David

I hope you are not suggesting Global Warming Terrorists are open minded?

No, Imajulianutter, not open-minded. More feeble-minded!

g david that is a radical departure from your usual position. I'm surprised but good on you. you are truly open-minded.
what changed your mind about warming terrorists?

Quote Cohenite
"GRACE is a great concept but is plagued by IGA, Isostatic Glacial Adjustment. To the layman, IGA can be simply explained as when the ice increases it compacts so a radar beam from a satellite will read as though the ice is DECREASING when it is actually INCREASING."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Experiment

Grace satellites work by calculating gravitational pull from small differences in distance between each other their speed and height.. Grace is not affected by Isostatic Glacial Adjustment as the measurements directly translate to mass so it does not matter if the ice and snow is compacted or not. The height and speed of the satellites is measured by GPS to pin accuracy in fact less than the width of a human hair, not radar as you appear to think. By the way IGA is the rebound of the earth surface due to removal of the heavy weight of ice not whatever you seemed to think.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/tropospheric-hot-spot-intermediate.htm

The point of about THS is the level of accuracy required. The measurements have to be some 50 times more accurate than those required to establish stratosphere cooling. To look at it another way even if the temperature measurement was dead accurate, it would be necessary to also measure the height to within +or - 25 feet to provide evidence of the hot spot, but on the other hand to establish cooling of the stratosphere height data with an error of +or - 500 feet would is good enough. This becomes a huge problem for THS when dealing with historical data. There are of course other indirect methods of trying establish the hotspot which hint at its existence.

"Grace is not affected by Isostatic Glacial Adjustment as the measurements directly translate to mass so it does not matter if the ice and snow is compacted or not."

Ok, tell that to the scientists at Real Climate:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/11/weighing-change-in-antarctica/

They say:

"Subtracting the GIA signal from GRACE data would not be a problem if we knew exactly the history of the evolution of the ice sheets and the rheology and spatially varying structure of the solid Earth. However, we don’t. The greatest impediment is the uncertainty in reconstructing the post-LGM Antarctic ice sheet. Unlike the formerly-glaciated parts of the Northern Hemisphere, 98% of Antarctic bedrock remains covered by ice and the ice sheet periphery is covered by extensive ice shelves; together these introduce substantial uncertainty in reconstructions. Indeed, previous estimates of the extra volume of Antarctic ice at LGM, compared to present-day, ranging from 3 to >30m of equivalent sea level (Bentley, 2010)."

IGA/GIA is definitely a problem for satellite radar/gravitational modelling. The compression confounds the satellite measurement no matter how you describe it.

As for the THS and measurement difficulty, the relevant level is the characteristic emission layer, CEL, at which level the optical depth is zero; see:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf

The varying levels are well known and the problems described at the SKS article are rather disingenuous.

The point remains a THS was predicted by AGW and it is not there.

You know these comments by the denialistas would make a wonderful script for a Goon show.
maybe they should put them all together as a comedy routine and sell it to one of the shock jocks to spout.