Pielke Senior has a blog

RP senior has a blog. Its quite interesting, and its about climate. Its http://ccc.atmos.colostate.edu/blog/ if you want to look.

In my normal carping way I'm going to pick up various points with which I diagree. So don't treat this as a review of the blog overall (and in fact it would be rather presumptuous of me to "review" his blog overall, given his status (err, and mine...)).

Browsing, Pielke and Christy Comment on Hansen et al. Science paper entitled “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications.” caught my eye. In it, they complain that Science won't publish their comment. Well, tough, I say: Science doesn't publish a lot of things. And when you get reviews back like:

The exchange is not worthy of publication. In fact, I do not understand why P&C even wrote their piece in the first place. They continually destroy whatever point they had in mind by noting Hansen ‘did it right’... None of the participants in this pathetic exchange seem to have the slightest clue about the large decadal noise that exists in the oceans and some ocean models.

then you're not going to get published. Thats ferocious stuff (there's another review, which is also highly critical, though more measured).

I find this interesting because it has shades of other controversies: Christy Spencer [oops, wrong one: thanks to TPa: here] whining that he wasn't asked to review Fu; and another one that I can't remember now. That particular post looks like a severe error of judgement to me.

Coming back to the MSU (I do seem to be getting a bit obsessed by it... sorry) elsewhere, RP complains about people saying that the surface and upper-air records of temperature change can now, in fact, be reconciled which rather suggests that he should be asking Christy about the vn5.2 dataset... Yet again elsewhere he notes that Recently, Christy et al. (2003) demonstrated a strong correspondence between their version of the MSU time series and several other independent measures of tropospheric temperature trends, and they conclude that the Mears et al. (2003) trend is likely too strong.. Which might have been fair enough when he wrote it, but blogging about it now, when even S+C admit that their trend is now the same as Mears, is a bit odd. It also points out that there will be a lot of rowing back to be done when S+C finally publish. There's also the interesting point (and I've said this on sci.env but not here): given that S+C *do* assert a good correspondence between vn5.1 and sondes, what are they going to do about the 50% larger trends in vn5.2? If it *still* matches the sondes, then the sondes are a poor test. If it doesn't... are they going to say their data is wrong? Or are they suddenly going to discover that the sondes aren't so good after all? Interesting...

BTW, speaking of Christy, the rumour is: August 11th. Just checking to see if you read through to the end...