Meantime, President Obama completed his entire State of the Union speech without once mentioning the “C” word. And his Climate Czar, Carole Browning, has resigned – without being replaced.

India now says at least 44% of warming is caused by solar activity. And all European Carbon markets have been suspended indefinitely.

What a week!

I’ll be keeping an eye out for astronomical/celestial support for a continuation of what so many are predicting (including geologists) merely by projecting a trend because although I have previously subscribed to that method, I’m no longer convinced.

The problem with the science is that although the astronomical correlations are clear, the cause mechanism is not. Ironic really because the celestial hypothesis is much like AGW but with better correlations.

In the case of the underlying quadratic trend of the the temperature record, that trend can be clearly seen in the Scafetta paper up to the present but he assumes a continuation of the quadratic trend in his forecasts. I haven’t got around to identifying his justification for that.

On this interesting thread on Simon Singh’s blog (recently taking pot shots at Delingpole), Bishop Hill pops up in the comments several times to critique this (not surprising since he is the author of the Hockey Stick Illusion).

Even more interesting to me is that Paul Dennis of UEA also comments, agreeing with BH. Dennis holds a senior position in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, though not in the CRU.

There are also discussions regarding positive feedbacks and cloud albedo.
You really get the impression that guys like Singh (I did really enjoy his book Fermat’s Last Theorem) haven’t really looked at the science behind AGW at all.

http://slsingh.posterous.com/41313406

http://flay.jellybee.co.uk/2011/01/dealing-with-denialists-delingpole-part.html\

The problem that the alarmists have that has been pointed out elsewhere is that they can extract additional warming from the metrics by nefarious means for only so long and inevitably they will discover for themselves the principle of diminishing returns. That will be exacerbated by any cool phase from now on but they might get lucky around 2035 if projection of the underlying quadratic holds true.

I have more respect for those such as Gandalf in the NZ Herald or even Gareth Renowden that at least make an attempt to introduce from time to time an element of detail with a modicum of scientific support. Their problem though is that they always fall short of doing the complete analysis.

Gandalf is now touting the underlying quadratic in the temperature trend as evidence of the CO2/temp correlation which is compelling but that does not hold up prior to about 1850 and doesn’t explain the more recent anthropogenic emissions.

Gareth Renowden rightly took Don Easterbrook to task over the present value of a graph in an effort to shoot down Don’s assertion that there were over 9000 years warmer than present over the last 10,000 years. What Gareth conveniently omitted was that using his own reasoning and making a correction to better represent the present, there were still more than 5790 years warmer than present over the last 10,000 years.

They are all seeing the “long-term” trend in atmospheric/ocean temperature and ocean heat content (thanks to Gavin Schmidt) but they cannot bring themselves to address recent points-of-inflexion in those same metrics. We are susceptible to to confirmation bias but that does not mean it has to be a normal mode of operation.