I totally agree. It’s like followers of Nostradamus who interpret his quattrains after the fact. The real test is whether you can make predictions without the benefit of hindsight. At this test, the warmists have failed miserably. Just as “psychics” have failed miserably.

And by the way, it’s interesting to note the double standard at work. If temperatures had been rising steadily since 1997, the warmists would be saying “Aha!!! Anthropogenic Global Warming!!” But if temperatures are flat or declining, they claim a 10 year period is insignificant.

You are the one providing the statistics that support my view that ten years is a sufficient period for observing a climate trend. You are the one that said that an increase in carbon dioxide can be observed as increasing temperature 0.2 degrees centigrade in a decade, not me. If this is so, then reason says an analysis of a ten year period should be sufficient to provide a trend that is as valid as your statement. This is logical reasoning and the value of semantics. Words do mean things, and you provided the words.

I’m still wondering how Church and White discovered that 7 to 19 micron increase. Did they have some hyper-efficient measuring device to measure a change that is roughly the thickness of one or two red blood cells? Did they have tide gauges with microscopes and microscopic gradations to measure down to the millionth of a meter? It is just such a subtle measurement they were able to accomplish.

the effect of CO2 on the climate is not directly derived from fundamental physical laws – yes it is. You misunderstand the way clouds are treated. Their formation cannot be treated directly within current climate models because the spatial resolution available is much larger than clouds. So, they have to be parametrized. If you think you know a better way, I’m sure a journal would love to publish your paper. The parametrization of a phenomenon in a model with limited spatial resolution does not mean that the operation of the phenomenon at higher spatial resolution is not understood.

The point about your bizarre ‘we’ is that it is analogous to saying ‘we don’t know why the Earth orbits the Sun’, or ‘we don’t know why helium is an inert gas’. We do. If you don’t, then your ignorance is nothing to be proud of.

CO2 forcing models end up with a completely incorrect atmospheric temperature profile – no they don’t. This claim is simply a fantasy of the Luddite deniers. Have you read any actual literature on this?

Keith – what a tiresomely thick person you are, really. Do you understand what I explained about natural variations? Do you see that some changes are larger, over a short period, than natural variations? And the other changes are smaller? Which ones do you think we’ll detect, and which ones won’t we detect? If you can get over your childishly black and white approach to science, I’m sure you can grasp this.

Good Lord! He’s finally woken up!

So, you are saying that a decade IS long enough to detect a climate trend? Your scale of effect in this quote is based upon a decadal scale, and the effect is of a measurable quantity. So, if a decade is long enough for this effect, then our observations that there has not been any perceptible warming over the last decade is valid as well. Thanks for confirming this, Scientist.

pretending you weren’t talking about the direct radiative forcing but feedbacks instead.

And here I thought the various feedbacks are supposed to be one of the things that CO2 is forcing, you know, like Andrews and Forster mention here:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2007GL032273.shtml

But I suppose I was wrong. Either way, the effect of CO2 on the climate is not directly derived from fundamental physical laws. For example, in the paper above, we don’t have any governing equations derived from fundamental physical laws for the formation of clouds. Those models have to be derived via observational correlation, which may very well take the form of a hypothesized ODE with “tweaked” coefficients (like the famous k-e turbulence model). But mathematically, that’s still a correlation…just a few steps fancier than linear regression. And because a turbulent fluid is a chaotic dynamical system, I don’t expect it to work very well. It doesn’t work well with energy dissipation; so why should I expect it to work well with cloud formation? AFAIK, that’s how all the CO2 forcings work.

Of course, I’m talking to someone who thinks that fluids are merely “one input” into predicting climate.

what is this royal ‘we’? It’s the unnamed actor in your passive “has been detected.”

so this sentence is just bizarre The collective “we” is not uncommon in English. For example, one might say “We really love hamburgers in the USA,” even though he himself might not like hamburgers, and not every American likes hamburgers. One also might say “We’ve been fighting in Iraq for a long time,” even though he himself had never been to Iraq. A mother might say to a child, “Are we not going to eat our dinner?” even though her own plate is clean. Another example is the old adage, “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t solve [fill in your social problem].” Hope that clears things up.