And in regards to the supposed hiding of something via the trick Mann has said that yes in the 98 paper there is some ambiguity about the smoothed curves, but not in the actual presentation of the data. After all the method was explained in the paper. That and neither issue makes any difference to the conclusions. Since he's adopted a different approach in Mann 04 and Mann et al 08, and no one has demonstrated a real problem with his work, it's essentially a moot point.

Real Climate is written by real climate scientists. Your best efforts emphasize the work of hacks like Singer and people barely aware of the discipline (M&M). You need better quality sources and a more honest appraisal of your own prejudices. Just because you don't like certain solutions to a problem you shouldn't ignore and deny the problem. You should promote alternative solutions.

That it's warming and we're mainly to blame is settled. Increasingly the fact this will be a major problem is becoming more and more obvious.

Your reporting of the evidence for continued warming shows the "quality" of the science you follow and the methods you use. If these would gain support from your engineer design type review it doesn't say much for engineers. What is it about engineers anyway? As I go around the web and meeting deniers so many claim to be engineers. They always seem to think their training makes them qualified to pronounce on the correctness of every field of science imaginable. It reminds me of how my plumber always complains about the work of my electrician and visa versa. Seems to be an arrogant lot.

So what does your judgement using Argo data show about you? 1) You think whatever is measured in the first deployment must be correct. 2) It doesn't matter to you how incomplete the network is (if it fits your preferred outcome), something we saw previously with Loehle. 3) While you take liberties with the Jones quote you'll cherry pick a very brief data period if it suits your purposes.

Re 1&2 above: The Argo's early readings are limited and have high levels of uncertainty. Claims that the oceans are cooling rely on early Argo data when the network was far from complete. Since the network has been completed the evidence is for continued warming. However both claims are based on short time periods and much more data is needed before Argo alone can provide a statistically significant trend. Just because early results tilted your way you should be a little more skeptical.

Sea level continues to rise on average 3.2mm per year. Must irk you that Schmidt and Hansen would turn out to be right.

Re #3: Which shows your hypocrisy regarding what Jones said. While accepting statistically insignificant trends you seem to be presenting what Jones presented as a trend with 90% statistical significance along the lines of the "no warming since 1995" meme. If you're a scientist you should have noticed how the question to Jones was constructed in an interesting way. If he'd been asked about 1994 to then it would have been 95%. By the way every other temp record had a statistically significant trend over that period. The CRU method has a slight cooling bias.

As for evidence of continued warming it doesn't take a fool to see that the past 10 years were, on average, warmer that the previous 10. It does take a fool to cherry pick 1998 and it's El Nino and say this somehow shows the warming stopped. In fact here's a graph from Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) how recently removed the natural effects from the temp records:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/FR11_Fig5.jp...

Wegman's social networking paper is one of the segments that have already been exposed as containing large amounts of plagiarism. Not of course from M&M but from a couple text books and Wikipedia, all with no attributions. What's even more disturbing is Wegman also twists meanings of the works he copied and often claims they say the opposite of what they actually say.

While his host school is dragging its heels the journal that he published some of this work in has already found him guilty and retracted his paper. Numerous works by Wegman are now under review at a variety of journals. Why is GMU dragging it's heels? Perhaps that's what Koch Industries gets for its $29,604,354 in donations.

It's particularly ironic that Wegman makes the claim of pal review when his report was the recipient of some of the lightest peer review since Soon and Baliunas. But all this does is illustrate that while peer review is necessary it isn't sufficient. Once published M&M have been found wanting. Wahl and Ammann found their criticisms groundless as they were able to independently replicate Mann. Peter Huybers demonstrated M&M hadn't calculated significance levels correctly and that MBH98 had. Then Rutherford et al showed a variety of statistical methods produced hockey sticks and the PCA complaint was groundless. Von Storch and Zorita found making the changes M&M claimed would make a huge difference produced changes so small that the key conclusions were not effected. As for MBH98 in addition to the above sources there is also about a dozen other reconstructions that do not challenge the conclusions. Then there is the NRC report that finds Mann's conclusions viable a report Pielke Jr said was a "near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al." Natutre said, "Academy affirms hockey-stick graph. But it criticizes the way the controversial climate result was used." And the organization Wegman belongs to, American Statistical Association, reported the NRC report as being cautiously, and said "plausible" meant 2:1 odds in favor. Which if you read MBH98 is all they really claim.

So when I read one report supported, replicated, confirmed and the other under investigation or supported only in the blogosphere I tend to think M&M being gutted is the appropriate term.

Highly dishonest post this. The report was not done by NASA or for NASA. Perhaps if the writer read or linked to the original report, instead of a blog post that links a newspaper article, she would have done better. It was also not commissioned to examine the alien response to AGW or specifically an environmental issue. It was a report where a group of scientists speculated on all the reasons they could possibly imagine for a first contact with an alien culture to occur. To quote mine this report and report it as something it is not is not only dishonest but it smells of desperation. Since you don't have the science on your side you seem to feel it necessary to try and discredit the science and scientists.

"Trenberth's admission that no one could accurately describe the earth's energy budget (which Trenberth called a "travesty") shows that the advocates of AGW were well aware that their theory was collapsing."

Another nice distortion. What he's saying is the earth is continuing to heat because of the CO2 factor (you should read the paper he was talking about) the travesty is not having enough observational methods to know where all the energy is ending up in the planet's system. A recent study by Palmer shows how the heat can be drawn down into the deep oceans. We're gradually getting the whole picture.

The real travesty is the way you and CON-servatives distort what was said in the e-mails.

"Finally, you do realize that I know that you are a "realclimate.org" shill. The folks at RC scour the net for references to RealClimate. That's why I mentioned RealClimate in the first place. You must have a terrible backlog if it took you three weeks to get around to answering my post."

You have such confidence RealClimate cares a wit for your commentary. LOL, such arrogance. I came to this page several weeks ago on my way to trying to find out about the study it claims to be telling it's readers about. Once I found what the study really said I returned to have some fun with uninformed Brietbart readers. I do read Real Climate. Anyone who wants to know what the science actually says should, although I like to read the studies myself.

Check the dates on my other posts on this page. You'll see I've been here for a while. I guess I just didn't bother with your pathetic version of events until the other day.

"Mann's reconstructions without bristle cone pines are not robust because he insists on using the same statistical methodology that was shown to be defective by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. When the head of the American Statistical Society was asked by congress to look at Mann's methodology he confirmed McIntyre's findings. Mann can't even acknowledge his defective method . Craig Loehle looked at removing various proxies and showed that without bristle cone pines Mann's analysis falls apart."

God. First you use Singer as a source and now Wegman??? You do know why Wegman came to the same conclusions as M&M don't you? It's because he plagiarized M&M and didn't ever do the work himself. He's under investigation by George Mason University for plagiarism. His paper published in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis has been withdrawn due to plagiarism. What's laughable is here's all you guys whining about frauds and tax payer money going to dishonest researchers but when we get an actual proven case of it you cite the work as authoritative. It's hilarious.

Loehle did remove a few proxies he reduced 1209 proxy reconstructions to 67. He also produced a graph that when post 1970 temps are added shows the key elements of the hockey stick.

M&M's work has been gutted. Their sole positive contribution was the corrigendum issued by Mann/Bradley/Hughes that corrected data tables but made no impact on the results. Mann's work has been reproduced by Wahl and Ammann (2006). Rutherford et al (2005) and Moberg (2005) confirmed MBH98's conclusions. The National Research Council said that MBH's conclusions were plausible and have been supported by subsequent research.

While you guys fight over Mann, climate science has moved on and has a dozen independent hockey sticks.

"The hiding of data in files called "Censored Data" should have been a warming, oops I mean warning signal that Mann was up to no good. His email exchanges with the University of East Anglia's Phil Jones show that he knew his "treemometers" didn't work and deliberately concealed it with the infamous "hide the decline" where the "treemometers" showed a decline in temperature when, in fact, the temperatures were rising."

The emails show that one set of trees in Briffa's data didn't follow measured trends. The uncertainties of using trees as proxies is discussed in the literature and in fact the supposed "hiding" was discussed in Briffa's paper, when it was originally published, and IPCC Reports . It was Briffa's data that was being talked about by the way not Mann's.

"Singer was wrong about tobacco, but right about DDT and ozone. The ozone "hole" was one of the great hoaxes of science equal perhaps only to the Piltdown Man."

Singer is old enough and dishonest enough to have been the guy who created Piltdown Man. He's got three strikes against him and you fools are happy to give him number four as long as he feeds you lies you need to hear. What are Singer's credentials as a climate scientist? What peer reviewed studies has he published on the subject?

"The "hot spot" was considered to be the "final nail in the coffin" right up until it didn't appear."

"Final nail"??? It has never been claimed to show anything other than warming. As I said it has nothing specifically to do with CO2 warming. Increased solar warming or warming due to reduced sulphate aerosols would produce the exact same signature. But if you have a source making the claim that measuring a "hot spot" will prove carbon dioxide warming then provide it. I'm sure your "quality" sources must have provided one for you to check.

So many errors in one post. I'll have to break this one down to answer them all:

"Christy and Spencer corrected their errors after the errors were discovered. Don't blame them if their opponents took ten years to find a problem."

After years of being told to. They have resisted every change they've had to make, and they've had to make several, because they keep making outlandish claims based on their uncorrected data. As every correction draws their data back into the climate mainstream it causes great embarrassment to them.

"Outside of satellites? That's like saying "Outside of the most reliable method of measuring tropospheric temperatures". The only method that directly measures temperature is weather balloons and they are consistent with the satellite measurements at the altitudes that balloons reach."

They are consistent with weather balloon measurements; they don't show a consistent pattern. All three satellite records show different trends for the upper troposphere, which can only make a person ask "what makes them the the best method?" You do know they don't directly measure air temperature don't you? And that they weren't made to detect high troposphere temps?

In the report he was lead author of Christy agreed the main reason the satellites don't give us a definitive answer on this is due to measurement uncertainty. It doesn't do your "skeptic" credentials any good when you so absolutely take a position even contrarian scientists don't take. (Christy is a real scientists, unlike Singer)

3 weeks? You're not looking at the names mate. But that apparently matches your observance of actual science. My ad hominem against Singer is due to the fact he's perhaps the most discredited of all deniers. He's the original sell his soul scientist. Any one who cites him after his record on cigarettes, ozone, DDT, and now global warming simply lowers their own credibility down to his, nonexistent. But if you insist I'll dismantle any of his arguments you like. Name one.

The key satellite measurements are perfectly consistent with CO2 warming. The key fingerprint of a warming troposphere and a cooling stratosphere tells us it's an enhanced greenhouse effect. All the satellite records tell us this.

There is that missing tropospheric hot spot that you allude to but that isn't a fingerprint of anthropogenic global warming. We expect to see that hot spot for any type of global warming. So if the satellites don't show that then it would seem our theory of "the moist adiabatic amplification of warming with altitude" would be the problem. Which would still be an issue if it were the sun, etc. It has nothing to do with AGW.

But are we sure it isn't there? We have measured it on a seasonal and annual scale and it fits theoretical expectations. The problem is long term measurements. Here we know that all of our measurement methods have issues. The three satellite records all disagree. UAH shows a lower trend than the surface, RSS says roughly the same and UWA shows a hot spot. The difference between the three is how they adjust for effects like decaying satellite orbits. The conclusion from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program is the most likely explanation for the discrepancy between model and satellite observations is measurement uncertainty. Before you dismiss the USCCSP report recognize that it was co-authored by John Christy.

Outside of satellites some proxy studies have found evidence for the hot spot. But none of this allows for a firm conclusion. There is not enough evidence to say it's there or to say it's not there. Any one who claims the evidence is definitive, like Singer, is pulling your leg. Not to mention that in the AGW debate it's a red herring.

Yeah, Christy and Spencer admitted their error, after about ten years of delay. I'm sure Mann and Schmidt have accepted the errors they have made too. Considering all the climate reconstructions that have come out that advance but don't contradict Mann I'm surprised to hear you think there is reason to admit to an "error" re the MWP. What evidence do you have for anything more? Trees do track temp but there are exceptions to the rule. Mann and others have written extensively on the uncertainties. And MBH 98 is robust to the removal of, say, bristle cones.

Hate to tell you bud but outside the echo chamber, like this place, "the CO2 theory" is not only alive, it's become far more robust as time goes by. It has a solid theoretical base and is matched by mountains of observational evidence.

Fred Singer disputed the idea that cigarettes cause cancer. He's still not sure. He's also not a climate scientist. He's a hired gun for those who want to disinform the public. Some source. About as useful as the weatherman. Watt's a confirmed liar.

Part of that disinformation is strange ideas like the satellites don't show warming. BEST is consistent with all the satellite records and the land based records. Surely you aren't still in the belief that Christy and Spencer's data shows cooling? They corrected for the orbital decay and now their data agrees with everyone else.

The "CO2 theory" is the only one that explains what we see. Nothing else fits.

Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) have just filtered the natural signals out of the temperature record. What they get is a nice steady climb in temp.
http://skepticalscience.com/foster-and-rahmstorf-...