Further Comments on debate

The main thrust of Tom’s argument was “it has warmed” therefore we are right to be worried.
The main thrust of Andrew’s argument was “it has warmed … but as a group there has been dishonesty in climate science and we don’t trust nor agree with your assertions that we should be worried”.
The main contention appeared to be whether the “last decade” of standstill was enough to be significant.
Perhaps the best way to put this, is that if we agree on the basic physics that suggests 1C warming (although Hermann Harde using latest Hitran suggests 0.45) … but if we take the 1C warming for a doubling, then the net remaining warming has been -0.1C. No warming, it should have warmed due to direct effects of CO2 by 0.1 so net warming due to feedbacks is: (0 – 0. 1 = -0.1).
Unfortunately, I couldn’t show the latest graphic Andrew Montford, was using, so the following old one has to do. This shows the IPCC prediction from its 2001 report against actual temperatures.

Things have got a lot worse since 2009. If we only look at feedbacks, assuming 1C of direct warming, the current lack of warming looks even worse. Because whereas there should have been 0.06 to 0.53 warming from feedbacks, we actually don’t have any warming to attribute to feedbacks instead for the last decade the change attributable to feedbacks is -0.1C . In other words, because the CO2 warming is accepted science, the “speculative”, the lack of warming this last decade is all the more damning of the part that is most at question: the feedbacks.
So does this matter? Is 10 years relevant. It is enough to cause serious doubt. Indeed, as Andrew showed on his graph there was serious doubt around 2005 when the actual temperature fell out of the bottom of the range. This in itself does not disprove the theory, however we expected to see an honest and open discussion of this in climate science and a reappraisal of the certainty of predictions.
Instead, we saw a closing of the ranks, outright denial that it wasn’t warming. In other words, total flouting of the required openness and frankness of problems which is the hallmark of good science.
Indeed, with a background in signal analysis, I would go a lot further than most sceptics and say that, given the known properties of the frequency of the variation of global temperatures (its 1/f type noise), we would expect a temperatures series as we have seen. In layman’s terms, the best way to show that the latter half of the 20th century has much the same long-term natural variation is to compare the two halves … one largely natural, the other supposedly manmade. (hopefully you can see that I’ve just copied and pasted the earlier section below the later)

This is what we call a “control”, the period 1880 to 1940 is the temperature series without the supposed driver, the period 1940 to 2010 is one with. What this appears to show is that there has been some underlying cause of climate change throughout the time and not one acting in the latter half and not in the earlier half.
It could all be natural
Even if we exclude the known 1C warming for a doubling (or perhaps 0.45 because it needs considering), there is no reason to attribute the climate signal to anything other than pure chance. To show how easy it is to recreate the temperature series from noise, the following two graphs contain: a) the global temperatuer series, b) a section of random noise (10% of the generated sample … so selected but no reasonably common). I could have cropped the random noise to make it look even more like the global climate signal, but I expect others to be honest, so I’ve kept it in the raw form to let you decide how close the two are. The question to answer: is how well does the first half of the noise graph match the global climate graph (which if you think they are similar, means that the climate signal can be reproduced by about 1 part in 20 of a random noise signal.

Feedbacks
This is an old list – which I did in a rush, but I think much of it is still current. And as I keep saying, if someone were paying me to produce material which I should be reading by academics who are paid to do it, rather than doing it myself.
Evidence contrary to massive feedbacks in climate models.

1. Ice cores show CO2 lagged the changes in temperature and therefore was not a cause.
2. Spencer and Braswell, their analysis of  NASA data: “NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing.” (Yahoo)
3. Lindzen and Choi implies that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity: “warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1°C … This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5°C to 5°C and even more for a doubling of CO2″(paper)
4. Richard P. Allan: This new paper by Richard P. Allan of the University of Reading discovers via a combination of satellite observations and models that the cooling effect of clouds far outweighs the long-wave or “greenhouse” warming effect. While Dessler and Trenberth (among others) claim clouds have an overall positive feedback warming effect upon climate due to the long-wave back-radiation, this new paper shows that clouds have a large net cooling effect by blocking incoming solar radiation and increasing radiative cooling outside the tropics.
5. While all greenhouse models show an increasing warming trend with altitude, peaking around 10 km at roughly two times the surface value, the temperature data from balloons give the opposite result: no increasing warming, but rather a slight cooling with altitude in the tropical zone. (more)
6. CERN physicists conducted a cosmic ray climate experiment that appears to make credible the link between solar activity (sunspots) and global temperature.
7. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found evidence that coal burning plants may actually be cooling the planet. This claim that recent pollution was the cause of colder temperatures, is very much at odds with the claim that the reduction in pollution after the introduction of clean air acts in the 1970s on a global scale had nothing to do with the coincidental apparent rise in temperatures. It may be possible to argue that different types of pollution act in different ways, but as most of it is coal burning I’m entirely sceptical of the selective interpretations of the effects which just happen to match the required groupthink.
8. I’m going to add the paper by Hermann Harde that suggests the radiative forcing using latest HITRAN data is half that of the older HITRAN data used in the climate models. But whilst the author was strong on the spectral data, they clearly weren’t a climate modeller. Worrying the English version hasn’t materialised (it was only available in German).
9. CO2 the cooling gas. The simple fact is that CO2 is a cooling gas. It tends to cool the atmosphere where the CO2 is warmer than the surrounding environment … which high in the atmosphere is the cold of space.
10. Something like 50% of surface heat bypasses the bulk of  possible CO2 blanketing by being taken straight to the edge of the stratosphere by convection (it’s in the climate data!) …. which means that the cooling effect of CO2 is not just an “interesting” aside but it does have a significant effect on the rate of cooling of the atmosphere.
11. Natural climate variability is around 0.1C/decade with a profile near to 1/f noise. At this level, something like 10-20% of randomly produced signals from 1/f noise would appear with the same basic trends as the current temperature record. Given that half the trends would be the other way (cooling), it is very difficult to say anything other than: “the global temperature is not incompatible with natural climate variability”. It is not necessary to explain the temperature signal with weird unproven positive feedbacks.
12. Most Met Office global temperature forecasts were high (until embarrassment stopped them doing them). In essence this is the flip side of one because they kept forecasting warming for an entire decade when it didn’t warm and only about one year did they even the sign right as most years it was well the lowest expected temperature. The point is this shows that climate forecasts don’t work. I.e. the models don’t work. I think I worked out the odds of that happening by chance as 1 in 512 if the models were wright. But as you might expect, all the predictions have mysteriously disappeared so I can’t recheck that statistic.