Will Replicated Global Warming Science Make Mann Go Ape?
By Patrick J. Michaels – from World Climate Report
About 10 years ago, December 20, 2002 to be exact, we published a paper titled “Revised 21st century temperature projections” in the journal Climate Research. We concluded:
Temperature projections for the 21st century made in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicate a rise of 1.4 to 5.8°C for 1990–2100. However, several independent lines of evidence suggest that the projections at the upper end of this range are not well supported…. The constancy of these somewhat independent results encourages us to conclude that 21st century warming will be modest and near the low end of the IPCC TAR projections.
We examined several different avenues of determining the likely amount of global warming to come over the 21st century. One was an adjustment to climate models based on (then) new research appearing in the peer-reviewed journals that related to the strength of the carbon cycle feedbacks (less than previously determined), the warming effect of black carbon aerosols (greater than previously determined), and the magnitude of the climate sensitivity (lower than previous estimates). Another was an adjustment (downward) to the rate of the future build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide that was guided by the character of the observed atmospheric CO2 increase (which had flattened out during the previous 25 years). And our third estimate of future warming was the most comprehensive, as it used the observed character of global temperature increase—an integrator of all processes acting upon it—to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a collection of climate models. All three avenues that we pursued led to somewhat similar estimates for the end-of- the-century temperature rise. Here is how we described our findings in paper’s
Abstract:
Since the publication of the TAR, several findings have appeared in the scientific literature that challenge many of the assumptions that generated the TAR temperature range. Incorporating new findings on the radiative forcing of black carbon (BC) aerosols, the magnitude of the climate sensitivity, and the strength of the climate/carbon cycle feedbacks into a simple upwelling diffusion/energy balance model similar to the one that was used in the TAR, we find that the range of projected warming for the 1990–2100 period is reduced to 1.1–2.8°C. When we adjust the TAR emissions scenarios to include an atmospheric CO2 pathway that is based upon observed CO2 increases during the past 25 yr, we find a warming range of 1.5–2.6°C prior to the adjustments for the new findings. Factoring in these findings along with the adjusted CO2 pathway reduces the range to 1.0–1.6°C. And thirdly, a simple empirical adjustment to the average of a large family of models, based upon observed changes in temperature, yields a warming range of 1.3–3.0°C, with a central value of 1.9°C.
We thus concluded:
Our adjustments of the projected temperature trends for the 21st century all produce warming trends that cluster in the lower portion of the IPCC TAR range. Together, they result in a range of warming from 1990 to 2100 of 1.0 to 3.0°C, with a central value that averages 1.8°C across our analyses.
Little did we know at the time, but behind the scenes, our paper, the review process that resulted in its publication, the editor in charge of our submission, and the journal itself, were being derided by the sleazy crowd that revealed themselves in the notorious “Climategate” emails, first released in November, 2009. In fact, the publication of our paper was to serve as one of the central pillars that this goon squad used to attack on the integrity of the journal Climate Research and one of its editors, Chris de Freitas.
The initial complaint about our paper was raised back in 2003 shortly after its publication by Tom Wigley, of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research and University of Toronto’s L. D. Danny Harvey, who served as supposedly “anonymous” reviewers of the paper and who apparently had a less than favorable opinion about our work that they weren’t shy about spreading around. According to Australian climate scientist Barrie Pittock:
I heard second hand that Tom Wigley was very annoyed about a paper which gave very low projections of future warmings (I forget which paper, but it was in a recent issue [of Climate Research]) got through despite strong criticism from him as a reviewer.
So much for being anonymous.
The nature of Wigley and Harvey’s dissatisfaction was later made clear in a letter they sent to Chris de Freitas (the editor at Climate Research who oversaw our submission) and demanded to know the details of the review process that led to the publication of our paper over their recommendation for its rejection. Here is an excerpt from that letter:
Your decision that a paper judged totally unacceptable for publication should not require re-review is unprecedented in our experience. We therefore request that you forward to us copies of the authors responses to our criticisms, together with: (1) your reason for not sending these responses or the revised manuscript to us; (2) an explanation for your judgment that the revised paper should be published in the absence of our re-review; and (3) your reason for failing to follow accepted editorial procedures.
Wigley asked Harvey to distribute a copy of their letter of inquiry/complaint to a large number of individuals who were organizing some type of punitive action against Climate Research for publishing what they considered to be “bad” papers. Apparently, Dr. de Freitas responded to Wigley and Harvey’s demands with the following perfectly reasonable explanation:
The [Michaels et al. manuscript] was reviewed initially by five referees. … The other three referees, all reputable atmospheric scientists, agreed it should be published subject to minor revision. Even then I used a sixth person to help me decide. I took his advice and that of the three other referees and sent the [manuscript] back for revision. It was later accepted for publication. The refereeing process was more rigorous than usual.
This did little to appease to those wanting to discredit Climate Research (and prevent the publication of “skeptic” research) as evidenced by this email from Mike Mann to Tom Wigley and a long list of other influential climate scientists:
Dear Tom et al,
Thanks for comments–I see we’ve built up an impressive distribution list here!
…
Much like a server which has been compromised as a launching point for computer viruses, I fear that “Climate Research” has become a hopelessly compromised vehicle in the skeptics’ (can we find a better word?) disinformation campaign, and some of the discussion that I’ve seen (e.g. a potential threat of mass resignation among the legitimate members of the CR editorial board) seems, in my opinion, to have some potential merit.
This should be justified not on the basis of the publication of science we may not like of course, but based on the evidence (e.g. as provided by Tom and Danny Harvey and I’m sure there is much more) that a legitimate peer-review process has not been followed by at least one particular editor.
Mann went on to add “it was easy to make sure that the worst papers, perhaps including certain ones Tom refers to, didn’t see the light of the day at J. Climate.” This was because Mann was serving as an editor of the Journal of Climate and was indicating that he could control the content of accepted papers. But since Climate Research was beyond their direct control, it required a different route to content control. Thus pressure was brought to bear on the editors as well as on the publisher of the journal. And, they were willing to make things personal. For a more complete telling of the type and timeline of the pressure brought upon Chris de Freitas and Climate Research see this story put together from the Climategate emails by Anthony Watts over at Watts Up With That.
Now, let’s turn the wheels of time ahead 10 years, to January 10, 2012. Just published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is a paper with this provocative title: “Improved constraints in 21st century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations” by Nathan Gillet and colleagues from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis of Environment Canada (not a group that anyone would confuse with the usual skeptics). An excerpt from the paper’s abstract provides the gist of the analysis:
Projections of 21st century warming may be derived by using regression-based methods to scale a model’s projected warming up or down according to whether it under- or over-predicts the response to anthropogenic forcings over the historical period. Here we apply such a method using near surface air temperature observations over the 1851–2010 period, historical simulations of the response to changing greenhouse gases, aerosols and natural forcings, and simulations of future climate change under the Representative Concentration Pathways from the second generation Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2).
Or, to put it another way, Gillet et al. used the observed character of global temperature increase—an integrator of all processes acting upon it—to guide an adjustment to the temperature projections produced by a climate model. Sounds familiar!!
And what did they find? From the Abstract of Gillet et al.:
Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.
The Transient Climate Response is the temperature rise at the time of the doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration, which will most likely occur sometime in the latter decades of this century. Which means that results of Gillet et al. are in direct accordance with the results of Michaels et al. published 10 years prior and which played a central role in precipitating the wrath of the Climategate scientists upon us, Chris de Freitas and Climate Research.
Both the Gillet et al. (2012) and the Michaels et al. (2002) studies show that climate models are over-predicting the amount of warming that is a result of human changes to the constituents of the atmosphere, and that when they are constrained to conform to actual observations of the earth’s temperature progression, the models project much less future warming (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Dashed lines show the projected course of 21st century global temperature rise as projected by the latest version (CanESM2) of the Canadian coupled ocean‐atmosphere climate model for three different future emission scenarios (RCPs). Colored bars represent the range of model projections when constrained by past 160 years of observations. All uncertainty ranges are 5–95%. (figure adapted from Gillet et al., 2012: note the original figure included additional data not relevant to this discussion).
And a final word of advice to whoever was the editor at GRL that was responsible for overseeing the Gillet et al. publication—watch your back.
References:
Gillet, N.P., et al., 2012. Improved constraints on 21st-century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 39, L01704, doi:10.1029/2011GL050226.
Michaels, P.J., et al., 2002. Revised 21st century temperature projections. Climate Research, 23, 1-9.
dana1981,
Just visited your favourite haunts, the SkS site. My experience is best defined by the word “slumming.” The stench of panic and desperation there are palpable. The aggressive approach and cheesy mockery are reminiscent of the “scientific socialism” magazines which went into over-drive to pump out their venom in the last days before the communism’s collapse.
To wit, skepticism…I mean real skepticism, not SkS’s embarrassing attempt to hijack the term…is described as an “anti-science campaign” which is “well-funded” by “narrow financial interests,” and skeptics are described as Bible-thumping, evolution denying low-brows. That’s rich, coming from a well-funded, glitzy site like SkS. When one casts stones from glass houses, one needs to be more careful, as the old adage goes. In the real world, of course, skeptical climate science can claim barely a fraction of what you Warmistas have been grabbing. Care to reveal the financial interests behind AGW (or is it “climate change” or “climate disruption” now). Never mind just the “small change,” from the usual foundations, university grants and even oil interests, but the trillions in the collapsing “green” and “renewable” scams, the dead carbon tax indulgences, the billions in government funding and hidden tax breaks.
What cheered me, though, is that the rhetoric, the mendacious content with its banal appeal to authority and the funny attempts to appear cool and up-to-date are all geared to the thinning left and the smelly OWS crowd. So, here’s my advice: Keep it up guys, you’re doing a great job. Give us more cackling, more Mike Mann defenses, compare us to Neanderthals and keep up the cry of “the science is settled, the science is settled!”
Chip – I certainly agree that Gillett et al. seem to prefer the results from the 1851-2010 timeframe. I disagree with that preference for a number of reasons, some of which I have discussed here (i.e.it relies on more warming from 1961 to 2010 than 1851 to 2010, which I haven’t seen anybody comment on – inconvenient facts once again, I presume).
Nevertheless, Gillett et al. also made it clear that their results are highly sensitive to the regression period used, both in the abstract and in the body of the text:
“By contrast, when regression coefficients calculated over the shorter 1901–2000 period following [Stott et al., 2006] are used to scale projections, projected warming is larger and consistent with that directly simulated, illustrating the sensitivity of the results to the regression period used.”
Those last 11 words are key to their findings – the projections are very sensitive to the regression period. That’s why they showed both. That’s why deleting one of those sets of projections is a distortion of their results. Frankly it’s a denial of inconvenient results.
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Thank you. That is what I was getting at. You made a blanket statement with no caveats.
So I assume you disagree with the IPCC dF= 5.35 ln(C/Co) in that they put it on a log basis?
Oh it’s also worth noting that Gillett et al. attribute greater than 100% of the observed warming from 1851-2010 to human effects (well over 100% to greenhouse gases). So there are a lot of reasons why “skeptics” should really be careful what they’re getting themselves into when endorsing this paper. Be careful what you wish for.
dana
Im well aware of the differences between mike trick and hide the decline.
So, you called this graph misleading
Ar4 and wmo presentations are no less misleading
Dana,
Your gish gallop away from my question to a diversion about the differences between Mike nature trick and hide the decline is a classic [SNIP: c’mon, Steve, you know the policy. -REP] tactic.
I repeat what I wrote below. Now, dana you’ve made mistakes before on SkS, I look forward
to how you treat this chart that Pat did especially in the context of SkS arguments about proper chartsmanship
#####################
“This post is a dishonest disgrace. The figure deletes essentially half of the Gillett (which is the correct spelling, by the way – two ‘t’s) results, calling them “not relevant”. More like not convenient, because they show Gillett’s second possible climate response, which is one with significantly higher warming. The full figure can be seen here”
Yup, kinda like hiding the decline dana.
When SkS defended hiding the decline, they appealed to two arguments.
1. it was discussed in the text
2. it was shown in other texts.
The WMO hide the decline was defended on the basis that the publication was not as important as IPCC.
It appears that
1. this blog post is not as important as the IPCC
2. the fact that the graphic has been changed is mentioned in the legend
3. the graphic is shown in other places.
using the defenses you used for hide the decline, this graph passes muster
On the other hand, if you call this graph misleading and raise a stink about a blog post,
then you should reconsider your defense of hide the decline. because here you are holding a blog to higher standard than the IPCC
E. M. Smith says (January 11, 2012 at 4:04 am….. “occupational birth control” on folks who do not agree with “settled science”. …………..”IMHO, it’s time to take the anonymous back room dealing out of science. Open the windows and doors, turn on the spotlights and cameras, and grow up.”
I concur that what Dr. Michaels shared with us is some feedback on the process-peer review- that failed in it’s primary objective: to expand or improve the state of our understanding- knowledge. Back in the days before the electronic revolution- when the current peer review process was put in place- it likely made some sense to have the give and take of review be anonymous. The danger of this closed approach to communication was shown by Dr. Michaels: if the gate keepers (editors, reviewers, publishers) act more like Machiavelli than Bacon, Descartes, Newton, etc. the intent of the process (adding to our knowledge base) is circumvented.
Can the process be fixed to keep Machiavellian traits, actions, etc. in check? I can’t answer this as my personal experience is from the use of the scientific method in the private world of product and process development. Our design reviews (what I will equate to the peer review process) had a lot more transparency then the academic peer review process does. We did have a process in place that allowed peers to submit questions, comments and or concerns on a paper, report, etc. anonymously, but this method was rarely used. Having been the process owner for a few formal design reviews it was rather easy to include the anonymous questions/comments into the design history files and require that the design team address them in the open and formally before the review was signed off as completed. The world is a competitive place so how to keep the trade secrets in the academic world confidential I don’t know…………….
Finding a why to get some checks and balances into the peer review process to reduce the probability of Machiavellian behavior seems like a good idea to me. How to do it……………. ?
By the way dana
your description of Mike’s trick on your site is wrong as Jean S has pointed out.
will you correct it or continue to mislead people:
You might know Jean S. from climate audit ( the rest of us know him from his stats work )
Here’s Jean’s comment correcting your mistake.
“This is incorrect. It’s “Mike’s Nature trick”. Mike (=Michael Mann) did not truncate any tree ring data in his publications (not specifically in his infamous 1998 Nature paper). Instead the “trick” is to add instrumental temperature series to the end of the reconstruction (to the truncated reconstruction in the case of Briffa’s series) prior to smoothing. This should be clear as the sentence continues “of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s”. Finally, the effect of this “trick” is to turn the end of the smoothed series upwards (instead of downwards as they would without adding in the instrumental series), and thus “to hide the decline”.
dana1981 says:
January 11, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Oh my goodness! That sounds a bit weird – I wasn’t aware one could attrribute OVER 100% of warming to CO2 ??
Good luck, Steptoe! I’m not optimistic — even if they did it, they’d probably slant it.
You can write to
NOVA@WGBH.org
or call
617.300.5400
I wrote to someone who was a NOVA production assistant — yesh! — now, long-time exec prod (but hardly a friend). Patrick Michaels is a neighbor of mine, now, and Judith Curry’s mentor/friend, Peter Webster, was a colleague of my husband’s. I’d facilitate, if possible, but I’m not optimistic.
(BTW, I handled the natl publicity for NOVA for its first four seasons, had to guide it beyond the kiss-of-death, talking-heads-from-MIT image. Frankly, dubbing it “Science Adventures for Curious Grown-ups” didn’t make me popular among the ‘gbh cognescenti. smile…. But, it worked.) ….Lady in Red
Genghis says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Hmm the equation in my last post needs ↔, greater than, less than symbols.
_______
Wouldn’t make any difference to the general inaccuracy of your contentions.
mkelly says:
January 11, 2012 at 1:57 pm
R. Gates says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Thank you. That is what I was getting at. You made a blanket statement with no caveats.
So I assume you disagree with the IPCC dF= 5.35 ln(C/Co) in that they put it on a log basis?
_______
Not familiar with this but there is no ratio that the log function of CO2 concentration can be muliplied by to give you an accurate measurement of either transient or equilibrium sentivity over all CO2 concentration levels– that is…a ratio will exist for any single concentration, but that ratio will change for other concentrations, and the jump in that ratio wil be non-linear such that the ratio will jump between levels, much as electrons jump between energy levels.
Steven Mosher,
your point would be cogent except that in the supposed instances of “hide the decline” the general nature of the missing information was indicated in text, and the graphs where original productions.
In this instance the text indicating missing information is downright misleading. That application of the same technique by the same team to 1901-2000 data results in a transient response of 1.7-2.5 C is clearly not “not relevant” to a discussion of transient climate response.
In this case, Anthony (or somebody working for Anthony) has clearly used a graphics program to manually remove the information about the the 1901-2000 result from the graphic displayed, a fact clearly indicated by the occasional additional mark next to the blue dashed line where the 1901-2000 data was not completely removed.
Anthony has gone to a lot of trouble to not reveal the caveats on the paper’s headline result. This is particularly troubling as the pre-1880 temperature data suffers from such limited geographical extent, particularly overland as to render it of dubious merit as a global temperature index, a problem that inevitably effects the quality of the papers result.
Of course, he has not revealed the equally embarrassing (for him) result in the attribution study in the paper, which shows that the GHG contribution to warming is greater than the net warming in all time periods examined. Arguably, of course, that is not relevant to the results he discussed, but neither did it require the physical removal of data.
[MODERATOR’S NOTE: Check your eyeglass prescription. -REP]
“Frankly it’s a denial of inconvenient results.”
lol.. like the last 12 or so years temps !
Dana: “…the criticisms of Climate Research were entirely valid, and based primarily on Soon and Baliunas’ horrid paper…”
You mean the paper that the AR5 Zero Draft vindicates?
http://climateaudit.org/2011/12/06/climategate-2-0-an-ar5-perspective/
dana1981:
Duh. Thanks to The Team’s control over climate science publishing (the subject of this post) EVERY paper has to nod religiously to the orthodoxy, or it never sees the light of day. An example is the research result announced earlier this week: “Global warming caused by greenhouse gases delays natural patterns of glaciation, researchers say.” What? Driving cars might avert the next glacial period? Don’t worry Team, the authors have your back:
Channell’s whole stupid report is based on the assumption that recent warming was caused by CO2, making it little more than a PR attempt to dismiss the perfectly rational fears of serious global cooling that REAL scientists are worried about, now that the sun has gone quiet.
Take into account the likely role of solar magnetic activity in the temperature history of the last 150 years and there is very little warming left to attribute to CO2, making the implied sensitivity very small, probably less than one (where net-negative feedbacks dampen rather than amplify climate forcings). So don’t worry dana, we know how to compensate for sensitivity estimates that assume that 20th century warming was CO2 driven. They provide an upper bound that is unrealistically high by a large margin. But thanks for your concern.
Upshot: no, CO2 will NOT have any significant delaying effect on the next glaciation, not unless we happen to happen to experience a Little Ice Age whose natural bottom puts us right on the very cusp of falling into Dr. Brown “cold attractor,” where CO2’s butterfly wing can make the difference. Vanishingly unlikely. Just the fact of another Little Ice Age will prove that CO2’s ability to stop natural cooling is like a paper-clip to a freight train. It is not going to stop anything.
Moderator, your response to my last post is deceptive either deliberately or from misinformation. If Anthony Watts does not publicly confirm that the graph was physically manipulated by deleting the data for the 1901-2000 transient response as I have claimed, I will publish a post proving the deletion and showing the original graph on my blog.
[Moderator’s Note: The following is from a subsequent comment which I have combined with this one. -REP]
slight addendum to my previous comment. As Patrick Michaels is the author of this blog, it is likely he rather than Anthony Watts responsible for doctoring the final graph, and the deceitful claim that the censored information was not relevant.
[REPLY: As you have already noted, Anthony posted this article as a guest post. Oddly enough, he has been criticized for posting “alarmist” articles without comment as well. You will also note, if you go through the comments, that Dr. Michaels, as well as other commenters, pro and con, have addressed the issues you’ve raised. No deception is intended and no one, skeptic or otherwise is deceived. -REP]
Anthony’s REPLY: My moderation team alerted me at work that Tom was going on a rampage, and I come back here dumbfounded how Tom could miss right at the top of the post these two important pieces of information
1. “by Dr. Pat Michaels”
2. The Link to World Climate report where the original essay was published, including the graph.
Further, the issue of the graph has been addressed in comments, by Michaels, Knappenberger, and others. You really should read all these before pronouncing me to be evil.
I think Tom owes an apology for his failure to read before pronouncing sentence and make threats to publish an “expose” rooted in confusion.
– Anthony Watts
Dana, that is a load of rubbish. Clearly the Gillett paper sets out to redo estimates using newly available data and presents the results as an improvement. In doing so it shows the previous results in order to highlight the improvement. Michaels rightly compares the new results with his previous work. The older results are completely irrelevant unless you can show good reason why a more limited timespan and data set should be chosen to analyse data which has intrinsically long time-dependent cycles.
If you can, publish a new paper critiquing Gillett et al. Good luck with that. Otherwise retract your head. In either case your criticisms of Michaels merely show your own prejudices.
R. Gates – “Whatever book, pamplet, or website you got this from, recycle, discard, and unlink, and try taking a real physics class.”
Can you point out what is wrong with this equation in equilibrium?
CO2* + N2 ↔ CO2 + N2⁺
The symbols * and ⁺ “are for the excited states to differentiate the energy modes – vibrational (*) for CO2 and translational (⁺) for N2.”
Warwick–what’s you email address.
[Moderator’s Note: Check your e-mail. -REP]
dana1981,
I just paid a your favourite haunts, the SkS site. That depressing experience is best defined by the word “slumming.” The reek of panic and desperation there are palpable. Such aggressive approach and cheesy mockery, kind of like the old “scientific Marxism” mags which went into over-drive pumping out their venom in the last days before the communism’s collapse.
To wit, skepticism…I mean real skepticism, not your SkS’s pitiful try at hijacking the word…is described as an “anti-science campaign” which is “well-funded” by “narrow financial interests,” and skeptics are smeared as Bible-thumping, evolution-denying low-brows. That’s rich, coming from a well-funded, glitzy site like SkS. When one casts stones from glass houses, one needs to be more careful, as the old adage goes. In the real world, of course, skeptical climate science can claim barely a fraction of what you Warmistas have been grabbing. Care to reveal the financial interests behind AGW (or is it “climate change” or “climate disruption” now?). Never mind the “small change,” from the usual foundations, university grants and even oil interests, but the trillions in the collapsing “green” and “renewable” scams, the dead carbon tax indulgences.
What cheered me, though, is that the rhetoric, the mendacious content with its banal appeal to authority and the funny attempts to appear cool and clever are all geared to the thinning left and the smelly OWS crowd. So, here’s my advice: Keep it up guys, you’re doing a great job. Give us more cackling, more censorship, beatify Mike Mann, compare us all to Neanderthals and keep up the cry of “the science is settled, the science is settled!”
Genghis says:
January 11, 2012 at 3:30 pm
R. Gates – “Whatever book, pamplet, or website you got this from, recycle, discard, and unlink, and try taking a real physics class.”
Can you point out what is wrong with this equation in equilibrium?
CO2* + N2 ↔ CO2 + N2⁺
The symbols * and ⁺ “are for the excited states to differentiate the energy modes – vibrational (*) for CO2 and translational (⁺) for N2.”
________
It’s not the equation itself, but the context with which you present it, as the context was supposed to be related to climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2, with all fast (Charney/transient) and slow (earth system) feedbacks included. Your equation has nothing to do with either of these, and if you think it does, my suggestion was that you take a physics class, or two, or three.
@Dunno
“This would of course contradict the surface stations ‘urban heat island’ arguments put forth so often on this site. Whoops.”
roflmao.. man, you have warped logic.
The UHI effect on the calculated “Globull Average Land Temp” slowed the cooling that would normally have occured in the natural cycle between 1940-1970 (ish) And then the massive increase in urbanisation, swallowing many stations that used to be “rural”, plus the accidental (yeah right) loss of many many remote rural stations contributes a significant amount (probably most) to the calculated “Globull Land temp” rise in the 1976-1998 period..
Then people got wise to what was happening because the SST didn’t match, and it became impossible to fudge the figures any more.
dana1981,
How does the graph you link to change the conclusion of the paper?
“Our adjustments of the projected temperature trends for the 21st century all produce warming trends that cluster in the lower portion of the IPCC TAR range. Together, they result in a range of warming from 1990 to 2100 of 1.0 to 3.0°C, with a central value that averages 1.8°C across our analyses.”
or this statement from the paper?
“Our analysis also leads to a relatively low and tightly-constrained estimate of Transient Climate Response of 1.3–1.8°C, and relatively low projections of 21st-century warming under the Representative Concentration Pathways.”
kakatoa says:
January 11, 2012 at 2:19 pm
I concur that what Dr. Michaels shared with us is some feedback on the process-peer review- that failed in it’s primary objective: to expand or improve the state of our understanding- knowledge. Back in the days before the electronic revolution- when the current peer review process was put in place- it likely made some sense to have the give and take of review be anonymous. The danger of this closed approach to communication was shown by Dr. Michaels: if the gate keepers (editors, reviewers, publishers) act more like Machiavelli than Bacon, Descartes, Newton, etc. the intent of the process (adding to our knowledge base) is circumvented.
====================
Er, Newton would have been quite at home with such machiavellian machinations –
It looks now that all consensus climate science is reduced to stagnantion worldwide as effectively as Newton imposed on mathematics in England for a hundred years..
Where’s prince charming to wake them all up with a kiss?