Agro, your last link is behind a paywall - try here:

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/216/Dessler2011.pdf

I've given up on the political ideologue. Not only does he misrepresent and distort the science, his ad-homs and cyber-bullying remind me of Alan Jones.

Agronomist; you really are slipping in my estimation; your snide little comments about obscure journals is not only snide but misleading when one realises the level of censorship both Lindzen and Choi and Spencer have had to endure:

http://joannenova.com.au/2011/06/when-top-scientists-take-2-years-to-publish-its-time-to-give-up-on-old-peer-review/

It's a miracle either were published at all given that the likes of Gleick, the forger, and other notable AGW trustworthies were leading the charge to suppress them; the circumstance of the ridiculous resignation by Wagner is here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/02/breaking-editor-in-chief-of-remote-sensing-resigns-over-spencer-braswell-paper/

The Spencer and Dessler ongoing 'debate' is chronologised here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/research-pages/the-spencer-braswell-dessler-papers/

Your complaints about Lindzen and Choi are trite and well rebutted; in respect of the LC 2009 paper Dr Tuuri at comments 51-59 at Real Climate vindicates LC 2009 against the complaints of 'cherry picking' and concentration on the tropics:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/01/lindzen-and-choi-unraveled/comment-page-2/#comments

In addition LC's follow up paper in 2010 addressed these complaints brought against LC 2009 by using all the data and extrapolating beyond the tropics and STILL found more IR leaving the top of the atmosphere then the stupid models had predicted.

It is clear you have just done a round up of a few pro-AGW blogsites about these 2 ground-breaking papers and regurgitated the whole mess.

Why don't you think for yourself and consider the issue of +ve feedbacks which AGW is reliant on but which has much evidence against.

cohenite, have you read and understood any of these papers you are commenting about? It really seems not.

My comments about where they were published was deliberate. Obscure journals have more difficulty in recruiting referees. They become easy marks for this sort of material.

I disagree that a miracle occurred in their publication, one merely needs to keep shopping around and someone will publish. They always had Energy & Environment up their sleeve if all else failed. These papers were not published in mainstream climate science journals because they were so obviously wrong. There is no need to invoke a conspiracy.

But then I did actually critique the papers. They both contain obvious cherry-picking of material to make their points. This is an immediate red flag that something is wrong.

Have you read Lindzen and Choi’s 2011 offering? I suggest you do. When you come to the bit where it is all based on the tropical regions, you might like to think why the rest of the globe was not included.

cohenite wrote: "Your complaints about Lindzen and Choi are trite and well rebutted; in respect of the LC 2009 paper Dr Tuuri at comments 51-59 at Real Climate vindicates LC 2009 against the complaints of 'cherry picking' and concentration on the tropics:”

Were you reading the same comments you linked to? Or is there a different set of comments? Because neither of the complaints you specify were rebutted by H. Tuuri in the comments. I was rather amused by the insistent way H. Tuuri kept using “naked eye analysis”.

The main problem with AGW, other than it’s inherent subjectivity, is that the zealous rush to damn anything, Carbon, allows the primary causes of most real and pressing environmental damage to go unnoticed. For example: The great Barrier Reef, an organism large enough to be seen from space, is in serious trouble. The pop-science brigade, along with several vested interests, all ascribe AGW as the main reason for the reef’s problems.

The actual causality of reef degradation, rests mainly with adjacent coastal river catchment clearing, and gross over - fertilisation, resulting in large amounts of suspended sediments (mud) and plant life (algae) that allow huge numbers of Crown of Thorns Starfish, to breed and subsequently destroy large amounts of coral. Here AGW protagonists will try to show that the weather has deteriorated, and AGW is causing an increase in tropical cyclone activity - resulting in mechanical damage to the reef, and smothering from millions of tons of mud swept onto the reef by flooding rivers. Well ... yes and no: mechanical damage from tropical cyclonic wave action is responsible for damage that has occurred for millions of years, and is generally roportionate to the intensity of the storm. However, storm damage to a reef that has been devastated by star fish attack, and general smothering, will be disproportionately high, resulting from severe imbalance by coastal / catchment agriculture and general soil disturbance - pre-colonial river flows did not contain large amounts of suspended sediments - as no wholesale clearing of catchments occurred.

And what of bleaching? again, an ongoing natural process, resulting in fluctuations of sea levels and sea surface temperatures. Here is yet another flaw in AGW theory: Coral bleaching results from surface and near surface exposure to high temperatures - as resulting from exceptionally low tides - especially during mid-summer. A major part of IPCC scary doctrine, relates to rapidly rising sea levels. Another part of said IPCC doctrine warns of the impending demise of the world’s coral reefs through coral bleaching ... ! Enough said

Hi Agronomist,

I'm trying to get a handle on your criticism of this paper. Can you help me with a few things?

First - the article cites seven papers. Is it only the two you name that you have problems with?

Second - Can we look at your criticisms of Lindsen and Choi, using your numbers.

1. On p 388 the authors discuss the reasons for using the tropical satellite data. One is that the water vapour feedback is assumed to be more significant at the tropics. Another is that one set of satellite data doesn't cover the whole globe, and the other has a lot of noise. I don't think they claim that their data represents the whole globe. Can you clarify.

2. What start and stop points would you have used? What would have been captured by your dates that weren't by theirs? As there is no trend analysis involved here I can't see that you can cherry pick, but I'm interested in your argument.

3. I think this is what is in contention so you're just asserting that their paper is wrong. Can you explain why their explanatory mechanism is wrong and the one you support is correct?

If it is possible to thrash out Lindzen and Choi I'd like to then move on to Spencer and Braswell.

Oh dear

Once upon a time there was a man called Copernicus. Well actually his name was Mikolaj Kopernik but it got Latinised to Copernicus. Anyway this dude had a crazy idea. He though the Earth and the other planets all orbited the sun. He said the reason we all thought they orbited about the Earth was because the Earth was spinning on its axis. What we imagined was the sun, planets and stars circling about us was an illusion caused by us being on a world-sized merry-go-round.

I mean, fancy that. Do you feel any spinning?

Well the astronomers of that era falsified this dude's preposterous theories pretty darn quickly. They worked out where in the sky the planets would appear if Copernicus was right and, guess what, they weren't there!

"Look," says one astronomer to another, "if that idiot was right we would expect to see Mars right there over the tall tree. But instead it's over that mountain. What a fool!"

And so Copernicus was falsified and today, as every schoolboy knows, we understand that the Earth stands still and all the planets and the sun and stars rotate about us at the centre of the universe.

Well, not quite. Copernicus got the big picture right but he fell down on some of the details. For example the planets did not move in circles but in ellipses at varying speeds. Another dude called Kepler figured it out.

Even that did not settle all the questions. If the Earth was spinning why didn't it slingshot us off? If it was moving why didn't we feel the wind?

But the preponderance of evidence pointed to Copernicus being right so we still give him the credit.

What the quoted papers MAY do is show that we got some of the details of global warming wrong although I'm not even sure of that. But I doubt they alter the big picture.