Personally I didnt see it as a formal attribution. Somewhere else here I described the three canonical responses to the chart
1. I knew that
2. Wow, thats surprising
3. No way, thats too simple.
WRT spatio-temporal patterns and formal attributions I would agree.
The other interesting thing is that people’s reactions to it are really conditioned by their prior beliefs.
Oh, Robert Rhode deserves 100% of the credit for all the temperature work. My primary remit is just to help folks who want to use the data, make sure they can get it easily and use it and explain the ins and outs so that Robert can do real work. so I’m the data monkey. nothing more.
Mosh,
Science provides us with other safeguards as well – at least it does in most scientific disciplines. One of those safeguards should have kicked in to prevent the spurious attribution argument from seeing the light of day. Since even an undergraduate statistics student should be able to enumerate its flaws, I can only believe that the argument was included very cynically to meet political expectations, despite full awareness of its fallaciousness. Unsurprisingly, the MSM has already picked up on that particular argument. Not good. Not good at all.
Thanks.
Is the temperature of the actual land of no interest to anyone though ? Surely it too is involved in the whole radiation budget thing ?
Russel Seitz wouldn’t know a chicken from a boilermaker if one blew up in his face and the other laid an egg on it.
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Mosher, it looks like part of your comment got cut-off, but I’m not surprised Steve would be involved. Publishing data and code immediately would be desirable (though not even BEST did so), but it isn’t necessary. I imagine he, like I, expects to those to be forthcoming and is willing to wait a short while.
Mosher, I didn’t say it was homogenization. I said it was basically homogenization. The effects of the two processes have a lot of similarities.
Moreover, nobody has a monopoly on the term “homogenization.” Something can be homogenization without being the homogenization process which was used in earlier temperature records. I think anyone who looks up the definition for homogenization will agree my description was reasonable.
curryja | July 30, 2012 at 6:09 pm:
“The greenhouse effect is illustrated by the ability of radiative transfer models to simulate the observed spectra (at both the surface and top of atmosphere) including the the CO2, water vapor emission bands.”
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Well, if a model is able to simulate something observed then… it proves what?
It would be nice if it were exactly the other way round: if what a model says about CO2 warming effect could be proven correct by a real direct experiment. Is there anything like that? I mean, if there is nothing, and from my experience with this issue there is nothing, would it not be appropriate to look more closely at the emperor’s clothes?
Upon further consideration fang (Sidles) I find I’m in agreement with Weissman. He just doesn’t realize he agreed with me (yet).
He says there is no such thing as an isothermal atmosphere in the real world. I explained why that’s so. There must always be a temperature gradient in the gravity field. Molecules at the top of column must, on average, have the same energy as molecules at the bottom of the column. Given the molecules at the top of the column have more gravitational energy they must have less kinetic energy for the books to balance. It’s really very simple.
Thanks for playing Dr. Weissman. It’s been fun but ultimately you could not win.
Mosher, it isn’t a sanity check. It’s insane. It claims to calculate a sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 while using CO2 as a proxy for many things. If I used stock market prices as a proxy for human emissions, found it fit well, then calculated a sensitivity and said, “The planet will warm 3.1 degrees every time stock market prices double,” I’d be laughed at.
It doesn’t matter if CO2 is a reasonable proxy for all emissions. Once it is used as a proxy, any results derived are derived for a proxy. Those results are not derived for CO2 itself.
But he’d look a ramblin’ wreck. Thanks Russell for the image of you and of Harvard.
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Thank you for your question, Randy.
Perhaps David Wojick could answer that one?
The emission from pure nitrogen is really weak, not exactly zero but very close to that due to the symmetry of the molecule. Even the magnetic moment is zero making the emission much weaker than that of oxygen which is also very weak.
Thank you for your comment, Jeremy.
Perhaps Steve McIntyre could post them, since he checked the stats.
Some sunlight does reach the Venusian surface, but it’s a very small amount. It’s an important contribution though in its ability to drive convection. The problem with Venus is that radiation from the surface can’t escape to space. It has nothing to do with “geothermal heat.”
Complex natural systems are not amenable to simple laboratory experiments. You have to conduct a series of process experiments, and link them together in a causal chain. If you can simulate the processes using a model that has predictive skill, then the understanding and physics that goes into the model becomes an important part of the theory. Then you continue to challenge the theory and its components with observations. If the models have predictive value and are useful, well then they are used for practical applications. And confidence in the theory is built with successful applications of the theory. So don’t be surprised if you can’t find a simple laboratory experiment that demonstrates or refutes the atmospheric greenhouse effect.
Outstanding post, JCH. 
