I challenged Monckton's elaboration here and here with respect to their accuracy and scientific validity. The first comment by me got a reply by Monckton, in which he only repeated previous assertions without anything to back them up, plus some ad hominem arguments against my person. So far, I have not seen anything by Monckton after my second rebuttal to him.
In his announcement to punish me with banning, Watts declared I should not write there anymore, as someone who was funded with money coming from taxpayers. True it is, my whole life is publicly funded, all the expenses that are needed to sustain my lifelihood, everything I do is basically taxpayer funded, since I do not have any significant private income sources, only my salary funded with government grants. Of course, Watts is free to make whatever rules he likes for who is allowed to write on his blog, and no one's rights are violated by this. However, I wonder whether he thinks this should be the case in society generally that people whose incomes come from public funds should not have the same constitutional rights as the ones with income from private sources. And what other rights and entitlements should be limited for publicly funded people compared to privately funded ones, according to Watts.
I am going to see whether my banishment is going to be temporarily. I do not plan to back off from criticizing Watts's and friends's crooked approach toward science and truth on his own blog, from the perspective of someone who works in the field of climate science. If he does not want to have it there he will have to banish me permanently.
Here are the comments that got censored by Watts from the mentioned thread. The first one disputes the meaning of a quote from the NOAA State of the Climate Report 2008 (Attention, this file is 14.9 MB), how it had been presented in a previous comment by another user. The second one just states some facts about the trend of the near surface and lower tropospheric temperature trend over the time period of the last 17 years.
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Werner Brozek, on February 26, 2013 at 8:42 am, in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/22/ipcc-railroad-engineer-pachauri-acknowledges-no-warming-for-17-years/#comment-1233141
wrote:
"My purposes are at least two fold. I think it is fairer to say a slope is 0 than to say a slope could be 0 at a certain level of significance, but that it could also be much higher at the higher end."
I don't really understand what "fair" or "fairer" is supposed to mean in the context of assessing data as empirical evidence to support or contradict a scientific statement. What is required in science is to be precise. A statement about a slope of a trend, when it is supposed to be empirical evidence for something, is quite meaningless without any information about the error band of the slope. You can do a trend analysis, and when the result shows a Zero-trend, it is always only a statistical estimate. It does not mean that you really have the information that the trend was exactly Zero. You only have the information that it was Zero within a range of uncertainty for a specified probability. There is no other way here than to make a probability statement. If the statistical significant trend of the temperature increase since the 1970ies lies within the error band of the temperature record of the recent years, then the conclusion that both trends probably did not belong to the same statistical population cannot be validly drawn from such a statistical trend estimate.
If uncertainty ranges did not matter, I could equally claim that the warming trend was something between 1.2 and 4.7 K per decade now, because that's what the trend analysis currently gives as result for all the major data sets from the beginning of the year 2012.
"PDF document @NOAA.gov. For anyone else who wants it, the exact quote from pg 23 is:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
So I admit that Hadcrut4 does NOT meet this criteria yet, but three other data sets do. See the bolded ones below."
You say everyone who wants can check the quote under the link. However, I wonder whether you yourself have bothered to check whether the quote really says what you assert here it says, because what you bring here is a misrepresentation of its meaning. I already have discussed this quote previously, like here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1220510
This is the longer version of the quote:
"We can place this apparent lack of warming in the context of natural climate fluctuations other than ENSO using twenty-first century simulations with the HadCM3 climate model (Gordon et al. 2000), which is typical of those used in the recent IPCC report (AR4; Solomon et al. 2007). Ensembles with different modifications to the physical parameters of the model (within known uncertainties) (Collins et al. 2006) are performed for several of the IPCC SRES emissions scenarios (Solomon et al. 2007). Ten of these simulations have a steady long-term rate of warming between 0.15° and 0.25ºC decade–1, close to the expected rate of 0.2ºC decade–1. ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2–25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
(http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf, p. 23, Figure 2.8b on page 22 illustrates this graphically).
From the longer version you have only quoted the last sentence. The whole two pages where the quote is from are about the question whether there is a discrepancy between model simulations and observations. The report refers to a study (Collins et al., CD, 2006, doi: 10.1007/s00382-006-0121-0), where many simulations were carried out with one climate model, HadCM3, with varied configurations. The important information you have left out is that the comparison presented in the report is done for the temperature data after adjusting them for the contributions to the temperature series that come from ENSO variability. Therefore, your presentation that the bolded temperature series fulfill this criterion that you quoted is false, since you don't have calculated out those contributions of the temperature variability that come from ENSO.
If you wanted to see whether those temperature data sets fulfill this criterion, you would have to do the ENSO-adjustment exercise first.
Actually, if one really is precise this criterion of "15 years" would only apply to the simulations with the one model, HadCM3, that was used for the mentioned study. The internal variability of different climate models is not all the same. Thus, other models might have given a somewhat different answer, if the study had been performed with those models. Perhaps, the answer for some models, the ones with smaller internal variability, would have been 12 or 14 years, or for other ones, ones with higher internal variability, 17 or maybe 20 years. We don't know the answer for those other models.
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The second censored comment:
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The claim that there had been no temperature rise for 17 year isn't even factually correct, since all the trend estimates for the major data sets show a positive trend, with GISTEMP more than 90% probability of significance, and NOAA and HadCRUT4 with more than 80% probability of significance. The trend estimate for UAH is higher than for these surface data sets, but it is not statistically significant because of the higher variability of the tropospheric temperatures, compared to near surface temperatures. RSS only shows a small positive trend.
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