It's a little more complete than the nature abstract

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/

As i said there, i'm still trying to verify the info

No idea where to put this so here will do.

As part of my ongoing attempts to make sense of the climate change debate i've been looking at the IPCC report's comments and responses section.

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Comments/wg1-commentFrameset.html

It's interesting to note that the vast majority of times a reviewer has suggested changing the language, or adding additional data that would change the context of the report making it look less certain is immediately rejected and the rational for their rejection/acceptance criteria seems a little inconsistant to say the least.

Quick shameless flame.

Jo - You are NOT a scientist (refering to "Trust me i'm a scientist"). You have a degree but seem to have abandoned some core principles of science, namely objective evidence and debate, i.e. I can prove conclusively i'm right and am happy to debate the theory based on the facts (and the best bit, be proved wrong by someone with newer facts, if applicable). I put that comment on this page as it seems to relate nicely to the title at the top of the page.

The BBC News report is clear and notes the model's acknowledgment of warming prevailing in the longer term, and its deviation from the recent warming trend. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7376301.stm

Looks like dear Charles Clover at the Daily Telegraph has had to beat a hasty retreat from his last emission, probably because he got it in the neck from some Climate Change activists...or someone close to him with more than a couple of ounces, I mean grams, of commonsense :-

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/05/01/earthl...

Earthlog: Climate change boomerang

By Charles Clover
Last Updated: 7:01pm BST 01/05/2008

Oh, heck. I knew this would happen. Sometimes we journalists get into trouble by using words that ordinary people use to grab people's attention when scientists use those same words differently. Maybe we shouldn't, but how else do you communicate complicated but interesting facts?

My story this week about global warming "stopping" until 2015 is a case in point.

What ordinary people understand by global warming is the world getting hotter - average temperatures rising. And, according to the initial results of one new computer model, published in Nature this week, average global temperatures do not look like rising, let alone breaking records again until after 2015.

The reason for that is that we seem to have underestimated the long-term variability of the ocean conveyor, the deep currents, which bring warm water from the Equator north in both Atlantic and Pacific. The weakening of those currents, over a 70-80 year cycle, makes the northern hemisphere cooler. A weakening can be expected over the next decade.

What scientists mean by global warming, though, is the sun's radiation being trapped near the Earth's surface by greenhouse gases. This has been going on for millions of years and is now happening at a faster rate thanks to rising emissions of fossil fuels. Clearly what scientists call global warming will continue through this decade.

What the scientists from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, are simply saying is that for the next decade or so the cooling caused by natural variability will hold warmer temperatures in check.

Where the sceptics, such as Lord Lawson, may feel this research bears out their views is that this paper does prove that the great consensus enshrined in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not always right. The IPCC had said that we would get 0.3ºC of warming this decade instead of nothing at all.

But is this a victory for Lord Lawson's view that we should ignore the worst predictions about climate change and get on with our lives? I think not. The German model shows that higher temperatures than 1998, the warmest year on record, are likely to return after 2015.

The Met Office's Hadley Centre also modelled sea temperatures last year. It looked at ocean currents at depth as well as on the surface - which the German model did not - and at the salt content of the water, which affects how currents behave. Hadley concluded that there would be a lull lasting a decade but it said this could be followed by record warm years towards the end of the next decade.

In other words, the warming trend has not gone away and it looks likely that warmer temperatures will boomerang back.

All the same, the political task of negotiating a meaningful new climate treaty in Copenhagen next year now looks more difficult because it will not take place against a backdrop of droughts and soaring temperatures of the kind that got climate concern under way in 1988....

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Steven Milloy is writing for the appropriately named "Junk Science".

It appears that he thinks he is debunking or refuting what he sees as Bad Science.

He could just be a meddlesome cynic, and not actually believe what he is writing about, but does it merely to stir things up and muddy the waters, but I'm not sure.

I think he is displaying poorly considered, derogatory and inflammatory opinions about things he appears to know little about, and that which he does have a grasp on, I think he has the wrong interpretation of.

He is, of course, American, and stands by his right to Freedom of Speech under the First Amendment to the American Constitution. He can say what he likes, regardless of the truth of any matter, and he can utter it in any media. Or, at least he can under American law.

Before you read his account of what he considers the true meaning of the Leipzig report, read this :-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Milloy
http://www.skepdic.com/refuge/junkscience.html
http://www.desmogblog.com/junkman-milloy-spins-himself-into-corporate-ca...

This is priceless, ageless Milloy. He hasn't changed his tune for decades, it seems, even as the Science has moved on and left him a dinosaur with his feet stuck in the mud (in my humble opinion) :-

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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,353844,00.html

Junk Science: The Great Global Warming Race
Thursday, May 01, 2008
By Steven Milloy

Can global warming’s vested interests close the deal on greenhouse gas regulation before the public wises up to their scam?

A new study indicates alarmist concern and a need to explain away the lack of actual global warming. Researchers belonging to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, reported in Nature (May 1) that after adjusting their climate model to reflect actual sea surface temperatures of the last 50 years, "global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations … temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming."

You got that? IPCC researchers project no global warming over the next decade because of Mother Nature. Although the result seems stunning in that it came from IPCC scientists who have always been in the tank for manmade global warming, it’s not really surprising since the notion of manmade climate change has never lived up to its billing.

When NASA’s James Hansen sounded the alarm in Congress 20 years ago, he predicted that rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or CO2, would drive global temperatures higher by 0.34 degrees Celsius during the 1990s. But surface temperatures increased during that decade by only 0.11 degrees Celsius and lower atmosphere temperatures actually decreased. ..

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Here's a little commentary fleshing out how you, the hackettes and journalistas, can be more cautious about how you report Leipzig :-

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http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/05/decade_break_in_glob...

‘Decade break’ in global warming - May 01, 2008

A paper in this week’s Nature predicts that, rather than warming, North Atlantic sea surface temperatures may actually decrease slightly in the next decade. What’s more, the paper suggests global surface temperatures may not actually increase either.

Has global warming stopped? Is this a nail in Al Gore’s coffin?

Well, no.

Despite headlines such as ‘Doubt is cast over global warming’ and ‘Global warming could stop NATURALLY for ten years, say scientists’ that is not what this paper is about.

What this new paper by Noel Keenlyside, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany, sets out to do is incorporate data on short term variations in climate into our models of climate change. By doing this they push us into the arena of creating shorter term predictions, in this case of the next decade.

In a “News and Views” commentary on the piece in the same issue of Nature Richard Wood explains:

"Keenlyside and colleagues’ model uses a very simple ocean initialization method in which they add heat to or remove it from the ocean surface until sea surface temperatures across the globe are close to observed values. They use their model to produce a set of retrospective ‘forecasts’ starting from earlier states, which they test against what actually happened. Their system produces refined temperature predictions a decade ahead for large parts of Europe and North America."

As Woods points out, colleagues of his at the Hadley Centre in the UK published a similar sort of prediction research of a similar sort, though rather different in approach and with significantly different predictions, in Science last year, as we reported at the time. Combining real world data and modelling this way has only recently become possible.

The new model predicts North Atlantic, European and North American sea surface temperatures will cool slightly; tropical Pacific temperatures will likely be almost unchanged and global temperatures will probably be offset by this variation.

This does not mean we don’t need to worry about global warming. “The natural variations change climate on this timescale and policymakers may either think mitigation is working or that there is no global warming at all,” says Keenlyside (Reuters)...

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