Wrong. Your dispute is an extreme form of cherry picking. The AGW prediction is a pattern of temperature change in the atmosphere that includes troposphere warming especially at altitude in the tropics and stratosphere cooling. The stratosphere has cooled, but so what? The pattern of temperature change in the atmosphere that AGW predicts has not happened.
‘

Richard, you’re the one who is wrong. The general pattern of observed warming in the troposphere is quite similar to the predictions, though some details differ. Certainly much, much closer than what would be predicted without including CO2 forcing.

2.
“’Another is that the arctic will warm faster than it warms closer to the equator.’

Wrong. Your dispute is another example of extreme cherry picking. The AGW prediction is that polar regions will warm faster than it warms closer to the equator. There are two polar regions and the Antarctic is cooling. That the Arctic is warming does not refute the fact that the prediction of cooling polar regions (n.b. both of them) is not happening.”

Richard, as I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the ozone hole facilitates cooling in the southern polar region while the circumpolar vortex block warm air advection from the north. Some while your argument is technically true, it is misleading, and the cooling in Antarctica does not falsify AGW.

3.
“’A third is that the day – night temperature differences will tend to decrease.’

Wrong. Cherry picking again. And this time it is combined with a misunderstanding. Any global warming from any cause induces a reduction to day-night temperatures. The reduction to day-night temperatures is a predicted effect of increased surface heating: it is NOT a prediction of AGW. There is a limit to maximum surface temperatures in the tropical warm pool (first determined by Ramanathan & Collins, Nature, v351, 27-32 (1991) and subsequently confirmed by several others). This limit to surface temperature results from increased surface heating inducing increased evapouration (which cools the surface) with resulting increase to cloud cover (that reflects more solar energy as every sunbather has noticed).”

Increased heat leads to more evaporation leads to more cloudiness leads to a reduction in the diurnal temperature range. So while the decreased diurnal temperature range doesn’t prove AGW, it would be expected if AGW is true.

Is that the partial support that’s opposite to impartial?

Thanks for the clarification, Anthony.

I was referring to your decision to close down a thread: “NSIDC’s Dr Walt Meier…” without allowing as right of reply.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/21/nsidc-s-dr-walt-meier-answers-10-questions/#comments

In this case you shut down the debate immediately following some charges against my claim.

Don’t take the wrong message. I’m not claiming prior deliberation on your part. I am asking you to clarify your position. If it’s “property rights rule”, fine. But please be more explicit in your rulings, so we all know where we stand.

REPLY: The thread is still open, I just wanted the off topic discussion to stop.

his own data show only seasonal winter warming at the poles
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23668657@N07/

the seasons are named for notthern hemisphere seasons

Good use of the straw man there, Brendan. It seems to be a favorite of AGWers.
No “vast conspiracy” is needed to keep the AGW bandwagon rolling along. There are AGWers of every stripe, with various agendas, all creating feedback loops, the biggest from the MSM, and politicians.
Nice try, though.

“THERE IS a good, but by no means certain,
chance that the world’s average climate will
become significantly warmer during the next
century, because of the increasing atmospheric
concentrations of infrared-absorbing
and re-radiating, so-called “greenhouse’”
gases.”

A visionary position at the time. Take a step back and examine all the evidence … either Richard Lindzen is a better judge of Revelle’s views in the latter part of his life than his own daughter, or else he is perpetrating a rather shabby little lie.

“Let us by all means bypass Wikipedia and let Roger speak for himself…”

The paper provided hardly qualifies Roger Revelle as a Sceptic or a Believer. It does not examine any data on AGW. It simply notes that “…there is a good, but by no means certain, possibility of significant warming over the next century…”, takes this hypothesis as a starting point and goes on to examine some mitigating actions. The tone of the paper is that there are many reasonably straightforward, low cost actions which could be taken to address any problem, but that ‘more research is needed’.

Hardly a position with which anyone would disagree, and neither supporting nor rejecting the underlying hypothesis of AGW. The quotes you picked seem to imply that the paper is an urgent warning, which is by no means the case…

As I said, Singer is the only person left alive who knows for certain the truth behind the controversy, (and so little point debating a ‘his word against mine’ situation) however there are numerous reasons to doubt the Singer-Lindzen versionL-

1. The article and its conclusions repeated verbatim a large amount of material from a previous piece soley authored by Singer.

2. Material from the notes from the meeting constitute 1% of the finished piece.

3. The conclusions were contrary to Revelle’s stated position clearly expressed elsewhere.

4. None of Revelle’s students, associates or family corroborate Singer’s version. His daughter wrote this in a Washington Post op-ed:

“Contrary to George Will’s “Al Gore’s Green Guilt” {op-ed, Sept. 3} Roger Revelle – our father and the “father” of the greenhouse effect – remained deeply concerned about global warming until his death in July 1991. That same year he wrote: “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” Will and other critics of Sen. Al Gore have seized these words to suggest that Revelle, who was also Gore’s professor and mentor, renounced his belief in global warming.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. “

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1024842.html

5. Quote from Singer: “When we were satisified with the galleys, we went to his house for cocktails, followed by
dinner in a restaurant with his wife Ellen, and several of his friends.”

Quote from Revelle’s secretary’s sworn affadavit: “In late summer 1990, Roger started coming into the office for short periods of time and often would spend much of the time dozing. Sometimes he would fall asleep while he was dictating . I remember that even as late as November 1990 he was too weak to walk very far”

We also know that Singer is quite prepared to fabricate evidence when it suits, for example inventing a fictitious paper in <iScience on his website to support the equally fictitious claim that most glaciers are increasing in size …

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/05/10/junk-science/

Does Lindzen even acknowledge that the Revelle ‘conversion’ is, to say the least, controversial? Nope – he cites it as an extraordinary example of ‘the posthumous alteration of skeptical positions’.

Methinks the Professor doth protest too much.

This is from an Oceanography</i article, published after his death, that he could well have been working on at the time he was visited by S. Fred Singer …

Research and observations over the next 10 to 20 years should give us a much better idea of the likely magnitude of atmospheric and oceanic warming during the twenty-first
century. In the meantime we should think of ways to mitigate, adapt to, and better understand future global change and its effects on our society and our environment.
There are at least six kinds of actions that could be taken to mitigate and delay climatic warming:

Not that different from measures recommended by the likes of Dr Hansen … One wonders if the rest of Lindzen’s examples are as well-founded in fact?

“You seem to be trying to argue that perhaps what would have happened in the absence of greenhouse gas forcings is that the trend from say 1910 to 1940 would have continued up til now.
we believe that the natural trend over the last half decade should have been flat or slightly negative.”

Well you have to believe that don’t you or the AGW case falls flat on its face.

Of course you have no verifiable emperical and quantifiable evidence for this. Just a few hypothesis, statements and an unshakeable faith that it has to be, or your belief system is dust.

The trend I quoted was from 1880 by the way but you can go all the way back to the start of mans recording of global temperatures in 1850 to see the same natural warming trend to 1945.

I was upfront about my graphs of trends containing a certain sophistry. I am upfront with this technique unlike some of the alarmist brigade.

Check my statements.

1. The UAH temperature trend is negative from 1978 – 1994.

2. The UAH temperature trend is negative from 1995 – 1997

3. The UAH temperature trend is negative from 1999 – 2000

4. The UAH temperature trend is negative from 2001 – date

5. All these data sets from 1978 which don’t include 1998 are negative

6. 1998 is an outlier for reasons which most everyone agrees is due to
factors other than CO2

Now all those individual statements are quite true and independently verifiable as you will have to agree

However if I was to state that this proves that the AGW theory is false and the Earth is actually cooling that would not necessarily be true.

But I don’t actually have to say that, I could just let the six statements stand and let other people draw an inference. You will not be fooled but others might be.

I t shows what can be done with data and statistics to create a certain impression or support a certain idea.

You see this quite often in the alarmist brigade. They quote some warming figure and say this is the highest ever seen, or the greatest on record or some such. They then link it and say CO2 has also been rising at the greatest ever recorded rate. They then quote how many billions of tons Mankind have been putting into the atmosphere.

I would say so what it is no different to the technique I have just used above.

Of course some counter “Ah but we now have the Models! to ‘prove’ the links and when we apply the models to the recorded data we have a fit.”

I say send me any random sample of Roulette spins amouting to hundreds or thousands and I will return you a betting model that will ‘prove’ you can make money at Roulette. You can ‘prove’ it by running the model against the data you yourself supplied and you will find that it works and you can send me some money for my efforts. I can do that everytime, guaranteed.

Of course the trick is to keep the model working when new data is supplied it is more than likely than not that the new data will start to move away from the model. That’s ok I can tweek the model for a while eg extend that betting sequence, alter the bet size here etc and still you will be shown to be making money. As the data builds up that becomes more difficult, so I could start to question your methodology for recording the data for a while. When the evidence becomes overwhelming I could then just disappear with your money!

That is I am afraid what these modellers have done. Their models have been created mainly from the data not a universally agreed knowledge an understanding of how the climate works and all gigantic number of factors and interelaltionships involved.

The modellers seem to have passed the first stage of the subsequent process, as the new data does not match the models ie they have tweeked their models, altered their understanding of past temperatures downwards in the main etc. We seem to be in the second phase questioning the accuracy of the data. “Cant spot that essential Hot Spot in the atmosphere? It must be your instruments that are wrong the model is right after all.”

The third phase is still to come, the dissapearence of the main players with no hope of ever getting back the money we have expended in the meantime!

Comments?

Alan

“Did you miss my little entry about the Professor’s repeating of Fred Singer’s shameful hoodwinking of a gravely ill man?”

I guess I missed that, when I was reading your very questionable spin — based on Wikipedia, which is also noted in Dr. Lindzen’s paper as being completely biased toward global warming advocacy. For the record, here’s what happened:

John Lancaster published his unfounded personal opinion, denying that Mr. Revelle was a co-author of the article. But how would he know? He was never present.

Reville had invited Singer into his home numerous times; he could have simply asked Singer to leave. But he never did. They were friends and associates.

And forget about Reville’s family — they were not present either. They are only shouting bystanders, who were not present at the time.

When Singer read Lancaster’s uninformed and/or dishonest statements, he sued Lancaster — who promptly folded like a cheap card table. As Mr. Philips admits above, Lancaster was forced to retract his mendacious statements.

Mr. Philips also admits that: “…only Singer now knows exactly what went on in that office,” so what evidence is there that Lancaster’s version is accurate? In fact, Lancaster was inventing conversations. He is very fortunate that Dr. Singer did not force the issue into court.

Lancaster put his tail firmly between his legs, and ran off yelping that he was “likely to prevail at trial because my comments were true…”

Pf-f-f-ft.

Lancaster spewed out a lot of mendacious opinions, and he was nailed for them. And Mr. Philips calls this a “shameful hoodwinking”?? With the gorons’ hundreds of $millions available for their disreputable cause, defending Lancaster in court would have been a no-brainer, since the case would have discredited a stand-up skeptic, Dr. Singer. But nobody backed Lancaster. Conclusion: Lancaster stated things that were untrue, therefore nobody came to his defense.

So, if Prof. Lindzen is mis-stating events, then go get him, boy! Be an alarmist hero! If you’ve got it in you. But please, stick to verifiable facts — and leave the prevaricating Wikipedia entries out of it; they have major credibility problems — as do RealClimate, Eli Rabett, Tamino, and the rest of the alarmist sites which, unlike this site, arbitrarily delete comments by opposing points of view.

“So Smokey seems to be agreeing with Joel Shore that AGW is a massive conspiracy.”

That should read: “So Smokey seems to be agreeing with Joel Shore that Lindzen claims that AGW is a massive conspiracy.”

Smokey replied: “See what Joel Shore is doing here, folks? In fact, Dr. Lindzen has laid out specific allegations, proving that many scientific bodies have been hijacked by pro-AGW advocates who place their political agenda ahead of scientific truth.”

So Smokey seems to be agreeing with Joel Shore that AGW is a massive conspiracy.

Smokey, you need to clarify your position.

1. Is AGW a vast conspiracy?

2. If not, why is it possible to hijack “many scientific bodies” in the absence of a vast conspiracy?