How do submerged submarines take sun or star shots when under polar ice? How deep are their cooling water intakes? (Hint: It varies).

Very good point that some data might be selective or atypical because ships looked for both currents and winds to help them on their way.

I cannot get my mind around the principle of relating a constant (assumed) model wind speed relative to the cooling effect on a bucket of water. If I had proposed effects and solutions like that in my (serious) career, I would not have stayed in it for long. I’d be there dancing on the head of a pin with the others of like mind.

Now for a serious finish to this post. The more I read CA, the more aware I become that people who OUGHT to have certain data are simply not releasing it or talking about it because it does not fit their made-up minds.

One can be guilty of a sin of omission as well as one of comission.

What does the collective think of a list of matters where we suspect “inconvenient” data is being shuffled to the bottom of the pack? I can start with Phil Jones’ Lost Australian temperature data from his 1980′s publications and Steve might mumble something about Lonnie T, but I think there’s much more. You can often read its presence into guarded phrases and qualified sentences.

News: Some sudden shock at the Bali AGW circus turned Aust PM Rudd from a confident new winner to a frightened grey person almost overnight. Congrats to the public servants who had the facts more than the propaganda. I suspect more than one of the CA regulars would know some of them.

Hear! Hear!

Capsule microexperiments are not fashionable. Who today would leave his/her office and computer, take a couple of buckets on a cruise and compare temps with hull and engine intakes?

Models are fashionable. Why do that bucket cruise when you can elegantly model x^y parameters that have occurred to you over many years, and so smooth your data and error estimates that the boss would give you a medal for removing anomalies?

Real data can be substituted with imaginary. Blind Freddie knows that there are marked changes in vertical sea temperature profiles at a location, maybe an order of magnitude greater than the final model error estimate. When you don’t know, or don’t define, what you are sampling, why sample it at all?

Nature does not change, Man/Womankind does. The 1941 SST change cannot be ascribed to any bad personmade global activity, so it is smoothed out. The first hot decade of the 2000s is not made by Nature but by Personkind, so it has to be kept, even amplified. Personal experience: I was born in June 1941. In the early part of the year, it was fairly hot and wet. The latter part was cooler, so I had to drink a lot. And I was 12 lb 6 ozs when the temp changed. Include that in a global model, these are big numbers.

This is not science – even to the extent of making sunshine corrections to buckets of water at night time. Even to ignoring cold upwelling like the big one off NSW in the last year, omitting that each packet of cold that rises is balanced by a packet of warmer that sinks.

As we used to say, this subject is about as fruitful as kicking treacle. (For outsiders, a type of thick sticky syrup loaded with joules).

But I’ve written this before. Several times.