Minute
To: All the AGW faithful

Neither Feynman nor Gell-Mann are/were “climate scientists”

It seems it’s quite ok for an OLO author to bully the commentators thus:

>> Your comment McReal, is a lazy, arrogant stupid comment; just like AGW science really; and anything but real. <<

>> Looks like you are blind, can't read or use a computer Robert; my sympathies. <<

Plus numerous accounts of Cox’s vitriol and cyber-bullying on other threads.

Yet OLO's chief editor and moderator raises the threat of censorship against anyone he doesn't like. No surprises there.

It’s blatantly obvious there is ‘one rule for them and one rule for us’ given OLO is aware of the vitriol and cyber bullying the author Cox has engaged in on other threads.

No GrahamY, Anthony Cox and his ilk are using your OLO as a platform to push an agenda. He has made AGW an issue about politics, evidenced by his blog site and numerous other comments he has made on OLO and at his co-author’s blog

Bonmot I thank you for your support.
having been threatened by censorship once before, I try to be careful about saying anything that might offend the Anti AGW camp. They usually pop up and aim barbs at any serious comments and do not get censored in any way. It is a shame that this forum is so obviously slanted this way. It could and should be an open discussion area where personal epithets are not allowed.
Not to worry, the people concerned know who they are and what they are doing and will be exposed for the astroturfers that they are in due course.
Anyone who does not accept that the Arctic has gone into free fall melt at the moment is either blind or is trying to mislead.
The passages around the North Russian coast are open and being used by shipping as a normal route. this has not ever been done before in our history. Yes ice breakers have forced a passage through on occasion but never have ships sailed through freely.
The NW passage also has become open and when you think of the battles that seamen have had over the years to sail this route, it is obvious that something big is happening there.

Here's a handy comparison of arctic sea ice:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2102-09-27/arctic-sea-ice-maps-before-after-1984-2012/4283418

I don't believe this phenomenon is something to merely shrug our shoulders at. There's much much more expertise that confirms AGW - this is just one more example of "cause and effect".

GrahamY, one of the things I found unusual about the piece by Cox and Nova is that despite there being thousands of papers published on climate change, measurements of temperature, models of climate change, proxies and predictions, the authors light on these few papers, most of which are published in obscure places and several are not peer-reviewed. One is simply a poster at a conference after all.

It reminds me a lot of the anti-GM groups response to scientific evidence. Ignore the vast bulk of the literature and focus on a few poorly run studies that produce results that fit your prejudices.

I may indeed comment on some of the other papers if I have the time and inclination. I stopped at two in my first comment, because I ran out of words. I said as much at the time.

On to your questions about Lindzen and Choi 2011.

1. The authors make it clear that it is tropical data. There are a couple of issues with this. One is that tropical sea surface temperatures have a much greater influence of El Nino/La Nina variations. This is the biggest bit of noise in our climate measurements. Over short periods, it tends to dominate the underlying trends. If not corrected for, no useful information about trends is obtained. Secondly, care needs to be taken in extrapolation of tropical data to the global system. Lindzen and Choi forget the tropics are not a closed system.
2. If you want to compare upward slopes and downward slopes, you start and finish at the tops and bottoms of the slopes. Lindzen and Choi did not do this. Sometimes they started half way up and sometimes finished on the other side. Why I have no idea, but I think it might be because it improved the significance of their result. This is cherry-picking and wrong.
3. Yes. Dressler 2011 showed that models incorporating specified sea surface temperatures produced a similar result to Lindzen and Choi’s lag/regression slope plot. Therefore, clouds cannot be driving SST.

Agronomist, I'm puzzled as to why you would question them selecting papers which purport to disprove the hypothesis. There's no point them selecting ones that either say nothing about it or which are consonant with it. That's how you do science - you test predictions of theories to see whether they are correct. If the theory is not predictive it needs modification. You can't satisfy this aspect by picking papers which appear to agree. We know that the general theory of relativity is a better explanation of the gravitational force than Newton's because it describes things that Newton's theory doesn't, but you're hardly going to put a study on ballistics into evidence because it would appear to support either!

1. They specifically deal with this issue and claim that Dressler does not. Further they also discuss the issues with extrapolating from part of the earth to the whole. As I understand it the best data doesn't extend beyond 60 degrees, which is still pretty close to the arctic circles. They also state, and it seems reasonable, that most of the moisture uptake is in the tropical area, so the relationship should be strongest in that area. Again, seems reasonable.

2. They're not actually comparing slopes so I'm not sure what your point is. Can you give me examples rather than generalisations? The start and finish dates are always going to be somewhat arbitrary in sampling, but they don't necessarily bias the data.

3. I don't follow this. Can you give me a link to Dressler and the page reference?