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Comments 71301 to 71350:

  1. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    16, JMurphy, I didn't think I could stomach the comments on Curry's blog, but looking it now, they saw the same thing and quickly cried "foul" on Muller's November deadline excuse. The plot thickens. Why am I not surprised?
  2. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Enough cherrypicking already `nough said!!!!
  3. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    To add some light entertainment to this important conversation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrURLJ6Vlsg But I don’t think the Watts, Singer, Curry crowd are in denial – it’s a lot more complicated than that.
  4. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    I'm not convinced about that November cut-off date mentioned by Sphaerica, supposedly mentioned by Muller. On the IPCC website is the following : WGI AR5 literature cut-off for submitted papers, 31 July 2012
  5. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Sphaerica @11 - that sounds like a likely explanation. I guess if they convince the IPCC not to rely on HadCRUT as the main surface temperature record in the AR5, that might actually be a useful result.
    Moderator Response: [John Hartz] AR5=IPCC's Fifth Annual Assessment report.
  6. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    To build on muoncounter's excellent post @10: The Merchants of Doubt (Watts, Curry, Pielke etc.) are behaving just like defense lawyers do and using the same tactics/tricks that they use on jurors: caste doubt, confuse, obfuscate, and make ad hominem attacks. I'd suggest one small change to "muoncounter's law": "If you don't have the science, and you do not like the signal, then argue the noise"
  7. Bert from Eltham at 09:50 AM on 1 November 2011
    Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    To show how easily the human senses can be fooled, J S Bach used to have compositions where the pitch seemed to ever rise. For more see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone I think the opposite is happening here with the wished for 'decline' being seen as obvious by our highly evolved pattern recognition systems working overtime in some people. As muoncounter pointed out at 9.22 am the BEST graphs can be potrayed as an ever rising set of 'steps' with the noise hiding the 'risers'. Bert
  8. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    I like muoncounter's new law at 10, and I thought I'd add one: if you don't have any noise, make some.
  9. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    9, dana1981, My guess is that they just haven't finished yet. Curry's site says that Muller said they rushed to publication before November so that it would be eligible for inclusion in AR5. That makes sense, and if that's the case, and they started from the oldest date and worked forward, the obvious inference is that by publication they'd only gotten halfway through 2010, and are still working on the rest. But... the smart move would have been to completely leave out April/May, not include it with only 47 data points processed.
  10. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    The 'let's have fun with BEST graphs' started here. It's a hoot that this comes so quickly on the heels of the Pielke statements as summarized by Albatross and Dikran. In law, if you don't have the facts, you argue the law. In this newly evolving pseudo-skeptic 'science,' if you don't like the signal, you argue the noise.
  11. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    michael @8 - I'm not sure why the BEST analysis effectively ends a year and a half ago. I found that odd as well.
  12. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Why don't the BEST team have the data from 2010 like everyone else? Could they be "hiding the incline" ;)? Really though, how can they be the "BEST" data set when they are so far out of data?
  13. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Re: Sphaerica @ 3, dana @ 4. Quite to the contrary. If you want to do a linear fit, I highly recommend that you stop collecting data after you have two points. Anything more just adds to the confusion. The trick is making sure that you have only the two data points you want to show the trend you want. [If anyone wants to disagree with me, keep in mind that I disagree with me, before you start arguing.] I actually read a paper once that did a linear regression on about 100 points, and found that the relationship was not statistically significant. They then duplicated the data set - i.e., they added a second copy of the same data to make 200 points - and then claimed that the regression was now significant, so they had shown that the relationship was real and the only reason for the lack of significance in the original data was that they didn't have enough data. They then proceeded under the assumption that they had come up with a proper result. I have no idea how it got past peer review.
  14. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    I'm considering writing a post that centers around the graph Sphaerica created showing global warming "pauses" every 8 years or so (if you don't mind me stealing your idea, Sphaerica). It looks like "global warming has magically stopped" is becoming the new favorite "skeptic" argument, and it's argument they can always make with some creative cherrypicking of dates, as Sphaerica showed. And the likes of Pielke and Curry and Spencer are not helping matters, effectively encouraging the propagation of this myth.
  15. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Sphaerica @3, "Really, how can you identify such a trend with just two data points?" Good point ;) Good one. But we do have a fairly large sample size. Watts, Singer, Curry, Pielke, Delingpole, Eschenbach, McLean, Monckton and many others I suspect claim that the warming has stopped, some of those even claim that we are cooling or have entered a long-term cooling trend. Where is that neat graph that you showed elsewhere? I do not wish to steal your thunder :)
  16. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Dikran - fair enough, evidence but not statistically significant (or less than weak) evidence. Really the issue is that, as often happens, the short-term noise is temporarily slowing the long-term trend (in a couple of years the converse will likely happen). The so-called "skeptics" are screaming that this proves global warming has stopped. The scientists who are trying to "bridge the gap" between real science and hysterical "skeptics" (a few of whose names have been mentioned here) don't seem to know how to react to this short-term change in trend. Dr. Pielke has said we should lower the standards of our analysis and essentially admit that global warming has slowed/paused/stopped/whatever. Dr. Curry is frankly all over the place. Dr. Muller started out saying there's no evidence the warming has slowed, then backtracked and apparently said we're in the midst of a "pause". The real failure amongst these scientists is in communicating that short-term pauses are expected, commonly occur, don't tell us anything about the long-term warming trend, and the current one is no surprise given that so many short-term effects have been in the cooling direction in recent years.
  17. Richard Milne separates skepticism from denial
    Shibui - just as a matter of interest, since you dont like the journal's subscription costs, who do you think should pay for the publishing?
  18. Climate's changed before
    The full term you are interested in is "bright sunshine hours", and it has a formal WMO definition (CIMO Guide chapter 8) based on direct beam solar radiation - you accumulate bright sunshine when direct solar exceeds 120 W/m². The Campbell-Stokes instrument is the classic, but has its limitations. The Campbell-Stokes instrument has been around much longer than the formal WMO definition. There are several other manufacturers of more modern instruments (e.g., Kipp and Zonen). There are long records of Campbell-Stokes data around the world, but the data is of quite limited value compared to actual measurements of solar radiation. I think sunshine hours was part of the whole "Global Dimming" craze a few years ago. Using the SkS search tool gives a few hits for "global dimming", and RealClimate had at least one discussion of it. A good place for global surface radiation data is the Baseline Surface Radiation Network. A fairly recent paper that looks at some of this is Wild 2009.
  19. Climate's changed before
    Change in sunshine hours is surely just a measure of changing cloudiness. Satellite records would provide far better global measure of this rather than station records. IPCC reports certainly mention cloud cover.
  20. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    2, muoncounter,
    Do you suspect a trend?
    I object. Your erroneous-global-cooling-trend-statements trend is not statistically significant. Really, how can you identify such a trend with just two data points? Surely you jest, sir.
  21. Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Dikran: First we had Pielke Sr. and now Curry making the same error. Do you suspect a trend? Here's one: Suppose one student from all four grade levels in high school walk into my classroom. The 9th grader was shorter than the 10th grader who was shorter than the 11th grader. However, the 12 grader was shorter than the 11th grader. My conclusion: teenage growth stops in 11th grade - alert the media!
  22. Dikran Marsupial at 07:36 AM on 1 November 2011
    Baked Curry: The BEST Way to Hide the Incline
    Being a bit pedantic (giving Curry as much of the beneit of the doubt as possible), Muller is not absolutely correct in saying "We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down". The measured trend from 2001-present is lower (0.13642 per decade) than the trend since, say 1993 (0.357871 per decade), which is evidence that the rate of warming had fallen. However it is not statistically significant evidence - it doesn't reach the minimum standard scientists generally regard as being sufficient to proceed with an hypothesis. So Muller's comment is perhaps an over-statement, but Curry's comment is silly; she needs to demonstrate that the decline really exists before she can complain that the BEST team are hiding it.
  23. It hasn't warmed since 1998
    124, Rickoxo, On Curry's statement vs. Muller's, this is logic 101. Curry says "A is proven to be true." (i.e. A = the globe has been cooling). Muller says "There is no evidence of A." Muller's statement is not the opposite but equal of Curry's. Curry's statement is false not because A is false, but because there is no valid evidence to support her statement A. Muller's statement is true not because A is either true or false, but rather because it is a statement about the evidence, not about proposition A itself. Do you see the difference?
  24. Richard Milne separates skepticism from denial
    Shibui doesn't appear to have watched the Richard Milne lecture, otherwise he may have realized his little meme was the one I referred to @ 1 - the bull in the china shop.
  25. It hasn't warmed since 1998
    Rickoxo#124: "if Tamino said Curry screwed up bad for making her statement that there is no evidence global warming hasn't stopped, wouldn't the exact same argument apply to Muller's statement?" In a word, no. First off, let's lose the double negatives and translate Curry's statement: 'There is evidence that global warming stopped.' This, as shown by tamino, is clearly false. For a change in trend (warming stopped) to be considered as evidence, it must be statistically significant - or else it is just more than likely noise. Muller's statement: "We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down." That's consistent with the statement made in the FAQ and the requirement that evidence be statistically significant. All else (including this spin job by some very frantic denialists) is noise. Further discussion of this Curry/Muller question should go to this new thread.
  26. It hasn't warmed since 1998
    Rickoxo - the short answer is that what Muller said was correct, and what Curry said isn't. See our new post on the subject. The "good reasons for doubt" comment is a different issue. Reasons for doubting what? AGW? The surface temperature record? Frankly Muller is exaggerating the importance of the BEST results regardless of what specifically he was talking about, but exaggerating the importance of BEST is nothing new for Muller. BEST shouldn't have been necessary to accept the accuracy of the surface temp record to begin with. Regardless, Curry's statements were ill-conceived and inaccurate, as the new post discusses.
  27. It hasn't warmed since 1998
    Murry made this comment publically, when asked about the question of recent temperature data: ‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html#ixzz1cOGjgBRy Curry's argument was much like Tamino's argument against her, that the statement from Muller was a stupid statement and meaningless. He could have simply said that short term trends don't matter due to decadal fluctuations, but he didn't. It seems like she called him on a statement of his that was not careful and that she saw as misleading. Help me with this if you can Tom or Muon, if Tamino said Curry screwed up bad for making her statement that there is no evidence global warming hasn't stopped, wouldn't the exact same argument apply to Muller's statement? And since he made it first, isn't it more logical to see her statement as a correction of his? The second thing Muller said that seemed pretty crazy stupid was the comment in the WSJ article, ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html#ixzz1cOIS0rEw Curry said she critiqued him in part because of this comment. The site you referenced Muon makes the following statement at the end of the FAQ: Our study addressed only one area of the concerns: was the temperature rise on land improperly affected by the four key biases (station quality, homogenization, urban heat island, and station selection)? The answer turned out to be no – but they were questions worthy of investigation. Berkeley Earth has not addressed issues of the tree ring and proxy data, climate model accuracy, or human attribution. Why would answering this one question mean that there was no longer any basis for skepticism? The insinuation that there used to be a basis for skepticism but the only possible reason was potential inaccuracy in the temperature data is pretty silly and Curry called him on it. It seems like he has backed way off his strong interpretational statements of what the data means and is going back to what Curry said earlier, let the data speak for itself and let the project be simply about trying to make the cleanest and most accurate, publically available set of temperature data available.
  28. Richard Milne separates skepticism from denial
    Shibui#35: "to convince the general public" Go back to the Milne video, where he cites the examples of CFC and SO2 pollution. Both controlled by worldwide efforts, despite there being no proof of 'the issue down to the last detail'. Look at the Dutch Delta Project, where a society invested enormous capital against the probability - not the certainty - of future catastrophe. No proof to the last detail there either. A sufficiently motivated population reacts on the basis of risk avoidance - unless they have been lulled to sleep by false information. Here's Milne again: Science determines facts - to the best ability of experiment and model, which are not absolute. Politicians create policy. To insist that science meet an artificially high standard of 'proof' is a guarantee that nothing will ever come of anything scientific. Is that what you're after?
  29. Climate's changed before
    246, Tom, Sorry, I added 2 myself after I'd written the response and forgot about my own lead in statement.
  30. It hasn't warmed since 1998
    Rickoxo#122: "It is pretty odd, however, that Muller was wrong about his own data." Odd because that is incorrect. Read the BEST FAQ under 'has global warming stopped?' the decadal fluctuations are too large to allow us to make decisive conclusions about long term trends based on close examination of periods as short as 13 to 15 years. There is no evidence of a change in trend on that long a time scale. Muller said it correctly; it's Curry and others who are deliberately spreading disinformation. #120: "a fact confirmed by a new analysis" There is no 'new analysis'; there is just a deliberately cherrypicked graph. Based on that kind of science, consider this: It was cooler today than it was in July; is that evidence that global warming stopped?
  31. Extreme Melting on Greenland Ice Sheet, Reports CCNY Team
    @mspelto #2: Thanks for the reference and link. Here's the summary of that study. "An international team of scientists has discovered that warming in the Arctic region has triggered the accelerated melting of a Greenlandic glacier. Presented in The Cryosphere journal, the findings reveal that the overall mass loss of the Mittivakkat Glacier for 2011 has amounted to 2.45 metres, 0.29 metres higher than what was recorded in 2010. The study was funded in part by the INTERACT ('International network for terrestrial research and monitoring in the Arctic') project, which has clinched EUR 7.3 million under Research Infrastructures of the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)."
  32. Mercury Scientist at 04:50 AM on 1 November 2011
    Richard Milne separates skepticism from denial
    @ Shibui, #8: Journals have expenses, and they have to at least break even on their expenses. They recover costs via subscriptions, including library subscriptions. This makes it inconvenient, but not impossible, for a non-subscriber to get content. Some suggestions: (1) Request the item from your library. They either subscribe, or can get a pdf of a paper through interlibrary loan. (2) Email the corresponding author, and ask for a copy. (3) Lastly, for authors, many journals have an option to pay for Open Access (sometimes called Author Choice); you pay the fee, and your paper will be freely accessible to the public via the web. Since your study was likely paid for by public funds, it's nice to use some of those funds to make your paper accessible by all. This is a good way for journals to recover some costs of delivering content in this digital age.
  33. It hasn't warmed since 1998
    Thanks a ton for the response and great info. I was hoping wood for trees was a useful site, but, I get the danger of cherry picking beginning and ending dates to find what you want to find. When I entered 1998 as the start date at wood for trees and used the same settings as for their example data, there was a clear positive slope. You have to hunt around to find a cluster that doesn't slope. I also get [DB]'s comment about a very short period of time not indicating anything about the longer term trend, and Curry makes that exact comment as well. But Tamino sure goes off on her and presents some pretty compelling analysis saying she was way off base in her critique of Muller. It is pretty odd, however, that Muller was wrong about his own data. I don't know Tamino, but when two of the folks who did the data set both say the same thing, it seems odd that they're both wrong. My last thought, I read through Tamino's post and all the comments. A number of folks offered that what she said was "technically accurate" (i.e. there's no scientific evidence than global warming hasn't stopped", but that her statement is meaningless. But at least from what I read, she said she made that comment to shut up Muller who she said made some comments saying the BEST data set proved AGW was true and that skeptics were totally wrong. I get reminded occasionally by my advisors about the limits of what the data I'm analyzing says and what I can and can't claim about it. If one takes her comment as chastising Muller for over-speaking, it doesn't have the connotation Tamino goes after and then, all of Tamino's analysis ends up demonstrating her exact point which is that small of a period cannot be used to prove anything. It was late when I read through her blog so I don't remember what she said she was responding to from Muller, but that's what I remember her saying started this whole thing, some statement from him she said was way overblown, so she wanted to restate it technically accurately and say let the data speak for itself.
  34. Climate's changed before
    Sphaerica @245, thanks for the correction of my typo, and the summation. Your point (2), however, though perfectly valid, is not in my original post. In essence, it is known that increased aerosol numbers increases cloudiness by increasing the duration of clouds. If clouds take longer to dissipate, but form at the same rate, the net result will be more clouds in the sky at any give time - and hence less sunlight hours. Conversely, if aerosols are reduced, as happened in the UK after the passage of clean air acts in the 1970's, clouds will dissipate quicker, resulting in less cloudiness, and more sunlight hours. If this phenomenon is a major driver of changes in sunlight hours, that would explain why sunlight hours have increased in the UK (with reduced aerosol emissions) but decreased in China (which has increasing aerosol emissions). Of course, if that is the major driver, than this is a subject climate scientists are actively studying very closely. It is know as the Cloud Life Time effect, and is one of several indirect aerosol effects.
  35. Extreme Melting on Greenland Ice Sheet, Reports CCNY Team
    This was also the case observed on the east coast of Greenland by Mernild and Hanna.
  36. Climate's changed before
    242, lancelot, To clarify/summarize Tom's points: 1) How do you know the change is not a result of GHG warming (i.e. one form of positive cloud feedback) rather than the cause? 2) How do you know the change does not have to do with decreased aerosols (due to less pollution or changed atmospheric patterns)? 3) How do you know that a single regional effect is global? To answer your direct question: scientists do measure the albedo of the earth (which is sort of the exact opposite of sunlight hours) in a variety of ways. I'm not sure if anyone has tried to globally measure sunlight with ground based stations, but you can see that this effort would no doubt suffer from the same issues that "plague" ground based temperature observations ("the Urban Smog Effect is artificially reducing solar irradiance measurements! It's all a farce!"). I don't know if the spat of lost (or warehoused!) satellites would have helped here, either. But it's not like scientists are stupid, or aren't trying.
  37. Climate's changed before
    Ok, following on from the data Tom cited I found that this is based on something called a 'Campbell-Stokes recorder' which basically focuses sunshine to burn holes through a card. There is some subjectivity in determining whether a hole was burned through by 15 minutes or 30 minutes of bright sunshine, but overall it is a measure of sunlight reaching the ground at that location. Thus, a reduction in smog could result in an increase in sunlight hours... as could local changes in cloud cover. I'm not sure this measurement can really tell us much about global temperatures... even if an extensive network exists. It only has two 'intensity levels' for sunlight... either there is enough to burn through the card or there is not. Yet the 'not' could be anything from complete blackness to just barely not enough while the 'enough' could be anything from just barely enough to two, three, four, et cetera times as much as needed. Basically, I'm saying that the 'resolution' of the data doesn't seem sufficient to make any determination of the total sunlight experienced.
  38. SkS Weekly Digest #22
    Muller is getting an object lesson on the old saying about lying down with dogs. Even a brief skim of their sites should have been enough to demonstrate that Watts and (to a lesser extent) Curry are bad jokes, rather than 'heroes'. He either didn't look or didn't care... and now he's paying the price. He angered many in the scientific community by repeating denier fiction... and now he has alienated the denier community by repeating scientific facts.
  39. Climate's changed before
    lancelot @242, it is true that sunshine hours have increased by about 7% in the UK over the period from 1974 to the present: It is certainly not clear that this is a forcing, ie, an phenomenon independent to temperature which drives temperature change, rather than a feedback, ie, a phenomenon largely controlled by temperature which in turn drives temperature change. More importantly, it is far from clear that this is a global phenomenon. Certainly in China the trend has been in the opposite direction towards less sunlight hours. A similar reduction of sunshine has been found in Switzerland, so the observed increase in the UK is not even a Europe wide phenomenon, let alone a world wide phenomenon. That the trends are opposite in different locations around the globe strongly suggests the cause is not astronomical (GCR) but rather global or regional climate conditions. That is, the phenomenon is likely a climate feedback or a response to major oceanic variations. Certainly the UK data shows a correlation to the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation. But the AMO may itself just be an artifact of the pattern or Northern Hemisphere warming and cooling due to variations in CO2 and aerosol levels during the 20th century.
    Moderator Response: [Sph] Typo corrected.
  40. Sorting out Settled Science from Remaining Uncertainties
    meagain @6 600 cu km of ice loss per year would require some 0.2 zJ to melt. That is small compared to rises in annual Ocean Heat Content which are twenty times bigger (at least). So on a global scale the Arctic sea ice melt is not so big. But for the Arctic, the impact has got to be large.
  41. SkS Weekly Digest #22
    With regard to BEST, it would seem that Judith Curry is being berated on her own blog for (as many of them seem to 'see' it) being had, deceived, taken for a ride, etc. by that beastly Muller chap. Plenty of accusations against him of lying and dishonesty - all being allowed to stand. Lots of belief that McIntyre is going to sort all of it out - he's auditing the BEST data as we speak, don't you know. And Curry is now referring to the BEST team as "they". Not "us". Can she get any more slippery ?
  42. Climate's changed before
    Coming back on natural causes: Sunshine records in S. England apparently show increasing hours of daily sunshine since 1970. I don't see any mention in IPCC reports of sunshine hour records, analysed globally. (If I have missed a mention, could you point me to one.) Regardless whether any mechanism other than GCR to influence cloud cover is conceivable, is sunshine hours not a relatively simple check on possible natural forcing which should be considered, separately from solar irradiance?
    Response:

    [DB] "Sunshine records in S. England apparently show increasing hours of daily sunshine since 1970."

    Assertions without source citations tend to get ignored.  Unless you can provide a source for your claim?

  43. Yes, It's Still Us, and It's Still Bad
    Sasquatch, Regarding the short-term trend (whether you refer to it as flatlining, marginally cooling or a warming hiatus), a nice summary of the competing theories is summarized here: http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2011/10/25/1
  44. Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study: “The effect of urban heating on the global trends is nearly negligible”
    lancelot @23, BEST shows a video showing global coverage of their data network for any given year. From that video we can see that in 1800, they rely on just 41 stations. By 1850, that rises to 196, covering all of Europe and Asia, most of North America, and parts of South America, Africa and Australia. Given the broad coverage, it is a safe assumption that in 1850, nearly all stations are at major centers of population. Some were not, of course, in that BEST shows "very rural" temperature from that period. It is dubious that the "very rural" network is spatially extensive enough to not suffer significantly from regional bias until about 1900, when the BEST coverage is global (excluding Antarctica) and incorporates 3413 stations.
  45. Yes, It's Still Us, and It's Still Bad
    Sasquatch @58 - we'll be publishing a post to address the issue you raise later today. There are a number of problems wrong with the "no warming in BEST since 2001" argument, not the least of which being that the argument is simply incorrect when the data is properly analyzed.
  46. Sorting out Settled Science from Remaining Uncertainties
    Hi Dana et al, Over the last decade it seems that, according to the PIOMAS data, something in the region of 6,000 cubic kilometres of Arctic sea ice has turned to water. This is much faster than the 30 year trend. The energy invested in this phase change is huge: 333Joules per gram of ice melted. The same amount of energy would raise the temperature of one gram of water by 80°C. So quite a lot of "missing" heat may have gone onto the melting in the Arctic. If the Arctic sea ice were to disappear completely, as it looks very likely to do by 2016 +/- 3 years, one would then expect the global temperature to rocket.
  47. Yes, It's Still Us, and It's Still Bad
    Everyone, I highly recommend reading JMurphy's post @46, it is an excellent (succinct) summary and assessment of this sad situation that the fake skeptics and those in denial about AGW have gotten themselves into. Nicely done JMurphy.
  48. It's the sun
    lancelot, can you cite a source for the supposed increase? I'm also not sure what you mean by 'sunshine hours'. Are cloudy days excluded? If so, at what 'level of cloudiness'? If cloudy days are not considered then the number of hours that the sun shines on various parts of the Earth is entirely a factor of the planet's orbit and inclination... and thus should not be showing any significant long term variation. In any case, satellite readings of total incoming solar radiation should be far more accurate than whatever measurement is being suggested here.
  49. Pielke Sr. and SkS Dialogue Final Summary
    Bob Loblaw @52 Very good discussion. Ocean heat content should reflect the integral of all the past heat flux imbalances back to the mythical global 'equilibrium' where there was no imbalance. If less that 10% of the heat energy imbalance is represented by land and atmosphere warming, then the 90% plus in the oceans must be the primary store of heat energy gain on a global basis. Redistribution of this heat energy by the complex circulations, ENSO etc would be measurable by ice melt, and/or temperature warming in one place and cooling somewhere else. It is very difficult to accurately measure ocean heat content and this should be the area of greatest research effort. Tom Curtis @55 "IMO the main problem with using OHC as the metric of global warming is that it has no implications for future behavior of the climate system." Future energy gain is in the future. Heat already gained to date will show somewhere in temperature rise, ice melt etc which has already occurred. If heat comes out of the oceans to warm the land and atmosphere - it will be lost from the oceans, so would not future warming on a global basis be entirely dependent on future heat energy gain?
  50. Sorting out Settled Science from Remaining Uncertainties
    @Dana: Please add a footnote defining the "Maunder Minimum."

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