Heh, you noticed too, Steve. So did he. Bona fides, bona fides.

It's occurred to me that a rough gauge of the increased yield can be had from greenhouse measurements of the increase in yield when CO2 is increased 40% from 280 ppm to 400 ppm. Is it 17%, or more, or less? Yours in curiosity, severalhundredmillionbellieskim.
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Chamber studies are not so useful. Free-air experiments have been done. Enhanced CO2 is good for cotton, for rice and wheat, not so much. Maybe the billion are gorging on cotton candy.

RR. I do not relish the role of peacemaker here, but seemingly someone has to do it. Phil and Mark are accomplishing something new here - a conversation with mutual respect and it is interesting. It can so easily be wrecked by others. So, please, very respectfully, stop the comments directed at Phil rather than at his views (which are fair game) if only for a short while, just to see what might develop. Please.

Phil does offer a counterpoint and rarely resorts to the sorts of abuse to which he is subjected. He offers interesting material, the latest on CO2 fertilization. I need to read this more carefully, but I think the authors ignore an important aspect. But without Phil, this information would have passed me by. It provides valuable data.

Radical Rodent

Why 1979? Because that was when the first continuous satellite observations of the Arctic started.Ditto the satellite measurements of microwave emission from the atmosphere on which the UAH and RSS temperatures are based.

Check those 60 papers and you will find that they are not saying no warming since 1998. They are studying transient changes in the energy budget. Look at GISTEMP and you will see that the post El Nino temperatures have settled onto the long term trend. My own wood for the trees graph shows this. It also shows that the post 1998 trend is now indistinguishable from the post 1970 trend. Your pause was short term variation and is no longer detectable.

I don't know where your expectation of a long term cooling trend comes from. There is no sign of it so far. Even the large La Nina so many sceptics were expecting is looking less likely.

Missing heat? Argos found it in the ocean heat content. Look at the slideshow here.

Arctic ice extent?

Look here for ice extent since 1850." Scroll down to the graph labelled SIBT Pan Arctic ice extent. I don't see your 1979 peak. Note how September minimum ice extent stayed around 8 million sq km from 1850 until 1970 and has since dropped to about 4 million sq km.

May I suggest that you update your thinking. Most rational sceptics now resemble Mike, accepting the warming and it's effects, but arguing that no policy response is necessary

Oooh, here’s a link! I wonder how this will be dissed, without once mentioning the arguments or the science…

Ah, the ever-deceptive Tony Heller. Kicked off the WUWT team, now ploughing his own lonely, cherry-scented furrow.

Firstly, the accusation of fraud is about the most serious one you can level at a scientist or scientific organisation, if you're going to make such a claim you'd better have pretty good evidence or you may find yourself with a defamation suit. Let's see how Tony's graphs measure up…

1. Fastest cooling on record. Yes, but over 5 months, starting at the peak of an El Nino. 5 months is way too short to be statistically significant. The NASA claim of unprecedentedly rapid warming was based on 30 years

“In the last 30 years we’ve really moved into exceptional territory,” Gavin Schmidt, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said. “It’s unprecedented in 1,000 years. There’s no period that has the trend seen in the 20th century in terms of the inclination (of temperatures)

NASA: 30 years of data, Tony: 5 months. Strike 1.

2 Satellites show the Earth cooling for almost 20 years. To illustrate this point Tony shows us a plot of the RSS data with a negative trend. Does he start the plot in 1997 or 1998? Neither, it's anchored specifically in 1997.5.. Hmmm And what's this? He's applied a 5-year smooth by plotting a 5 year mean. Depending on how this is implemented it may have endpoint effects diminishing the influence of the recent record warmth. Certainly if you plot the raw, unsmoothed data, the 'cooling' disappears.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997.5/trend/plot/rss/from:1997.5

Ironic from a source that often accuses others of raw data tampering. Strike 2.

3 NASA temperatures are diverging from much more accurate satellite temperatures at a spectacular rate.

This is illustrated by plotting what he calls Satellite Land temperatures versus Surface Land temperatures. This is same smoothing trick and short period, plus the dataset he plots for Surface Land is GISTEMP-DTS, which includes extrapolated ocean data and is thus not a land dataset. Apples and Oranges. Strike 3.

Here's the raw data

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss-land/from:1997.5/trend/plot/rss-land/from:1997.5/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1997.5/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1997.5/trend

And here are the two 'divergent' datasets unsmoothed, plotting all the data.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1979/offset:-0.3/plot/rss-land

Last claim : But why would the US space agency use modern satellite technology, when they have a garbage surface data set which they can tamper with constantly?

To illustrate this Tony has built a blink comparator from the data on this page http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/history/ (so much for data being witheld) and asserts that the 2016 version shows 1.4C of warming vs 0.5 in the 2000 version. Well, more than half of the difference is due to the warming that occurred since 2000, the rest is down to the reasons laid out on the NASA page, one suspects. Strike 4.

As a bonus, here's a plot of the 'garbage' NASA surface dataset and the 'reliable' RSS satellite data, offset to allow for the different baselines.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/offset:0.33/plot/gistemp/from:1979

Only one fraudster here. Add Tony Heller to the charlatan list.

Heh, ACK, maybe you should check out 'hot models'.
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kim. Shame on you, suggesting I view soft porn!

Hmmm, ACK, I looked at FACEs instead. If chamber studies are optimistic, and the '04 researchers @ FACE found less optimism but fair uncertainty, why hasn't more research been done or published on this matter? We may well be arguing over how many hundredmillionbellies have been sated.

I agree that attribution of increased yield is going to be difficult. I suspect that my billionbellies is optimistic, but the actual figure is still an 'extraordinarily' large number.
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I'm also amused that these studies were mostly carried out only with fertilization during the day. Granted, that's when the sun shines, but these studies hardly replicate our real atmosphere with rising CO2.

I also note that rising temperature appeared beneficial.

I'm just suspicious enough, too, given the timing of the study, that this is something like Gergis, manufactured to fill a need in the alarmist pantheon of horror. An immense amount of research(billionstudies, heh) have been done in the service of that cause.
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Yeah, the Humboldtians are alarmists about climate. When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn.
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You can see the flaws 12 years ago, you can see the need for better research; where is it? Billions of bellies depend upon it.
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If it's not a billion bellies yet, it's gonna be before long. Yippee doo dah day. What an extraordinary day.

Phil, this is only one of the reasons the BRICs do as they do.
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RR, there is growing evidence that North polar ice is cyclical, however, I still suspect that a warmer world will ultimately end up with less North Polar ice.

Given wintertime warming at both poles what we appear to be seeing is a very gradual diminution of North Pole sea ice and a gradual accumulation of South Pole continental ice. Sea ice, though, seems very dependent upon water temperatures, and I have little insight into where they are going.

And the slightly warmer poles will decrease the polar/equatorial temperature gradient, and lead to less severe weather events. What an extraordinary day, billions of bellies say 'Hey, hey!'
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May we all agree that an open Arctic is a net benefit, unless it brings on Pope's Snow and northern hemispheric continental glaciation?
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Um, 1910-1940 was in the 20th Century.

I've re-done your graph but using HADCRUT4, as on the woodfortrees site HADCRUT3 stops in 2014.

Here ya go.

Heh, Phil, either Gavin was talking about the late 20th Century trend and RR's right or he's talking about the whole 20th Century trend and Gavin's simply wrong, there. Again, Phil, that ol' straightened shaft business.
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Unfortunately, though, the impact of rising carbon dioxide seems to be far more pronounced in the weeds that compete with crops than in the crops themselves. “Weeds are survivors,” said Lee Van Wychen, director of science policy for the Weed Science Society of America. “They can fill various niches and thrive under a wide range of conditions.

​​While we have about 45 major crops in the U.S., there are more than 400 species of different weeds associated with those crops. There is always another weed species ready to become a major competitor with a crop if growing conditions change, such as an increase in carbon dioxide levels.

​​” The impact of rising carbon dioxide levels on weeds can be striking. In a study conducted by Dr. Lewis Ziska of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, weeds grown under urban conditions of warmer temperatures and more carbon dioxide – conditions anticipated for the rest of the world in 50 years – grew to four times the height of those in a country plot 40 miles outside the city, where carbon dioxide and temperature reflected background conditions.

Buy shares in Primark and Roundup.

Phil. An interesting , but ultimately frustrating, paper. I don't understand all of it, but note

1.The paper reviews very few large-scale studies (2) and all but one are in temperate regions. [Some of the larger greenhouses in The Netherlands where increased levels of CO2 are used, are substantially larger than experimental plots reviewed in the paper].

2. Increased levels of CO2 are introduced from the plot periphery leaving ambient conditions to diffuse or transport the CO2 into the plot. Without reading the original papers on which this review is based, it is not possible to determine if CO2 levels in the plot were actually measured or are assumed. Similarly were the increased CO2 levels constant or fluctuating?[I suspect the studies were not well controlled and that varying wind strengths and any differences in temperature between the introduced CO2 and the ambient temperatures would both cause unknown variation].

3. If the difference between open air and chambered experiments is not due to (2) then it remains unexplained. As such any conclusions or predictions based on it are suspect.

4. Some experiments involved both wet and dry conditions. In wet conditions there was little increase in crop yield, whereas substantial increases were reported in dry experiments.

(4) suggests to me that world crop yield increases may not come so much from existing crop producing areas as from the expansion of those areas into more marginal areas, or be the result of a longer growing season after the wet season had passed.

So Phil I am uncertain whether this paper really suggests that CO2 fertilization will be less than expected.

There is little doubt the whole biome benefits from increased CO2. Funny the researchers lost interest in grains and got lost in the weeds.
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Phil, you are just picking dandelions around the edges of the field of the argument. C'mon, admit that increased CO2 is feeding a lot of people, more than you expected.
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Phil, kim. The situation with weeds is no joke, those plants are better adapted to local conditions than those we want to grow and are likely to benefit more from improved growing conditions. That's why they are weeds. However, agriculture doesn't stay still and the combination of breeding herbicide resistant plant strains and application of herbicides to fields has, where this combo has been employed, worked effectively. Where it is not used, the CO2 fertilization effect is likely to favour weeds.

I recall seeing fields of weeds, with some foot-high grass, in the central Urals, near Perm in 1989, which I was informed were grain fields. It brought home to me just how much modern western agriculture is dependent on fertilizers and herbicides, and what pre 17th century arable farming must have been like. CO2 fertilization could have some devestatingly negative effects today, so it is entirely legitimate to focus on its effects on weeds.