STOP CALLING "SURFACE" TEMPERATURES GLOBAL TEMPS ! ! !

Yesterday a casual google search triggered a flurry of recent stories from a spectrum of news outlets, most with breathless headlines about two years of global temperature drop - that leaves me stupefied.  Too many of these stories with all their handwringing and confused writing either ignore or bury the fact that they are discussing Earth's surface temperatures.  Why can't we get the simplest principles straight?  It's the atmospheric insulation silly!  Right, Left, malicious and well-meaning, what up?  We live upon a Global Heat and Moisture Distribution Engine!

Our Surface Temperature represents about 10% of our Global Climate Engine's total heat content.  The oceans contain the other 90% of global climate temperatures, for christ sake stop ignoring that!  Enunciate how our planet operates.  Surface temperatures fluctuate, distribution patterns of surface heat are immensely complex, so what?  The fundamental physical reality that no one cares to hammer home is that our global heat and moisture distribution engine is accumulating a known amount of extra warming 24/7/365 and the reasons are well understood, and the amounts are well known.

But don’t take my word for it, listen to a real expert Josh Willis PhD explain the deniable, but unavoidable, physical reality.   First a quickie, then another talk with a bit more details, followed by some visualizations of Earth’s temperature rise to put these fluctuations into realistic perspective.

NASA | Ask a Climate Scientist: Global Warming Pause?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmoYStB-Rzw

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Charting Irreversible Climate Change with Jason-3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqHbkkt_iL8

Phil Klotzbach's response to Citizenschallenge Examined - The Map vs. Territory Problem

Phil Klotzbach gave me his permission to share this email and I thank him.  I haven’t changed any of his words, I simply follow along and share my responses as I try fleshing out this Map vs. Territory Problem I'm trying to explain.  By that I mean the attitude that unless you can statistically prove it, it doesn't exist and should be dismissed, even though the physics dictates it must exist and had better be taken seriously.

There’s also the seepage issue, a sort of self-censorship where certain information is being withheld while other information is given inordinate weight - following the contrarian script rather than focusing on conveying the physical reality.

Dr. Klotzbach's words are in Georgia font, while mine are in Verdana.  

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From: Phil Klotzbach
Date: Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 6:51 AM
Subject: Re: fyi, just posted "Surely you’re joking Dr. Klotzbach, no hurricane global warming connection"
To:  citizenschallenge @ gmail 

           Dr. Klotzbach:  Apologies for a delay, but it's been a very hectic past few days.  

No apology needed, considering your lead author of the Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science’s seasonal hurricane forecast, I imagine you’re probably running on four hours of sleep these past few weeks.  I was surprised to receive any response, let alone such a thoughtful one.  I don’t mind admitting I’m honored and thank you for your time and effort.

Explaining your position will allow me to explain mine, which I believe is compatible with the need for vigorous science in all it’s maddening details minutia and uncertainties.

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Dr. Klotzbach:  In answer to your questions, I have spent over 15 years working with historical hurricane data, primarily for the Atlantic but over the last several years with global data, so I do not make statements like I did on NPR and many other news outlets without having spent much time understanding the nuances of the technology going into the analyses.  

I acknowledge your expertise, in fact both Drs. Mann and Tobis made a point of telling me your professional reputation among experts is solid.  Me?  I’m a layperson and my hobby for the past 45 years has been learning about Earth sciences.  Evolution and our planet’s global heat and moisture distribution engine have been of particular fascination to me.  

My position is that while our actual living breathing climate engine is infinitely complex, it follows fundamental and well understood laws - which I believe are too often left behind in favor of obsessing over trying to explain uncertainties that in the end are more irrelevant than not, and only serve to sooth people into complacent disconnect from the changes happening underfoot.  This is what my Map vs. Territory Problem is all about, allow me to explain.

Dr. Ed Hawkins not making any sense - 2000s warming slowdown?

In working on my review of Bates' article, I stumbled on another example of a presumably well meaning scientists doing more to fuel confusion and denial and distrust than to inform and learn.  That would be Ed Hawkins with his 2/24/2016 dissenting blog post "Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown."  I started writing him a comment, but it got too big to post over there, I have given him a shorter one and a link. 

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Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown

Ed Hawkins | February 24, 2016   

It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming ‘slowdown’ or ‘hiatus’, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented in a new commentary in Nature Climate Change by Fyfe et al. contradicts these claims.

The new Fyfe et al. paper is mainly in response to Karl et al. and Lewandowsky et al., who made the following statements in their abstracts:

“These results do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature” – Karl et al., 2015, Science

“there is no evidence that identifies the recent period as unique or particularly unusual” – Lewandowsky et al., 2016, BAMS

Firstly, climate scientists agree that global warming has not ‘stopped’ – global surface temperatures and ocean heat content have continued to increase, sea levels are still rising, and the planet is retaining ~0.5 days of the sun’s incoming energy per year. …