The 1995-2009 figure was just less than 95% significant.

Now if you were told that you had a 95% chance of your cancer being removed by treatment you would take it (1 chance in 20 that it wouldn’t work).

If you were told the probability was 94% – would you decline? 1 chance in 17 of failure??

Of course not.

The deniers are not playing with thermometer sensitivity – they are intentionally misunderstanding what is mean by statistical significance. This is not a binary situation.

You know perfectly well that even one weather thermometer can’t measure 12/tenths (10 times higher) of a degree, let alone all the thermometers in the world! These microscopic levels are simply undetectable, and that’s exactly what Prof Jones admitted.

So why did the Arctic icecap shrink during 2007? And why did it grow back last year?

I’m sure you haven’t forgotten about the “missing sink” that’s been soaking up about half of all our emissions of CO2, regardless of how much we increase them. That must be located, and extensive studies will be needed to establish the processes involved and consider the possibility of increasing its throughput. Quite probably yearly international conferences will be required (95% probability).

He mentioned this just failed to meed 95% confidence level.

That is quite normal as there had not been a long enough period to produce the required precision. (His example for 1975-2009 was significant at 95% level). You just can’t have a high confidence about trends measured at the decadal level.

Then again, if your motives are political why worry about facts.

The vast quantities of GHG produced over the last 15 years, which have been responsible for an increase in atmospheric concentrations of 15ppm, have caused warming of 0 degrees (C or F). If we project this forward, the warming during the remainder of the 21st century will be 0 degrees – which is comfortably below the targeted limit of 2 degrees.It seems unlikely that 0 degrees will cause “runaway” or “irreversible” global warming. The Kyoto Protocol has clearly been an outstanding success.

We now need urgent research grants to ascertain what has been causing the melting of Arctic sea ice, and various glaciers, and the Greenland ice cap,since 1995. There was no warming in the last 15 years, so some other agency (as yet undetected) must have been at work.
Something else must also have been sinking Tuvalu and the Maldives, causing extreme
weather events, and killing polar bears.

Science employment levels can be maintained in trying to track down this new “unknown unknown”.

But yes, this is highly significant.

Another point is that, with convention setting 30 years as the minimum for determining a trend, and with half of that gone so far with no warming, it’s impossible for the forecast temperatures to be met without the most outlandish warming occurring in the next 15 years.

For several centuries now, scientists always and everywhere have respected the principle of “Occam’s Razor” – which requires over-complex hypotheses to give way to simple and elegant explanations of the available data.

An explanation that “it must be wrong because my model can’t replicate it”, is undercut by the fact that the models can’t replicate the other two modern warming periods either. This argument has been met in the past by denying that the 1860-1880 and 1910-1940 warming rates were reasonably comparable with 1975-2009. Now the guru himself, Phil Jones, has stated unequivocally (on the BBC no less) that all three periods “are similar and not statistically significantly different”.

Game, set and match!