UPDATE September 22 2010
The website Prison Planet has posted Paper: Global Cooling began in 2003 which refers to my weblog post below. I want to emphasize two issues here. First, the data does NOT support a conclusion that the global annual heat content has been declining. It shows a lack of statistically significant warming. Second, and an even more important issue, is that the Knox and Douglas study does NOT
“falsif[y] the entire anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.”
Overstatements on all sides of this issue are what is preventing an effective scientific discourse on this subject.
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There is an excellent new paper by Bob Knox and David Douglas that provides further insight into the issue of the monitoring of global climate system heat changes. The paper is
R. S. Knox, David H. Douglass 2010: Recent energy balance of Earth International Journal of Geosciences, 2010, vol. 1, no. 3 (November) – In press doi:10.4236/ijg2010.00000.
The abstract reads
A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.
This paper provides new evidence with respect to the comment and discussions of this climate metric on the weblog post on Skeptical Scientist titled “Pielke Sr and scientific equivocation: don’t beat around the bush, Roger”. The new Knox and Douglas 2010 paper is an important benchmark study to use when the data is further fine tuned and updated into 2010 this Fall.
Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. 