioned these problems to Spencer and Salby and that they would have listened or corrected themselves after the fact. I'd like an explanation there.
  9. Stephen Baines at 23:41 PM on 6 July 2012
    Roy's Risky Regression
    I meant that a natural Co2 source was responsible for the recent increase. The stable isotope and mas balance arguments are particularly compelling because they reinforce each other.
  10. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    Ah - don't trust early morning results (I should know better). Here's the 60-month moving average comparison of nearest neighbour (HAD4ext) and splines (HAD4s) with BEST. They are almost indistinguishable after 1960 - the trend difference since 2002 is a slight lowering about that date in HAD4s. BESTgiss2 shows a bigger uptick and short term trend because it is lower around 2002. (It would be very interesting to get to the bottom of that.) However the interesting thing is the difference before 1958. The spline version looks more like GISTEMP, eliminating the difference caused by the SST corrections. I'm guessing the change is coincident with the introduction of the Antartic stations. However why this should counteract the SST correction (except by coincidence) is baffling.
  11. Stephen Baines at 23:39 PM on 6 July 2012
    Roy's Risky Regression
    Actually, the isotopes are just as damning to the idea that there is a natural CO2 source. Suess documented the decline in atmospheric C-14 back in the 50s, which indicated introduction of old or fossil carbon (>10,000 years). The source of this old carbon could have been due to plants or volcanoes. The later observation that C13 of atmospheric CO2 was changing as well indicated that plant material was contributing to the increase. So we know that the increase is in part due to fossil plant carbon.
  12. Dikran Marsupial at 23:32 PM on 6 July 2012
    Roy's Risky Regression
    @tristan cheers! @Alexandre Note Dr Spencer published his blog article some time ago and I suspect he has since understood his error as he has not mentioned it since, as far as I can tell. @ScepticalWombat I think is is more likely that Salby is simply unaware of the mass balance argument, as he he explicitly states in his Sydney Institute talk that the required observations are reliable and he gives the fundamental equation on one of his slides and explains how it is net emissions that matter at great length. He just hasn't seen the obvious conclusion that you get when you combine the observations and the equation. I suspect the same was true for Dr Spencer, he even included this plot for me it is obvious from that diagram that the natural environment is opposing the rise in atmospheric CO2; but apparently it doesn't seem so obvious to everbody!
  13. Sceptical Wombat at 22:53 PM on 6 July 2012
    Roy's Risky Regression
    Alexandre The isotopic signature of the carbon provides good evidence that volcanoes are not responsible, but, as I understand it, the same isotopic ratio could be expected if the CO2 came from net emissions from, for instance, plants. Salby puts a lot of emphasis on the isotopic bit, which I see as a technique to distract attention from the much more formidable mass balance considerations.
  14. Roy's Risky Regression
    Gosh, they literally try to deny anything they get their hands on. I wonder if someone out there doesn't deny the existence of CO2 - we can't even see it! How does Spencer explain the isotope signature of the atmospheric Carbon? Our emissions are more than double the amount that stays in the atmosphere annually. Does he have an explanation for the secret hole where all this anthropogenic Carbon gets hidden every year?
  15. Ocean heat flux and the Arctic
    'Melting big time' is right. The PIOMAS figures for June are out and show a new record low anomaly. The downward spike each of the past three years is interesting. Seems to coincide with the run-up to the solstice and then 'recover' somewhat to less extreme anomalies by the end of the melt season. Odd to see the same 'pattern' three years in a row when it was never so pronounced previously. I had thought that Maslowski's estimate was based primarily on just a projection of the volume trend with the heat flux as the most likely explanation for the difference between observations and the models. The quotation above seems to suggest that his team has actually developed a "high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice forced with realistic atmospheric data" showing the 2016 +/- 3 result. Either way, the projections for Arctic sea ice to continue holding out for decades seem increasingly untenable. The only way that happens is if the declining volume trend stops dead in its tracks in the next few years... but, if anything, it seems to be accelerating.
  16. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    Kevin Thanks for the generous offer. Unfortunately I'm still a ways from having the requisite expertise to do anything fun with it. I need to hit the books (again).
  17. Roy's Risky Regression
    Excellent post
  18. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    Thanks. If you're interested, I can make python code available for all of this. It should be fairly easy to get most of it running on Linux/Mac. For windows you'd need to change a few command scripts to Windows command language. The one really painful part is extracting and regridding GISTEMP, which needs a fortran compiler.
  19. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    Kevin Your posts inspire me to learn more numerical techniques so I can try to do some of the things you do, thanks for making me want to reach further.
  20. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    OK, here's an even more tentative early-morning result. In the final graph, BESTgiss2 shows an much bigger uptick around 2007 (but is a 60 month smooth, so must come from 2009/2010) than any of the other records. My new HAD4spline shows the same uptick. So it looks as though temperatures in 2009/2010 may be significantly affected by the smoothing bias, and both Kriging and polyharmonic splines are in agreement over this. While the difference in trend on 1996-2010 is only 0.005C/decade, the difference on 2002-2010 is 0.02C/decade.
  21. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    Agreed. Also, the SST bias, if right, has been building steadily over a longer period. While it would bring the instrumental record over the last few decades into very good agreement with the CMIP3 results, it wouldn't produce an acceleration of warming over the last couple of decades. One other update: I've now implemented polyharmonic spline interpolation to fill in the missing regions, which allows a crude estimate of the smoothing bias in GISTEMP and the *giss and *ext methods. This is very preliminary, but my current best guess is that the smoothing bias exists but is small - about 0.005C/decade for 1996-2011. So my best guessed are ~0.18C/decade without the SST corrections, or 0.21C/decade with. Polyharmonic spline interpolation takes about 2hrs for 60 years of data (compared to ~20s for nearest neighbour). Kriging would be better but slower still. The next step is to test the skill of the various reconstructions by omitting known regions.
  22. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    Paul: As best we can tell, the underlying temperature trend has remained roughly constant over the past three decades. The recent short-term sea level rise is mostly the result of all the water that was dumped over South America, Pakistan and Aus during the 2009-11 period making its way back to the ocean.
  23. The GLOBAL global warming signal
    Question: So is the rate of GW increasing significantly now? Must be as sea level rise is accelerating by quite a bit, but there must be a lage. So what warming years are responsible for the increase in slr rate happening now? Is it a 2 5 or 10yr lag?
  24. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Nick Rouse, UK
  25. Review of new iBook: Going to Extremes
    Michael, you might want to check out caliber to see if it can help. It can connect to itunes and has extensive conversion facilities (some built-in, some via plugins).
  26. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Per Wikman-Svahn, Sweden.
  27. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Paul Wigton, Colorado
  28. Jeffrey Davis at 06:02 AM on 6 July 2012
    Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    Clouds as a forcing? It's like saying that automobile airbags are a cause of collisions.
  29. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    I suspect, however (just my opinion here), that cloud forcing is attractive to skeptics because such analysis, while flawed, leads to low sensitivity values they find attractive - a confirmation bias temptation.
    There are other implications to this. It would mean that the climate has not only a low sensitivity to CO2, but a lower sensitivity to human activities that could raise the temperature generally. If it's the clouds that are the forcing (instead of a feedback) and they drive warming, then there's no way to stop it through regulation or disruptive energy technologies. Furthermore, the reflective properties of aerosol emissions would work to counteract hypothetical cloud-driven warming, so regulating industries that send aerosols up smoke stacks would have a stronger argument against it.
  30. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Phil Clarke, UK No scientist should have to endure what you've been through. Your fortitude is an inspiration, your science speaks loudly for itself and for that we all owe you a huge debt of gratitude.
  31. Murry Salby's Correlation Conundrum
    I guess it would be a study in behavioral economics where we might say that this convoluted conjecture in science is far easier to wrangle than ramifications of human caused climate change. This is because fore-shortened survival scenarios, and violent weather/wild fire events appear increasingly more often in a changing climate that stupidly, we have refused to mitigate. So any convoluted, twisted and wrong theories of climate is going to be easier to ponder and invent than considering our painful demise, reviewing shameful blunders, noting the deliberate deceits, and standing up to blatant marketing PR manipulations in support of rapacious carbon capitalism. It is not very wise, but it may just be easier for some people to contort, ignore and deny. Thank you so much for not allowing it to fester.
  32. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Dr. Jones, someday the world will recognize the heroism of climate scientists such as yourself, sounding the alarm and retaining your intellectual and personal integrity in the face such scurrilous attacks. You may be certain that I, many years your senior, count you as a personal hero. Ron Taylor
  33. Dale_Husband at 04:14 AM on 6 July 2012
    Sea level is not rising
    My own blog entry on this matter
    Moderator Response: TC: The comments policy states that:

    "Any link or picture should be accompanied by text summarizing both the content of the link or picture, and showing how it is relevant to the topic of discussion."

    Your post does not meet these conditions. Future posts consisting of a link only and inadequately explaining the content and relevance of the link may be summarily deleted (which is a lot less work for the moderators).

    For the record, the linked post is an extensive discussion of the noted contrarian Niels Axel-Morner's obfustications of the rise in sea level.
  34. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    May I also note that Alex's "still no peer-reviewed response" is in many ways problematic, as LC11, as noted on numerous occasions, does not address many issues already raised for LC09. That is, LC11 was in essence already rebutted by the various studies criticizing LC09!
  35. Arctic sea ice loss is matched by Antarctic sea ice gain
    "Arctic sea ice loss is three times greater than Antarctic sea ice gain." === That should be "three times as much as". It's different for the same reason that 50% more is different from 50% as much.
  36. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    alexharv074 - Tom Curtis and KR have already said everything I would have said in response to your comments. Everything in the above post is supported by documentation, be it the PNAS letter or the papers being referenced. Your contradictory comments thus far have been wholly unsubstantiated. In short, if you think something in the post is wrong and should be corrected, provide the documentation to support your position. If you are correct, I will amend the post accordingly, but thus far your criticisms are all direclty contradicted by the source documentation linked in the post.
  37. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    alexharv074 - "He (Dessler) asserts, for instance, that Lindzen and Choi's paper claims that "clouds cause climate change". In fact, their paper says nothing about clouds or the cause at all." (emphasis added) A minor point here: LC11 lists a total of five keywords after the abstract: "Climate sensitivity, climate feedback, cloud, radiation, satellite" (emphasis added). I'm not impressed with your understanding of the paper you are supporting...
  38. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    alexharv074 - "He (Dessler) asserts, for instance, that Lindzen and Choi's paper claims that "clouds cause climate change". In fact, their paper says nothing about clouds or the cause at all." It really appears that you have not read LC11 - the word "clouds" one of the most common nouns in the paper. The sensitivities LC11 derive are with temperatures and radiation lagging cloud changes by several months (1 month for short wave radiation, 3 months for outgoing LWR, IIRC), which is a temporal causal statement (causes do not lag effects!), and they state in section 5:
    Based on our simple model (...), this ambiguity results mainly from nonfeedback internal radiative (cloud-induced) change that changes SST.
    (Emphasis added) They do acknowledge in LC11 that in LC09 they had erroneously used the same causal reversal, with clouds leading temperature changes, in analyzing a number of models where causality specifically goes the other direction - models where SST is an explicit input value and cloud cover results from it. In LC11 they limited the lag values for the models to zero, which in my opinion is equally unphysical (instantaneous response). But they keep the LC09 cloud temporal lead for analyzing the observational data. That seems pretty clear to me, and Dessler 2011 is entirely relevant. "Nonfeedback internal radiative (cloud-induced) change that changes SST" is a claim of forcing, not of feedback.
  39. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    alexharv074 @8, Lindzen himself has confirmed that one of the reviewers was Dr Patrick Minnis, a person suggested by him, and not by PNAS. The second reviewer approved by Lindzen may have been Albert Arking who was not suggested by PNAS, or Veerabhadran Ramathan, who was suggested by PNAS and accepted by Lindzen as an appropriate reviewer. Whichever of the two, the fact that one reviewer suggested by Lindzen and not previously suggested by PNAS was used shows that had Lindzen expressed a serious objection to all of those suggested by PNAS, then he would have had two entirely of his own choosing. I assume that a paper will be revised for resubmission even if the resubmission is not to the journal it was originally submitted to. Therefore wishing that the reviews will be helpful for the purpose of revision in no way invites resubmission to the journal. The most that can be said is that the editors did not actively forbid such resubmission.
  40. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    KR, the paper is indeed quite short and Dessler clearly had written it with a view to refuting Spencer and Braswell 2011. He seems unaware that Lindzen and Choi's argument is not the same as Spencer and Braswell's. He asserts, for instance, that Lindzen and Choi's paper claims that "clouds cause climate change". In fact, their paper says nothing about clouds or the cause at all. It relates OLR to changes in SST. It is hard to take the paper seriously when it is not even clear that Dessler has even read the paper he briefly criticises.
  41. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    Tom Curtis, not to put too fine a point on it but "approving" of editors selected by PNAS is not the same as "selecting" your editors. Moreover, Lindzen makes clear that the editors PNAS claimed he "approved" were not in fact the editors he did approve. Meanwhile, your bolded text says that the 'current' paper is rejected and hopes that the comments will assist in revising. I assume that one revises a paper only with the intent to resubmit.
  42. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    alexharv074 - Your claim, "...there is still no peer-reviewed response to LC11", is flatly incorrect. If you wish to discuss the merits of Dessler 2011, in regards to LC11 or SB08/SB11 (a different thread), then present your arguments. You have, to date, not done so. Dessler 2011 is quite short - 4 pages. I think this primarily speaks to how clear the errors in LC11 and SB11 really are. If those authors or others disagree, they should then comment on D11. However, as I and Tom Curtis have pointed out, you have yet to make a supported (or, in my opinion, supportable) claim in this thread. And just insulting D11 (with phrases such as "a rushed, half-hearted response that probably shouldn't have been published") is not making your case.
  43. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    KR, if you insist, Dessler 2011 is a response - a rushed, half-hearted response that probably shouldn't have been published. When I suggested at RealClimate that it is not a serious response, I don't recall anyone disputing this. I also don't recall anyone claiming that Dessler had settled the matter. The arguments were about justifying why there would never be a serious response to LC11.
  44. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    alexharv074 @2: 1) Dana did not suggest that Lindzen conceded that there where major flaws in LC09. Rather he said that we (SkS) had noted the existence of major flaws, and the Lindzen had admitted the existence of stupid mistakes. Both statements are true. 2) As to your further points, I quote from the letter to Lindzen:
    "Dear Dr. Lindzen, The Board appreciates your cooperation in soliciting additional reviews on the paper you recently contributed to PNAS. We consulted the two experts you approved and two others selected by the Board. All four reviews (enclosed) were shared with two members of the Board before reaching a final decision. One of the Board members noted:
    All of the reviews are thoughtful assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript in question by leading experts, so they provide valuable hints for (possibly) improving the paper…I sympathize with Rev. 4's comments who concludes that the new paper simply has to explain why the opposite conclusions from the same data set by Trenberth et al. are flawed. If that could be achieved through a major review of the current version (hopefully accounting also for other important referee remarks) then the article would provide a crucial contribution to a most relevant scientific debate.
    In light of these additional critiques, the Board concurs that the current paper must be declined for publication. I am sorry we cannot be more encouraging at this time and hope the additional reviews will help in revising the work."
    (My emphasis) This letter directly contradicts all of your major claims. Specifically, a) It specifies that two of the four reviewers whose reviews where enclosed where approved by Lindzen, and two selected by the board contradicting your claim that Lindzen did not select two of those four reviewers; b) Reading the reviews, it is apparent that all four reviewers did not consider the paper of sufficient quality; and that all four reviewers did not think Lindzen and Choi had justified their conclusions; c) The letter explicitly states that the paper is declined for publication, ie, that it has been rejected. It certainly does not invite L&C to resubmit, contrary to your claim. Finally, none of the reviewers conclude that L&C has shown earlier papers to be flawed, and indeed one of them explicitly criticizes the paper for failing to adress the arguments of previous papers, specifically Dessler 2010. If you are going to try and spin the debate, may I suggest you do so on details which are not so easily checked and rebutted.
  45. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    alexharv074 - "...there is still no peer-reviewed response to LC11" That would be incorrect - Dessler 2011 as referenced above is a direct rebuttal of LC11 and of Spencer and Braswell 2011, both of which argue (incorrectly, according to D11) that clouds are a forcing. dana1981 - The Dessler 2011 link in the body of the article is broken.
  46. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    It is worth noting that the LC11 article in Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Science is considerably longer than the LC10 PNAS submission that received the reviewer comments described above (I suspect 'skeptics' might object to this opening post on those grounds). However, to a large extent this is due to the page limits in the PNAS journal - the PNAS submission included a very large appendix that was brought into the APJAS article main body, and having read both I find the content significantly identical. The final LC11 paper includes all of these issues: poorly described methodology, tropical rather than global data, no sensitivity testing for the time periods examined, no real addressing of the multiple papers that found much higher sensitivities from the same data, and the rather astounding conclusion that clouds are a forcing rather than a feedback. That final item - clouds as a forcing - appears to be a common element in several attempts to prove climate sensitivities to be low. Dr. Spencer took much the same approach in his book The Great Global Warming Blunder and Spencer and Braswell 2008, where he believes most observed climate change is due to chaotic changes in cloud cover. From that, and an overly simple climate model, he obtained low sensitivity values. This is just foolishness - Dessler 2011 (referenced above) and others have shown that the techniques used in LC11 derive the same low values and cloud forcing from models where the causality operates the other way around - a false conclusion. And contradicted by the responsiveness of humidity and thus clouds on temperature, as a feedback. It's a bad analysis. I suspect, however (just my opinion here), that cloud forcing is attractive to skeptics because such analysis, while flawed, leads to low sensitivity values they find attractive - a confirmation bias temptation.
  47. Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009
    Dana, - you seem to suggest that Lindzen because Lindzen conceded some 'stupid mistakes' in LC09 that this is somehow a concession that it contained 'major flaws'. Saying 'stupid mistakes' is hardly the same as 'major flaws'. - you assert that 'Two of the reviewers were selected by Lindzen, and two others by the PNAS Board.' This is completely wrong. The two reviewers selected by Lindzen were Ming-dah Chou and Will Happer, but these are not among the four reviewers you refer to. (And of course the two reviewers Lindzen selected recommended publication, which is a relevant but omitted detail.) - you write, 'As a result, PNAS rejected the paper, which Lindzen and Choi subsequently got published in a rather obscure Korean journal'. This is, again, wrong. PNAS did not reject the paper; they asked Lindzen and Choi to revise and resubmit. The authors, however, believed that dealing with reviewers #1 & #2 was a waste of time, and decided to submit elsewhere. In general, you have mentioned all the negative comments made by the reviewers and ignored all the positive comments. There is no discussion of the fact that Lindzen and Choi, for instance, have demonstrated that the methods of Forster and Gregory, Dessler 2010 and others, using the simple regression, are almost certainly flawed. What is good about your post, however, is the important reminder that there is still no peer-reviewed response to LC11.
  48. Nil Illegitimi Carborundum
    Kurt Persson, Sweden
  49. 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #26
    Bernard thumb up :)
  50. Murry Salby's Correlation Conundrum
    ...net collected from all sources and sinks... that is what ultimately controls atmospheric CO2.

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