Yes. I’m prepared to accept that in relation to their sphere of expertise, indeed they do (know more than a layman). What I object to (gently) is the ‘I’m a scientist, trust me’ line – a layman with the requisite maths and science education can understand the papers and make cogent judgements. And so far as logic goes – that is for everyone, not just scientists.
Of course, one needs to see a number of papers not just those from one point of view. But given that, I see no difficulty in engaging in rational analysis of the science.
I take your point (to the effect that it is the laymen who decide). But if laymen can decide (and they do as you say), it follows that they can also agree and disagree ( or even agree to disagree.).

Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. But it is the laymen who get to decide policy!

I think I understand his main point (AGW is an underlying upward push that does not negate natural variation). I merely disagree (mostly). I think there has been some giveback from the LIA, and the recent (late 70s – 1998) increase is due to multidecadal ocean/atmospheric cycles flipping to warm.

I think the Aqua satellite data is showing us that the positive feedback from CO2 may well be negative feedback leading to more low clouds, increased albedo and homeostasis.

And now the cycles are beginning to go cool again.

Well, so far as hurricanes go, accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) and numbers of storms seem to have decreased rather steadily over the last few decades.

The Rev posted on this subject a while back.

heck, why stop there. PDO, AMO, NAO, AO, AAO, and IPO all flipped from cool to warm from 1977 to 2001.

Then, the above all being in a warm phase already, the temperatures stopped going up.

Now the PDO has gone cool, and posibly the AO (decades ahead of schedule). The NAO and AMO are still warm but looking shaky. Temperatures are off by half a degree C,

What goes up may reasonably be expected to come down.

(The “dead sun” is a legit but separate issue.)

There seems to me to be a confusion further up the thread between the relative weight of forcings (yes, it’s true that if GHG forcings increase they will be proportionately more significant than others) and the absolute effect of internal variation.

The ENSO effect, for example, is not an external radiative forcing. Regardless of the energy balance (and what that means in terms of rising or falling background temperatures), the extent of natural internal variation is not reduced proportionately.

Of course, there are those who speculate that a changing energy balance may increase the range of natural internal variability, but that’s a wider issue.

…neither the GCM nor the best of SWAGs nor the IPCC nor the rest of the entire movement can possibly tell you that the last 100 years isn’t perfectly natural.

Bingo.

Do my eyes deceive me, it looks like beeb might change their tune…?

REPLY: Possibly. They contacted me about the surfacestatiosn project, and I provided several photos. I’m pretty sure they’ll be showing the picture of the rooftop USHCN weather station in Baltimore.

See it here:

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-48-noaa-admits-to-error-with-baltimores-rooftop-ushcn-station/

Not exactly. The model is merely an observation of what’s perceived as being past temperatures and then doing the software equivalent of casting goat entrails to peer into the future, except with scientific sounding terminology.

Temps have warmed since the LIA. Past reconstructions of temperature show quick ups and downs (unless of course you perceive MBH99 as scientific, which makes you religious, not scientific.) These are seen as normal variation. There is nothing in the current rise of tems in the past 150 years to suggest that mankind is solely to blame for these. In fact, the work of Mr Watts et al tell us that the temp record is likely to be incorrect/improper/biased. Not by an evil Dr. Hansen, either; most of this is likely to be poorly understood effects based on land use.

In truth nobody knows what the “average” global temperature ought to be nor what this was. GCM’s meanwhile are a poor tool. They are designed solely to model the effects of CO2 based on a myriad of SWAGs (assumptions) and unsurprisingly after a churning for days at petaflop speed they spit a result out that looks suspiciously similar to a linear trend based on fundamental GHG equations. This trend has an increasing first sigma error capability such that after 15 years the signal itself has no meaning. Then of course if the “strong PDO phase” kicks in and the temps later show up not as predicted (e.g. lower) but within the absurd first sigma range (error bars) then it’s pronounced as successful.

And then of course we have the fact that neither the IPCC nor anyone else can give a straight and reliable answer to how long CO2 lives in the atmosphere. There are “estimates” which are merely more SWAGs, which seem to pile up aftar a while. For example the SWAGs of days gone by were explicit that the poles ought to be warming more than the rest of the globe. The south pole didn’t play right. It’s cooling. GCM’s were “updated” (different entrail mix, apparently) to make the model fit that particular data. Then, of course, the modelers claimed that the southern cooling was predicted all along. People like you regurgitate the line by claiming that “the science has moved on and improved.” Nonsense. The science was caught with its panties around its ankles so was recast with the claim that the real culprit was that there was a pentaflop shortage. “We have more horsepower now, so we can better model!” More nonsense, this time on the level of claiming that a Corvette really isn’t a rolling overpriced POS and is worth buying because it has more horsepower. It solves all. Rubbish! Brute force isn’t the problem and isn’t the answer. In the world of software this has never been the case. We use brute force only to save coding time.

That leaves us with the following —

Your analogy is utterly devoid of meaning because neither the GCM nor the best of SWAGs nor the IPCC nor the rest of the entire movement can possibly tell you that the last 100 years isn’t perfectly natural.

Jared, first of all, the temperature rise had not been “steady” when you look at it over timescales of several years…It is only when looked at over a sufficiently large time that the trend clearly emerges from the noise. (See, for example, the HADCRUT record here http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/ ) Second, whether the trend has been flat for the last several years or not depends strongly on which temperature record one looks at and the exact number of years one looks over…further evidence of how trends over time periods of less than about 10 – 15 years can vary quite a bit.

Jared says: “In addition, Joel, you cannot claim that decade long absences of global warming were expected by the AGW community. Looking at statements by NASA, the IPCC and others, it is clear that they have expected the warming to continue.”

Again, that expectation is that the warming would continue when looked at over a long enough time period. As I have noted, the models that they are basing their predictions on clearly show large variations in shorter periods.

Jared says: “This is why GISS/NASA predicted that if an El Nino formed in 2006 or 2007, a new global temperature record surpassing 1998 would likely be set. The El Nino formed, but no new temperature record. Not even close, according to most metrics.”

Actually, the NASA GISS data itself does show that there was a new global temperature record, so by their own metric it was. HADCRUT and the satellites (which measure a somewhat different thing) do not show it to be a new record…but it was second in those records only to 1998.

Jared says: “In addition, the 2007 IPCC report predicted that half of the years between 2009 and 2015 would exceed 1998’s temperatures.”

Where in the IPCC report does it say this? (I am not saying it doesn’t, it well may…but I remember this as being a specific prediction made in one recent paper by the Hadley group.) At any rate, since we are still in 2008, I would say that we know very little about whether this prediction will turn out to be correct or not.

Waiting in dread of the second coming of AGW,
Mike Bryant

PS I think I’ve been fed this line before.

Dennis, I apologize if I sometimes come across as arrogant. However, I would ask you to consider who is truly more arrogant: (1) a person with little training or research background in a field who thinks that he or she knows more about a subject than most of the scientists who have spent years training and then researching these issues OR (2) a person who suggests that these scientists may actually know more than you do and tries to explain the ways in which you are deceiving yourself.

Let’s wait a year and see what reality tells us about the winter of 2009.