StudentOfClimatology

I'm not a skeptic at all (anymore). This board is just uninformed/out of the scientific mainstream on a lot of topics. It doesn't surprise me that you'd try and pull that one, though. At least now I know you're lying about your remote sensing education. There are 7 different MSU/AMSU satellites used in the UAH/RSS interpretations. Meanwhile, RATPAC uses no "sensors"..it is an aggregated sonde network.

Anyone putting faith in the RATPAC aggregation over the MSU/AMSU satellite networks is horribly misguided re: required homogenization and cross-verification. The former requires sunstantially more quality control despite utilizing only a fraction of the datapoints.

RATPAC has an average gridded spatial resolution 850km. That's horrible, and even getting there requires homogenizing for the lack of radiosonde coverage in remote areas. There's a reason there are over 900 peer reviewed papers using the AMSU/MSU data for depth-based analyses, and under 50 that use the RATPAC sonde aggregation for the same purpose.

This is a load of crap. The lower troposphere won't respond until sometime between October and January, as usual. The 1997-98 Niño didn't spike the TLT until mid-late November. The 2009-10 Niño took until January to do it. The 1982-83 Niño took until mid December.

Reading childish stuff like this (below) gets old. There are a few select posters who don't seem to add anything outside some hyperbole and half-arsed conjecture.

Lol, I think WeatherGuy#s is Paul Beckwith.

The irony in this statement is hilarious.

I'm with you on this one. The pattern going forward looks as good or better than the 2013/2014 patterns did going forward.

Wasn't he the guy calling for an ice free arctic in 6 months? He's either an idiot or a closer denier trying to shame the science.

That's correct. We'll probably delay it by a few thousands years at most.

So, you're back to making things up. Stupid of me to expect otherwise.

Okay, but you said adapting to SLR would be more expensive than stopping it. What you're suggesting would cost trillions upon trillions of dollars that, frankly, no one actually has.

Abruptly shutting down all CO^2 emissions would cost trillions and would lead to your eventual starvation and death.

If there's one thing to be worried about, in my opinion, it's the relative dampening of the equator-to-pole thermal gradient. This is what drives keeps the circulatory network stabilized (Hadley/Ferrel/Polar). The paleoclimate data suggests that before we entered the Pleistocene era, the NH was dominated by a single Hadley cell for the majority of the solar year. A broad Hadley Cell is a weak Hadley Cell, so tropical convection and wind speeds are significantly reduced in this scenario (we can already easily this in modern day observations, including ENSO). This alone would significantly reduce the rate of heat expulsion (latent heat released in the upper troposphere is more readily emitted than surface heat). And unlike CH4 release, an abrupt circulatory shift can occur in a very short period of time. Perhaps in a year or less. This is the positive feedback loop I'm looking for. I can't say that the developments in 2013 and 2014 have quelled my concern, either.

The "hiatus" never had anything to do with OHC, and it's pretty obvious where the heat was/is going. Energy flows from the atmosphere/sea surface boundary into the deeper oceans via diffusion and kinematic transport. The amount of heat transported to depth is kept in equilibrium by surface winds, which govern both the evaporative cooling process at the sea surface, and vertical overturning within the upper ocean mixing layer(s). When surface winds slow, as they have, the evaporative process will slow at the sea surface, warming the upper oceans as less thermal energy is converted into latent form and released in the upper troposphere. This spikes OHC and warms the planetary surface. This is the mechanism behind the warming at the surface/oceans, and the absence of warming in the lower troposphere for the last 15 years.

I couldn't agree more with this, overall. You pretty much hit the nail on the head. That said, it's also okay to acknowledge that E&E has published bulls**t science in the past, due to the very political bias issue you brought up at the end of your post. Therefore, giving E&E additional scrutiny, irrespective of whatever individual publication is in reference, is fully understandable.

Arguing that the Isthmus closure renders the prior paleoclimate data non-analogous to modern day ESC seems like a stretch to me. Maybe it'd impact TCR-based studies more? Either way, I was putting the majority of my emphasis on the late Pleistocene. The data is pretty solid at this point, from what I know. Can you refer me to these papers? I suspect they diverge in estimating historical TCR and/or it's degree of variability. It's easy to get a faulty ESC via the paleo-data when using an incorrect TCR, or assuming that's TCR is unchanging.

I think you're overestimating the speed of continental drift. Even five million years ago geologic configuration was essentially a copy of today's. I can see how that argument may have merit on longer geologic scales where planetary geology was different, but not on the scale of a few million years. We have good mineral and ice-core derived data on at least the last 4 interstadials, and the last million+ years of swings into and out of ice ages. I'm surprised at some the foundational debate in here, yes. When I see people arguing for a certain dataset because it's published potential error is 0.05K/decade vs 0.08K/decade, despite the fact that the two datasets are measuring entirely different domains, I'm surprised. The surface vs satellite debate is nothing short of stupid, because potential error does equate to realized error, and the two are not even remotely similar regarding what they're measuring in the first place. If that's not bad enough, some in here are arguing for error via stratospheric contamination and interpolation algorithms when they should be looking at sensor degradation and merging inconsistencies.

Not just that, but the paleoclimate record also points to a high ESC. We have several million years of solid, high-resolution proxy data suggesting that ESC is at least 2.5C, probably higher. I'm surprised this is still even debated because the observational data is doing exactly what the paleo data suggests it should.

Some of the science that's come out of E&E has been pretty bad. Let's not forget the iron Sun debacle.

While I agree, that alone doesn't refute any of the science published there. It's important to critique the science itself, rather than the source. I've read a few decent papers in E&E myself.

You've never posted "quality stuff" a day in your life..why start now?

What are you referring to, exactly?

That's just because Arctic temperatures tend to track in line with northern hemispheric temperatures. There is scarcely any DO^18 evaporated from polar waters, relatively speaking, and the ratio found in the cores is much higher than what can be physically evaporated from waters above 50N..a good 70-80% of the DO^18 precipitated over polar regions was not locally evaporated. Unfortunately, this is not the case either, because (as has been explained) the isotope ratios in the ice cores depict hemispheric SSTs, not global SSTs or regional SSTs. The Vostok cores, for example, can only depict southern hemispheric temperatures due to the nature of the Hadley Cells..visa versa for the GISP2 cores.

The bold is where you make a leap...that's only half of what determines the weight of the ratio. Remember that the temperature at which evaporation occurs determines the initial O^16/O^18 ratio before the precipitation process occurs..polar SSTs are usually too cold to sufficiently evaporate O^18 at the ratio observed in the cores. A good portion of the O^18 that precipitates over the poles has a tropical/subtropical source. These isotopes are subsequently rained out during the condensation process and relatively few are transported to the poles. So, warmer tropical/mid-latitude oceans will lead to more O^18 being transported poleward. For all intents and purposes, ice cores are hemispheric SST proxies.