Remember the tales of Brenden and St Pat cruising the North Sea in their little cockle shell?

Gosh, Bob, do you really think I don’t know why you always choose to start with the extreme El Nino in 1998?

I didn’t. The graph starts in 1997. The reason to look at the last 15 years is that this is the period chosen by NASA as the period that would invalidate the models (ie: at the 95% confidence level) if there was no temperature rise. See NOAA Climate Report (2009)

Of course, I apologise and withdraw my comment unreservedly. You did include the confidence limits and they were correct.

But I must congratulate you for doing so. I think it must be the first time I have seen this happen **********************. Actually quite pleasing – you seem to have taken my previous criticisms on board – **********************************.

Progress?

Manfred, old chap, you well know the large confidence limits on your value of -0.01. yet you don’t give them.
This has been thrashed out before – such graphs are meaningless, especially when the confidence limits are ignored. Those limits show how wrong your conclusion is.

Ken, old fellow, once again you make a fool of yourself. Look again at the graph. Note the ±0.036°C/decade shown quite clearly.

…largest sea ice formation in 30 years .. strangely yet another record.

A record over 30 years is trivial on climatic timescales. We’ve only had satellites in place since the late seventies, so in terms of polar ice, we’ve really only just started measuring.

So don’t be so quick to run around saying ‘record sea ice proves the global warming is wrong ‘

Why then are the alarmists running around saying ‘record sea ice proves the global warming is right’?

“CO2 deniers”? Not many of those Dan. Were they referring to the Antarctic or world-wide? Regional effects are not necessarily global effects. However, wouldn’t a global AGW effect be the same at both polar regions? That’s what AGW predicted but it’s not happening.

You’ll find with a little research that the case by sceptics of the enhanced GHG effect is a little different than whatever you’re imagining Dan (your “CO2 denier” case). Cloud cover is both an albedo effect (increase cools by radiative reflection, decrease warms by insolation) and a spectroscopic (DLR) effect. But DLR (GHGs+clouds) is ineffective as a heating agent. Cloud cover varies obviously, less and more on a decadal scale i.e. a feedback. Sceptics argue that feedbacks on temperature are negative, AGW says feedbacks are positive. There is no evidence of positive feedback but plenty for negative.

Water vapour is a DLR effect but an increase (at upper tropical troposphere specifically) is the AGW case – not the sceptic case. WV measurement is only recently returning information that is even remotely reliable but indications are that although there may be a WV increase at surface, there’s been a decrease at the AGW-critical upper tropical troposphere level (i.e. no positive feedback and no AGW “hotspot”). Over this first period of the 21st century, the WV increase at the surface has not translated into atmospheric warming either.

The case for increased CO2 causing warming falls flat because a) the warming effectiveness of the emitted LWIR is limited to low levels of CO2 (less than present) due to the characteristics of the gas (actually a refrigerant), and b) there’s been no observed DLR increase corresponding to the increase in CO2 levels

The AGW theory – as it turns out – IS wrong, and the egg is definitely not on sceptics faces. In any event, the climate variations since the LIA have solar explanations.