I do agree with you that circularity of mathematical method, which was the primary flaw alleged, is not the primary but the whole assumption that one can evaluate output validity from comparing to the data that was used to program the input. The equation variables, ERF, alpha and kappa were all derived from delta T. So, circularity is not an issue since identity is assumed. However, do you believe that there should have been an additional term added to the equation to account for unforced variability?

I’m referring to the circularity argument. If there were no known mechanisms then I would suspect a lot of climate related arguments would be circular. But there are. What McI and others are really doing is forgetting that there are fundamentals that you can’t ignore and still get this right.

Let’s take look at it as if we were figuring out how to make the fasted car with power fixed at 100HP. One could build a an ensemble of models that are small and simplistic and do lots of testing combinations with large quantities of trials. Or, you could feel that they should be make full-scale and very complex but you knowing that trials are so expensive that they will have to be planed months in advance and can only rent the track once a year. Add to this that each car is built by a national team and entered into an international competition to see whose is the best. Which approach do you think is the most efficient to get you the optimal design? Which approach best describes the IPCC’s?

There is extreme pressure to declare an answer to the AGW question but to do that scientifically your model has to demonstrate the power to predict future temperature trend. Clearly, it’s no validation to predict the past since one used the past temperature as the programming guide. Temperature is not a question. What occurs internally to produce temperature is. Each model has a unique mix of variables to simulate the 20th century within naturally observed variability. Once everything is set the clock starts that the experiment begins. One hopes that after each four-year interval one can report which models are tracking the temperature trend an which are not, every reporting adding certainty to which are more valid. The problem is that right out of the gate none of the models tracked observed temp. No problem. We can wait and see if there is variability swinging the trend back. The predicament we are in now is that it has been 4 times 4 years and all the models predict steady rise and we observe flat line. The logical thing to do if you were a business is scrap the complex models and start learning at a faster pace with simple models and then start the clock again for validation with higher confidence models with a wider spread, just to be sure there is at least a few successes out of the group.

What we have now is 16 years of reports that are ever more confident in the models at the same time the observed temperature trend is pulling further and further away. What to do? Enter Dr. Jochem Marotzke et al, and the “innovative” idea of validating the models from the models. Are you following my so far? Any problems with my narrative?

Are you familiar with Marotzke and Forster 2015 (Nature)? Do you believe anyone can make a conclusion about approximations of adjusted forcings, ECS, TOA imbalance averages and trends by diagnosing a sampling of runs from a sampling of models that used a sampling of real observed temp history that was of questionable accuracy before 1970? If you can’t make the leap to accept all those assumptions you cannot even begin to take the paper seriously. But lets say you do. The problems just begin there. Here is the paper. http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/global%20temperature%20trends.pdf

Here is the audit of the paper with 830 comments: http://climateaudit.org/2015/02/05/marotzke-and-forsters-circular-attribution-of-cmip5-intermodel-warming-differences/

Here is the author’s response: http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2015/marotzke-forster-response/

R Graf, you have some serious citation mojo if you’ve figured that out! I have 33 peer reviewed papers on my desk that were published in 2015 that address the so-called “hiatus” but I’ve not tried to cross-correlate the authors with a list of “IPCC authors.” Have you? Can you tell us exactly which four papers you are talking about?

I would not characterize the general sense of climate science as you have in your comment, but that certainly is one opinion. I have no idea what you mean by “they just stare at you.” I’ve had conversations with some of these authors and nobody stared at me. Perhaps you could clarify what you are talking about here!

Dave Burton is apparently correct for discrete pockets of warmer water (less dense) — It is buoyed up by the cooler waters around and below it. I never realized this held for liquid water; I *assumed* ‘ One warmer drop raises the whole ocean’.

For instance:

The Loop Current and its eddies may be detected by measuring sea surface level. Sea surface level of both the eddies and the Loop on September 21, 2005 was up to 60 cm (24 in) higher than surrounding water, indicating a deep area of warm water beneath them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_Current#Effect_on_hurricanes

Peter Gleick cleared of forging documents in Heartland expose

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/may/21/peter-gleick-cleared-heartland