This is OT but I wanted to ask if either Kevin or yourself have seen/have any thoughts on Jim Bouldin’s work described in a series of posts on his blog, titled ‘Severe analytical problems in dendroclimatology’. This is part one, there are eleven further parts.

It would be good to get the perspective of some dendrochronologists.

does this movement of heat into the deep ocean challenge the existing models of ocean heat transport?

THe Meehl et al 2011 paper quoted above shows that, in their model at least, periods of increased ocean uptake are ultimately followed by periods of reduced uptake. So the joules getting into the Earth System maybe increasing year by year, but their ultimate fate into the climate subsystems (ocean, atmosphere, ice, etc) is more variable. In the end, however, the whole climate system warms, to conserve energy. The current hiatus is perfectly compatible with the behavior of such a model (and possibly other IPCC-class climate models).

Might we be fortunate enough to see more heat whisked down into the blackest waters, not of course gone but less of an immediate problem than the joules stuck on the surface?

I think that’s what’s going on. It might continue for a little while, until something gives and surface warming catches up with the top-of-atmosphere energy imbalance. The heart of the problem here is that we’re trying to judge long-term climate sensitivity from very transient variations. It could be that the warming rate was extremely high in the nineties, extremely low in the oughts, and that has fueled extreme perspectives on either side (the alarmists vs the denialists). But until CO2 concentrations stop rising exponentially, I’ll see little reason to doubt that higher rates of warming will eventually return.

I absolutely agree with you (see here: http://theidiottracker.blogspot.com/2013/04/attack-of-pause.html) but I do wonder; does this movement of heat into the deep ocean challenge the existing models of ocean heat transport? Might we be fortunate enough to see more heat whisked down into the blackest waters, not of course gone but less of an immediate problem than the joules stuck on the surface?

I don’t know, I wonder about it. Thoughts?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/16/us-climate-slowdown-idUSBRE93F0AJ20130416

It smells extremely fishy, especially as they give no sources at all. My guess is that they took the story from the Economist.

That’s not what the Economist said, as you wrote above “I read the piece Global Warming: apocalypse perhaps a little later. It argued that since some recent estimates of climate sensitivity have been revised downward, the world might not scorch as early as we once thought.”

So it appears the Economist does not agree with you. I believe the Economist. Thanks.

cheers

“…simulating one exactly like Sandy would be impossible unless we had perfect models and perfect observations (we don’t).”
The models we do have are good enough to show the butterfly effect, and better models won’t make it go away. My presumption was WHAT IF we have an (imperfect) model and observations, imperfect but still good enough to predict Sandy a month and a half prior; a model this good would show that the perturbations in water temperature and Arctic sea ice due to AGW made Sandy what it was, and if those observed perturbations hadn’t happened, Sandy wouldn’t have occurred. Arguing that the increase in retained energy from GHGs magically got sequestered somewhere, and some other internal variable source of energy melted the sea ice and warmed the Atlantic is as silly as the argument that human fossil fuel CO2 emissions disappear magically and an unknown source proportionately adds “natural” CO2 to the atmosphere.

“….one storm won’t do it:”
And one bad roll of the dice won’t prove they’re loaded either. But if you know the weight, dimensions, center of gravity, and have film of the dice rolling to snake eyes, you know. And we don’t have just one storm – we have the storm track, diameter, water temperatures, evolution of central pressure, characteristics of adjacent ridges and troughs, observations of changes in Rossby waves because of sea ice melt, increased humidity from AGW, and a bunch of other 3,4,5 sigma events which are becoming 2,3,4 sigma events.

“…how did you compute those probabilities?”
I looked for storms with similar unusual tracks like Sandy that started or made landfall near Sandy’s at http://csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/#, and came up with 1-3 (depending on parameters) in >120 storms. There are 5-10 tropical Atlantic cyclones per year since 1900, e.g. 500 to 1000 storms. I’ve seen a lot of expert comment along the lines of “unusually low barometric pressure for a storm with no eye” and “unprecedented storm diameter”; nobody’s saying “this happens all the time”, so my SWAG is that the probabilities of those characteristics I listed are small, smaller than 1 in 10, probably nearer 1 in 100. Allowing for Dunning-Kruger and confirmation bias on my part leads to a generous probability of 1 in 10 for each, or 1 in 10000 aggregate – but maybe this was a one in a million storm absent AGW effects.