What is remarkable with this is that for climate change short term satellite measurements are not preferred over a mishmash of flawed surface measurements, while for ozone depletion most policy decisions were based on a very short sample of satellite measurements while surface UV levels didn’t support the alarmist view that we’re going to die of cancer.

this is still not a good argument for using it to measure the change currently occurring however. but it does mean that if we use surface data pre 1979 and satellite afterwards, it is not a purely apples to apples comparison.

but that does not seem to be a good reason to prefer a flawed and incomplete record to the satellite record which not only uses better methodology and has a wider footprint, but has been verified by an independent source (weather balloon data) see ball etc on comparing MSU lower trop data to noaa weather balloons. they are statistically indistinguishable.

i suspect another reason (though it is certainly not a valid one) for preferring the surface data is that it began, in a widespread fashion owing to the spread of thermometers, in the late 1800′s as the world was still emerging from the little ice age, one of the coldest period in the last 10,000 years. given climate’s tendency to revert to the mean, any data set anchored at that time will have a built in tendency to show warming. this is essentially like taking the temperature in february as baseline and then commenting “my, it certainly is much warmer most of the time.”…

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/

I wanted to point out that Pieke is comparing the IR4 predictions to the actuals from 2000. IR4 was released in 2007 so one would expect a good match between the models and the recent past. What we need to do is watch for divergance from 2007 on.

This means Pieke’s blog gives an extremely misleading representation of the accuracy of the models. He should clearly indicate on his graphs when the model results were published.