Thursday, December 13, 2007

Tropospheric trends, and a sally from denialists

Real Climate patiently swats some recent denialism (a long article, but well worth reading): Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

Some old-timers will remember a series of 'bombshell' papers back in 2004 which were going to "knock the stuffing out" of the consensus position on climate change science (see here for example). Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened. The issue in two of those papers was whether satellite and radiosonde data were globally consistent with model simulations over the same time. Those papers claimed that they weren't, but they did so based on a great deal of over-confidence in observational data accuracy (see here or here for how that turned out) and an insufficient appreciation of the statistics of trends over short time periods.

Well, the same authors (Douglas, Pearson and Singer, now joined by Christy) are back with a new (but necessarily more constrained) claim, but with the same over-confidence in observational accuracy and a similar lack of appreciation of short term statistics...

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