Sorry for the delay in reply. I saw that you posted a similar discussion on RealClimate.

Jack, the warming of the oceans since 1955 doesn’t resemble the increase of GHGs in any way. See the sinusoidal curve at Levitus ea., with a cooling 1980-1985, while GHGs were increasing fast. Hansen linked the 1993-2003 warming to the increase of GHGs in that period, but did not include the previous periods…

I don’t see why the ocean warming should resemble the increase in GHGs. Temperature changes in the climate system are non-linear and spatially diverse, ocean circulation is variable, and ocean/atmosphere systems like the PDO and NAO have specific phase characteristics that don’t have much in the way of intermediate “positions”.
Levitus et al. 2005 discusses non-uniform oceanic temperature response in paragraph 11, with an interesting reference to the Indian/Asian brown cloud.

Moreover, Barnett proved that models don’t capture natural variability.

That’s unsurprising, particularly because they can’t effectively capture the size, duration, or frequency of ENSO events, though they do have them. That’s why ensemble results are preferred over single run results. Am I missing something more subtle?

Further, the change in heat content, corrected for ocean surface area/volume, shows that the NH oceans warm much faster (some 50%) than the SH oceans, while GHGs are more evenly distributed,

Barnett says that the warming signal in the northern and southern Atlantic penetrates deeper due to convection. Warming of the Indian Ocean appears to have been suppressed by aerosols (though I don’t know how far south this effect extends). Also refer to the last sentence of Levitus et al. 2005 paragraph 11.

Last but not least, there is a huge discrepancy between the supposed radiative heat balance at the surface, according to Barnett, and the heat storage, as follows from the ocean findings, according to Levitus,

I looked at both papers side-by-side and cannot find a specific mention of this. However, Levitus et al. 2005 indicates that ocean warming may actually be under-estimated (end of paragraph 10). If that’s the discrepancy, it’s not in the direction I would prefer it to be.

Jack, the warming of the oceans since 1955 doesn’t resemble the increase of GHGs in any way. See the sinusoidal curve at Levitus ea., with a cooling 1980-1985, while GHGs were increasing fast. Hansen linked the 1993-2003 warming to the increase of GHGs in that period, but did not include the previous periods…

Moreover, Barnett proved that models don’t capture natural variability. See Fig. S1 of the supporting online material which shows that the models and the observations significantly differ for any periodic events between 10-60 years, which includes the 11/22 and longer sun cycles.

Further, the change in heat content, corrected for ocean surface area/volume, shows that the NH oceans warm much faster (some 50%) than the SH oceans, while GHGs are more evenly distributed, but aerosols are emitted (and stay there) for 90% in the NH. Aerosols, according to current climate models, have a large cooling effect…

Last but not least, there is a huge discrepancy between the supposed radiative heat balance at the surface, according to Barnett, and the heat storage, as follows from the ocean findings, according to Levitus, based on NOAA data (fig. S2 in the Levitus paper need to be corrected for ocean area to be comparable to the Barnett findings at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/309/5732/284/FIG4 ).

As you point out, a main issue is the influence of the UHI on the recorded trends. Until Jones et. al. gets off their “my data! mine! you can’t see it! it’s mine! mine!” kick, we won’t find out.

However, UHI is likely not a “primary warming factor” as you state. The cities likely are not warming the world appreciably, but they may be warming the temperature record significantly, which is very different.

w.

This is the paper:
Magnuson, J. J., Robertson, D. M., Benson, B. J., Wynne, R. H., Livingstone, D. M., Arai, T., Assel, R. A., Barry, R. G., Card, V., Kuusisto, E., Granin, N. G., Prowse, T. D., Stewart, & K. M., Vuglinski, V. S. 2000. Historical Trends in lake and river ice cover in the Northern Hemisphere. Science 289: 1743- 1746.

John J. Magnuson’s Web site

I apparently was misremembering the trend in this data; it’s 5-6 days earlier (for thaw) and later (for freeze). The 9-10 days is probably for a different phenological trend.

Re: #42, from Dave Dardinger:
Sorry, my response was for Paul. I didn’t make the attribution correctly.

Re: #47 from Warwick Hughes
Regarding rebound from the LIA: sure, that’s fine, but there is a warming trend. That would be global, wouldn’t it? [I still think that current observations indicate greenhouse warming as part of the cause, and I think that the ocean water column warming is probably the most unassailable data set demonstrating it. My point in the original "weakest link in the chain of connectivity" was to note that a variety of data types evince a warming trend which is consistent with basic physics and models containing them. Tim Barnett of Scripps made some considerably stronger statements regarding his recent paper.]

Regarding urban heat islands, in general:

The main issue seems to be whether or not UHIs significantly affect global temperature trends. UHIs of some kind certainly exist; I offered papers which indicate how their climate effect has been assessed. To show that UHIs are a primary rather than a peripheral factor in global climate change would require rebuttal of these assessments, and demonstration of how the UHI signal propagates into the full climate system. In particular, I think that it would take effort to show how UHIs affect ocean temperatures at depth, and how they are the main factor in Hansen’s “global energy imbalance”.

Finally, if UHIs are indeed a primary warming factor: cities aren’t going away.

I did not say that. I said that if the WSJ is featuring columns which say climate change is happening and that it is humanity’s fault, at least in part, then the proof must be there.

Even the WSJ wouldn’t smokescreen an issue if it were clear that it was true.

I mean, I’d heard that scientific results about the climate were submitted to the journals … but I didn’t realize they meant the Wall Street Journal. In that case, we can all go home, move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here, party’s over …

w.

Also, this article was in the WSJ, not in some, what you would say, “liberal” paper. That the WSJ seems to indicate that skeptics are mistaken, it shows that the proof of the occurrence of human-induced climate change exists.

The PowerPoint viewer seems not to display such comments.

One pertinent comment about the USHCN station history file may be that the first of this month was the eleventh anniversary of the most recent update to it.

Item 1 has link to problems with weather station sites.

Is that the overall trend, or a local impact somewhere? Are you comparing latest thaws of 1800 to earliest thaws of the past twenty years?

As a data point, I personally saw Ice on Lake Champlain this year in late May, this is roughly 20 days later than I normally see it there. Though admitedy my observational time frame is sporadic.

I just haven’t seen a real complete data set for what your are talking about (global, not local), so far as I know there is only good data for one area in Alaska where people have been betting on it for like 75+ years. I know of no comprehensive study going back that far.

But I honestly would like to see the data, data that is up to date of course. I’e seen a lot of data for the northeast that snowfall is less now than it was in the 1970′s (same with lake, ice). However that data ends in 2000, those of us that live in the Northeast realize that the years from 2000 to 2005 have seen abnormally large snowfall, incluiding the winter of 2003-2004 where we had eight months of snow at least one day a month. And who can forget the snow in Las vegas last year.