“The future ain’t what it used to be.”
-Tom Petty

Predictability evolves. …

Classic.

But then again, maybe not. And considering what rides on this data set not being contaminated, I hope the practitioners in the RC audience will agree that the issue deserves some serious attention rather than just casual dismissal.

Certainly there could be scientists in the RC audience who would agree, in light of your paper’s findings, that the temperature measurement adjustment issue deserves more attention. Unfortunately the RC line, as protector of the consensus and policy advocate for the big A in AGW, would not, for strategic reasons, admit to any significant doubt about the “settled” science. The RC approach prevents an adequate or properly oriented discussion of your paper that could and should be made by its natural critics. In my view, the non-technical issues RC introduces and at times an apparent failure to comprehend fully what the paper was measuring or the points being made are manifestations of this role. Critical to the paper would have been a discussion of the very last part of your paper where you write, “Additionally, there is always the possibility in cross sectional regressions that unobservable heterogeneity may explain both climate and economic processes in such a way as to eliminate the significance of the results reported here.”

The papers use of MSU satellite temperature measurements hits too close for RC comfort, I think, to the problem of those measurements also showing a major discrepancy with climate models in the measured and predicted relationship of surface to tropospheric warming in the equatorial regions of the globe. In that controversy, discovery of errors in the satellite measurements makes that problem go away. In my layperson’s view, however, I do not see that the general conclusions from the modeling of spatial differences to temperature will be affected much by the choice of the temperature data set used.

The issue of spatial autocorrelation of temperatures is one that I ponder as a layperson as it concerns the degree of its influence in (a) relating local climate changes to regional and global average changes and what that implies for the effects of aglobal trend for the local resident, (b) how much of the large differences that I have noted on near distanced temperature measuring stations are the result of measurement errors or are real differences (Steve M has alluded to this question a number of times) and (c) at what point will climate models have sufficient resolution to weigh in with modeled differences of nearby local temperatures.

Finally I would be curious what people who questioned your methodologies in this thread took away from your replies and explanations. John V’s comments concerning over fitting of a model based simply on the number of independent variables used and your response comes to mind.

What I parsed out of it for the second sentence is bizarre. What does it mean?

Is he really using all those words in the article to say it’s usually one way until it becomes another, different way?

I die a little inside everytime Ross uses that word. It just looks…wrong.

Re: 273

The models show the planet is absorbing .85 watts more energy per meter squared than it emits into space. Normally this absorbtion/emission is almost in equilibrium until the normal state is going to change from near equilibrium. This recent rate of change in this imbalance is abnormally fast, and has almost never happened in the recent past, the last 1000 or more years.

If we’ve only just now been able to measure this, how would they know whether it ever happened before? How do we know that’s not the norm?

This is like saying, “The dog was asleep 5 minutes ago, and now he’s awake, something’s seriously wrong” without taking into account a more significant portion of the dog’s life.

This is science??

As a user fee, as the temperature goes up, more money is available for climate research and mitigation. If it works ( or AGW disproven) the need for the user fee disappears; if it worsens or is proven, it goes up.

This is basically what we have now. Scientists who are pro-AGW seem to get more grant money than those who are not. To me your proposed method would tend toward more corruption of the data in order to keep the money flowing.

Burning the midnight oil.

Almost unprecedented means that it happens rarely.
Not unprecedented means it’s happened before at least once.
Unprecedented means it’s never happened.

Could we get a number here?

Let me see if I understand what he’s saying in that article.

The models show the planet is absorbing .85 watts more energy per meter squared than it emits into space. Normally this absorbtion/emission is almost in equilibrium until the normal state is going to change from near equilibrium. This recent rate of change in this imbalance is abnormally fast, and has almost never happened in the recent past, the last 1000 or more years.

Nice ‘n’ vague.

Yep, time to roll out the memes again, this one hasn’t had an airing for a couple of months at least:

Because Gavin would never spin a scientific story without caveats, would he?

Actually, to be fair to him, although Gavin used the word “unprecedented”, he did add a caveat, to make it “almost unprecedented”. Someone will have to explain to me the difference between “almost unprecedented” and “not unprecedented”, it strikes me these are “remarkably similar” statements (to use another climatology meme).

That’s the problem with double standards. It’s so easy to cross-check using the magic of the interweb.