https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/snow-and-ice/extent/snow-cover/namgnld/6

This is a funny post by Kenneth in reply to Phil at NoTricksZone:

So the exchange went something like

NTZ: PAGES 2K shows modern temperatures are not unusual

Me: The last data point in PAGES 2K is the 30 years centred on 1985, temperatures have risen 0.6C since then, about the same range as covered by the entire study

NTZ Here's a list of studies showing warmer temperatures in the past. ….

Do you spot the bait and switch/Straw Man Fallacy? I was talking about the last 2K years, he switched the timescale to any time in the past. I have not made the claim that the planet has NEVER been warmer than now, indeed I even cited Marcott which covered the Holocene Optimum.

Also if you click on the links, most of the time they don't take you to the paper, as you might think, but just a jpeg of a graph that Tricky has extracted and uploaded and thinks supports his case. Hard to debunk a jpeg. I followed the link to a claim that the Antartic Peninsula was warmer 1,000 years ago, it took me to a graph supposedly from Browne et al. I eventually dug up a free pdf of that paper and the graph, which has been included for comparison, is plotting data from a completely different paper. That study is paywalled, but the summary includes

The Antarctic Peninsula is currently one of the fastest-warming locations on Earth, but its long-term variability has remained unclear. Amelia Shevenell and colleagues now use the TEX86 proxy, a palaeothermometer that tracks membrane lipids of the marine picoplankton Crenarchaeota, to show that a long-term cooling of about 4 C occurred in waters near the tip of Antarctic Peninsula over the past 12,000 years.

So it was a spot off the peninsula, not the peninsula itself and one would need to spend 20 bucks to find out if Tricky is accurately representing the study (precedent would suggest probably not). In other words, a Gish Gallop, a flood of links that are deliberately made hard to confirm.

Another NoTricksZone Trick is selective quotation: his first extract reads

The Holocene Climate Optimum was a period of global climate warming that occurred between six to nine thousand years ago. At that time, the global average temperatures were somewhere between four to six degrees Celsius higher than they are today"

For some reason, he cut off the quote there, the next sentence is

That is the range of warming that climatologists are predicting due to the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human activity. 

So it goes. But, if you're looking for a genuinely funny NTZ post, this made me smile

Arctic sea ice volume has rebounded and is close to normal levels

ORLY?

While we're on PAGES 2K, here's an extract from the blog of Julien Emile-Geay, a Lead Author.

As a scientist, you have to go where the evidence takes you. You can only be smacked in the face by evidence so many times and not see some kind of pattern.  (you will never guess: a HOCKEY STICK!).

It’s been nearly 20 years since the landmark hockey stick study. Few things about it were perfect, and I’ve had more than a few friendly disagreements with Mike Mann about it and other research questions.  But what this latest PAGES 2k compilation shows, is that you get a hockey stick no matter what you do to the data.

The hockey stick is alive and well. There is now so much data supporting this observation that it will take nothing short of a revolution of how we understand all paleoclimate proxies to overturn this pattern. So let me make this prediction: the hockey stick is here to stay. In the coming years and decades, the scientific community will flesh out many more details about the climate of the past 2,000 years, the interactions between temperature and drought, their regional & local expressions, their physical causes, their impact on human civilizations, and many other fascinating research questions.  But one thing won’t change: the twentieth century will stick out like a sore thumb. The present rate of warming, and very likely the temperature levels, are exceptional in the past 2,000 years, perhaps even longer.

https://strangeweather.wordpress.com/2017/07/11/the-hockey-stick-is-alive-long-live-the-hockey-stick/

Mar 30, 2018 at 7:50 PM | Phil Clarke

If you are looking for deceit and trickery, why not concentrate on the discredited Peer Reviewed Climate Science that has not been withdrawn or retracted, but still gets incorporated into further dodgy Peer Reviewed Climate Science, with the authors continuing to be paid at Taxpayer's expense?

ECS takes another battering

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/03/30/game-over/

Guest Blogger / 12 hours ago March 30, 2018 By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Skeptics 1, Fanatics 0. That’s the final score.

"The corrected mid-range estimate of Charney sensitivity, which is equilibrium sensitivity to doubled CO2 in the air, is less than half of the official mid-range estimates that have prevailed in the past four decades. Transient sensitivity of 1.25 K and Charney sensitivity of 1.45 K are nothing like enough to worry about.

This third article answers some objections raised as a result of the first two pieces. Before I give some definitions, equations and values to provide clarity, let me make it plain that my approach is to accept – for the sake of argument only – that everything in official climatology is true except where we have discovered errors. By this acceptance solum ad argumentum, we minimize the scope for futile objections that avoid the main point, and we focus the discussion on the grave errors we have found."

If we have had all the warming we are ever going to get, who cares? It only appears to Climate Science that we are warming, when they look at computer models that assume ECS is larger.

In the text/comments of the latest Monckton story at WUWT, there is a claim that CMIP5 models underestimate rainfall vs observations.by 50%. Is this true? All the models or just one or two? Obviously if the rain isn't right there is going to be a follow-on effect on temperature.

Oh, it occurs to me that my last question might prompt a response by Mr Clarke that Monckton isn't a real lord or he has bulgy eyes or whatever. Let's try and address the question this time.

rhoda & Radical Rodent

Some people refer to themselves as "Climate Scientists" and even have bits of paper that say so, whether they have the correct beard trims or not.

Christopher Monckton is the Viscount of Benchley, a hereditary title which cannot be revoked. He is not, however, a Member of the House of Lords although he claims otherwise. Most hereditary peers were barred from the House in 1999, with some remaining by means of election. Monckton stood, but received zero votes, this did not stop him claiming to be a member of the UK legislature even after the House issued a cease and desist letter.

I decline a visit WUWT to discover his latest pseudo-science. If it has any merit it will prevail, if like all his previous claims, it is scientific nonsense, it will sink without trace. I know where my money is.

Assumptions about what the value of ECS might be, have been the focus of attention recently.

On this thread, alarmists have stated that they are right, but can provide no actual proof.

Observations suggest they are wrong, and there is ample supporting evidence, but presumably no proof?

If ECS was an unproven "guesstimate" from the start, is proof required to establish it was wrong?

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-5.html#box-10-2

I decline a visit WUWT to discover his latest pseudo-science. If it has any merit it will prevail, if like all his previous claims, it is scientific nonsense, it will sink without trace. I know where my money is.

Mar 31, 2018 at 10:53 AM | Phil Clarke

Real Climate is written by those claiming to be Climate Scientists, it is unravelling as nonsense. That is why no one bothers with it anymore.

RR See here

From Kinnard et al.

 Here we use a network of high-resolution terrestrial proxies from the circum-Arctic region to reconstruct past extents of summer sea ice, and show that—although extensive uncertainties remain, especially before the sixteenth century—both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10581

RR See here

From Kinnard et al.

 Here we use a network of high-resolution terrestrial proxies from the circum-Arctic region to reconstruct past extents of summer sea ice, and show that—although extensive uncertainties remain, especially before the sixteenth century—both the duration and magnitude of the current decline in sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years. 

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10581

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10581

Mar 31, 2018 at 2:49 PM | Phil Clarke

I read the abstract, and the list of References. I am sure it is all Peer Reviewed by the others listed, so what is reliable and trustworthy about any of it?

Neat sidestep, does it rain less in the models than the real world or not? How well do they do with regional temps? If you chuck out temperature variations in the past as merely local, why not treat the models the same?

Phil Clarke, can we assume that Climate Science has exaggerated ECS, and the amount of warming that COULD occur?

Simple observations confirm that Climate Science Theory has some mistakes in it. Kinnard relies on theory, not observations

Radical rodent

Why is there this fear of the world warming a little bit, and the Arctic sea ice receding somewhat?

You sceptics expect this.

The consensus, including Phil Clarke and myself, expect the current Arctic sea ice recession to be followed by more extensive melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

We do not see the current temperature changes as a short term linear trend which will stop soon. We see it as the lag phase of a larger sigmoid curve.

And we will all drown or burn because of a physical cause which it just so happens we can't demonstrate happening in the laboratory at any scale.

Apr 1, 2018 at 3:04 PM | Radical Rodent

As Climate Science has failed to self correct or even admit its own mistakes, it has failed as a Science.

"We do not see the current temperature changes as a short term linear trend which will stop soon. We see it as the lag phase of a larger sigmoid curve."

Apr 1, 2018 at 9:09 AM | Entropic man

Entropic Man, do YOU think that Climate Science needs to review its assumptions about ECS? If we have had all the warming we are going to get, then there is no reason to fear a larger sigmoid curve. No lag phase was shown in Mann's Hockey Stick.

It still does not provide a cause for the MWP starting, continuing, and ending.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/01/uh-oh-analysis-of-ghcn-climate-stations-shows-there-is-no-statistically-significant-warming-or-cooling/

"In Conclusion, based upon the available long-term temperature data the case for global warming is very weak. There is evidence to suggest a hemispheric pattern exists. The evidence further suggests this is a cyclical pattern which is evident in localized temperature peaks in the 1930’s and the 1990’s. However, changes in local site conditions due to human development appear to be the most important factor affecting overall temperature changes. Extreme warming trends are almost certainly due to human induced local changes."

"..... changes in local site conditions due to human development ....." Does that mean UHI?