I've been spending the past couple days digesting Fyfe 2016 on account of John Bates, and his ClimateEtc hit-piece, which uses it to imply the global warming ‘hiatus’ was a real thing >>> Mind you “hiatus" = "A pause or gap in a sequence, series, or process.”:
J. Bates writes: "The most serious example of a climate scientist not archiving or documenting a critical climate dataset was the study of Tom Karl et al. 2015 (hereafter referred to as the Karl study or K15), purporting to show no ‘hiatus’ in global warming in the 2000s (Federal scientists say there never was any global warming “pause”). The study drew criticism from other climate scientists, who disagreed with K15’s conclusion about the ‘hiatus.’ (Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown)"
Link to a readable Fyfe et al. 2016: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/Mann/articles/articles/FyfeEtAlNatureClimate16.pdf
When I read Fyfe 2016 I was stunned and appalled by how it was worded. Yet, it’s co-authored by some of the foremost climate scientists in the world. A couple having endured vicious and vile attacks fabricated out of pure lies at the hands of the Republican PR campaign of climate science deception. Scientists whom I consider genuine heroes. I am under no illusion. I cannot dispute their facts, but it's the way their facts were presented that seems to me a prime example of the “Seepage” suffered by well meaning, but extremely conservative and cautious scientists, playing right into the Contrarian’s Script, rather than clarifying how our global heat and moisture distribution engine operates in a manner were it can “click” with non-sciencie citizens.
Before I post my critique, which is far from finished, I want to share what Sou at HotWhopper has to say. She was trained as a scientist so approaches this paper differently than I do, from my own street-level perspective, that of a high school grad (‘73) lay-person, albeit one that’s spent a lifetime paying attention to developing Earth Sciences and the evolving insights they’ve offered into Earth’s fantastical pageant and our place in that pageant.
Therefore I think it appropriate to first REPOST her article of February 25th. She explains the scientific perspective in a way I never could. I’m going to begin with her closing paragraph because that’s exactly what I’m struggling with. I also a thank you Sou, for allowing me to repost your work.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Global surface warming continues without pause contrary to denier claims
Sou | Feb 25, 2016
I want to start with Sou's closing paragraph since it echoes the thing that got under my skin and that my review is struggling to articulate.
=====
This is a useful paper from a scientific perspective.
From the perspective of informing the public, I would have preferred the authors were more constructive rather than making it appear there are disputes in scientific circles when there aren't.
Deniers aren't going to read the paper. They aren't going to care that there was no change in the long term trend. They aren't going to care that the models differed from observations because the estimated forcings were wrong. All they are going to do is point to the paper falsely claiming it is "evidence" that scientists disagree, when on these issues there would be very little disagreement (if any) among climate scientists.
Or they'll do as Anthony Watts {and also John Bates} did, and point to the paper claiming there was a "hiatus" or stopping of global warming, when there isn't and hasn't been.
_________________________________________
There's another new paper out in Nature Climate Change today that discusses the recent trends on global surface temperature. It's by a rash of notable authors: John C. Fyfe, Gerald A. Meehl, Matthew H. England, Michael E. Mann, Benjamin D. Santer, Gregory M. Flato, Ed Hawkins, Nathan P. Gillett, Shang-Ping Xie, Yu Kosaka, Neil C. Swart. Anthony Watts heralded the paper (archived here), which is unusual because he normally scoffs at the findings of most of these authors. He referred to an article in the Examiner newspaper, which claims that this paper contradicted "another study last June" that stated that the "the hiatus was just an artifact that “vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.”
Well it doesn't contradict it. Needless to say Anthony and the Examiner was comparing apples and oranges.
