So in addition to your very odd assertion that we can safely ignore the observational data in favour of theory – you made one mistake and 2 leaps of faith:
1. It’s well known that there is not much actual water vapour over the Arctic. Most water vapour feedback is expected over the tropics. Any water vapour in the arctic turns to snow, giving negative ice-albedo feedback – the opposite of what you say. Ice albedo would give positive feedback via warmer seas but that is a different argument.
2. The idea that the paleo record cannot be explained assumes the very simplistic theory that climate operates like an electrical circuit is correct. A simple correction to the theory can easily be made to explain whatever you fancy.
3. CO2 plus water vapour feedback cannot explain the 20th century warming without adding aerosols and natural variations. And even then it isn’t a great fit. But I think you’ll find that Roy Spencer has a new theory that fits 20th century warming quite well.

Response– James, James…would you believe anything you hear?- c

Vaguely.

Kerry Emanuel. It was on the tip of my damn tongue.

Hey Chris! How’s it going! Phys 2 is annoying. Good luck!

Response- Hi Chris. You might be referring to this piece by Robert Korty, Kerry Emanuel, and Jeffrey R. Scott
ftp://texmex.mit.edu/pub/emanuel/PAPERS/korty_etal_2008.pdf

Clearly hurricanes play a role in heat transport from the equator to the poles, so changing hurricane intensity/frequency may play a role in the temperature contrast with latitude. Interesting hypothesis, and I’m glad to see the paper touched upon the implications to paleoclimate (are you familiar with the pole-equator temperature gradient issue during the Cretaceous and other hothouse climates?) — chris

This is a late post, hope you see it. You’ve answered my questions on some other blogs and I have a conceptual question for you.

I’ve recently read that despite an indicated cooling of the mean ocean temperatures since ~2003, because sea levels have actually been rising it has been hypothesized that the measurements are inaccurate and the water is warming and therefore expanding. That makes sense.

But I see now that according to http://sealevel.colorado.edu/results.php sea levels have been falling for approx. 2 years. [Way to short for a trend and I won't put any deeper thought in to it, but... ] It’s always said that there is “warming in the pipeline”.

Well surface temps have been flat or slightly cooling for some period of time, say 8 years. Ocean’s have been reported to be cooling for say 5 years. Now sea level has been reported as dropping for 2 years. Logically doesnt this all make sense and could it not paint the picture that the climate is cooling and there isn’t more heat in the “pipeline”?

If the energy imbalance peaked in the 1990’s and the surface temperatures started to drop, ocean temps lagged and peaked a few years later, then the ice melt input fell behind the volume from thermal contraction so the sea level started to drop. It makes a logical picture no?

Response- Check this out. – C

I read your post, but it seems to just restate WG1 Sect. 3.4. Specifically I would welcome clarification of a number of apparent contradictions in the arguments:

1. “there is very strong reason to suspect that the data is simply not reliable,”
This doesn’t cut it. What is the confidence interval? Are they any worse than global average surface temperatures that also have changes in instrumentation? These data are averaged over many problematic measurements and still broadly useful.

2. Sect 3.4 states: “that the available data do not indicate a detectable trend in upper-tropospheric relative humidity”. “available data” also includes radiosonde data. How do you account for what appears to be denying the existence of “inconvenient” data.

3. Related to the above, the relative humidity trends look much more reliable at all altitudes than specific humidity.

4. Though I haven’t really nailed down the levels of the atmosphere, without wanting to get into ambiguity over that, the levels they model at 200-300hPa are the same levels that models are supposed to exhibit maximum EGE warming. See the figure from Douglass above. Therefore this is exactly the region that should be identified for evaluating the accuracy of GCM modeling of enhanced greenhouse due to feedbacks.

5. The spectroscopic effects are very small, and the stats suspect. See my post on the Harries paper here http://landshape.org/enm/interpretation-bias/ and John Daly extensive review http://www.john-daly.com/smoking.htm. I haven’t read Sodon’s paper yet.

Sorry to seem like I am hammering on this. I really would appreciate clarification, and we try to be civil around here. Regards.

Response- I didn’t do any original analysis, and this is not different from IPCC conclusions; I also contacted Brian Soden who seemed convinced that (at least for upper level water vapor, maybe not temperature), the reanalysis data was not reliable. Having him say that in Science, and in informal exchange, suggests to me there may be some issues. The trends in Watts’ plots make no sense.– chris