The Aerology section of my blog is run by Richard Holle. He has invested a lot of his retirement money in digitising weathersat images into a sequence he can examine at any timestep. The correlations he has been discovering are remarkable. Full explanation of mechanisms is not necessary to the advance of science if the correlations and predictions are good.

Full explanation can arrive later, if the mainstream sees a need to fit the phenomena into the scheme. We have been waiting several hundred years for an explanation for the physical cause of gravity. Einsteinian geodesics doesn't cut it, which is why there was a (so far fruitless) search for a 'graviton' to fit the quantum view.

Jon, I have no problem forgiving you for not taking my opinions about climate seriously, everyone is on one side or the other of that sharply divided debate, despite the fact no-one has sufficient certainty to warrant a strong position.

I take exception to the 'astrology' slur though. My degree is in the history and philosophy of science, my earlier training and academic qualies are in mech eng.

The anisotropy in the speed of light measured by Dayton Miller could have several plausible explanations apart from 'aether', but his results were real, and have been independently replicated.. Even the Michaelson Morley experiment, poorly sited in a basement, did not get a null result, although the data were reinterpreted that way later. Mainstream astrophysics does itself a dis-service by brushing the results under the carpet, rather than investigating the apparent contradiction.

Well I've had a login to this site for more years than I can remember and this is the first time anyone has visited chez moi. Welcome to the 350+ members who clicked the link to my blog in the headline post.

I hope that those who disagree with the actions of the 'whistleblower' or 'hacker' will take a look at the other interesting stuff we discuss at the talkshop rather than judge by the single issue of the climategate emails.

These last few years I've been researching the secret life of the solar system and how the various masses and forces in it interact to cause change of various kinds (including but not limited to the surface temperature of planets), and we've discovered some very interesting things. Some of these things are now being confirmed by recent research by NASA scientists.

Please feel free to look around and hang out for a while if you're interested in the near cosmos and our planet's interaction with it.

Cheers

Rog Tallbloke
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/

All Spencer is demonstrating is that the amount of the temperature change due to unforced changes in cloud albedo in relation to the amount of cloud change being caused by temperature is not able to be determined by regression of the satellite data on surface temperature against measures of outgoing longwave radiation. This is obvious to anyone who thinks about it for a minute. The ocean overturns on a 1500 year timescale, and has a heat capacity 4000 times bigger than the atmosphere. It tends to thermally stratify, but 'folds' and mixings of those layers occur due to changes in Earth rotation speed etc. As a consequence, the energy of past warmings can pop out of the ocean back into the atmosphere on various timescales and in quantities which don't directly relate to current forcings and feedbacks within the climate system.

No amount of huffing and puffing by Trenberth, Abrahams, or Dessler changes that.

The Forbes article is wrong in that what Spencer is telling us is not that he has 'blown a gaping hole in mainstream climate theory'. He has just correctly pointed out the *uncertainty* in our assessment of the magnitude of cloud feedback. That's what Trenberth and the other mainstream guys don't like, because it makes a mockery of their assertion that we can know the extent of human contribution to temperature change at the probability levels they claim we can.

Stratospheric water vapour and co2 are in the wrong forcing ratio on that graph. SWV is about 30% as effective as a ghg. It's been falling in concentration since around 2000 and partially explains the hiatus in warming. Solomon 2010 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1182488

Warmista Anxiously Rebut: Mention Impending Sizzling Thermageddon Again

The principle problem for the enhanced greenhouse effect theory is that IR doesn't penetrate water further than it's own wavelength. Because the surface 'skin' of the ocean is cooler than the ~1mm below it, conduction downwards doesn't work either, and turbulent convection won't mix IR energy downwards in any significant amounts. So the only contribution the longwave radiative flux makes is through its support of the adiabatic lapse rate. Whilst this is responsible for the fact that the lower troposphere and the upper ocean is some 33C warmer than it would be in a world devoid of radiative gases, it only has one way to change the temperature of the ocean bulk: by reduction of the temperature differential between near surface air and the ocean surface.

This is a very sloooooooooow way to change the temperature of the bulk of the upper ocean, which has an enoooooooormous heat capacity.

It certainly won't explain the increase in the ocean heat content from 1980-2003, when the warming of the ocean pretty much then stopped.
The empirical measurement of a reduction in tropical low cloud cover by ISCCP allowing more shortwave sunshine to penetrate the ocean during that time period is more likely responsible for that.

OK, so what other 'raw materials' might CA or US want from Siberia? Not ice cubes.

Renewable energy transmission? From Russia??