Strange bedfellows

Anthony Watts' "long awaited surfacestations paper" had as one of its co-authors John Nielsen-Gammon. I hadn't heard of him before, but some commenters around the place noted that he was no skeptic, and said he ran a pretty good blog (Climate Abyss) on climate change. (Some said they couldn't understand why he would get involved in any project with Watts.)

At Deltoid and Rabett Run, the biggest climate change blogs so far which have spent time pointing out how Watts' paper had disproved his own claims about warming bias for the US mean temperatures, Nielsen-Gammon made some comments which seemed to be attempts to protect Watts from too much criticism. Some at Deltoid had a go at him about this: why shouldn't Watts be strongly criticised for the way he pre-empted (inaccurately, and for skeptic propaganda purposes) the results of his own project for years.

Anyway, I see that Nielsen-Gammon has a new post up at his own blog which does show how much of a non-skeptic he really is. It really does confirm that he and Watts make very strange bedfellows on any climate research paper.

So, here are the best parts from Nielsen-Gammon's post:

“If carbon dioxide supposedly causes global warming, then what caused the Roman Warm Period?”

This question just floors me. I have a hard time figuring out why I’m supposed to fully understand the energy balance of the Earth 2,000 years ago, prior to the first thermometer or the second satellite,* before I’m allowed to examine data from comprehensive global observing systems to figure out what’s happening right here and now.

I’m pretty sure that what’s really being asked is the following: “The Earth’s climate has had warm and cold periods before. Why can’t this be the same old thing again?” This is a little easier to address, but still there’s the unspoken expectation that all possible natural explanations need to be understood and excluded before we should accept an anthropogenic explanation.

This does sound like a cautious choice, seemingly consistent with Sherlock Holmes the climate scientist, who would say that you should exclude all the plausible explanations before concluding that the remaining explanation, however implausible, is the correct one. The problem, though, is that the anthropogenic explanation is not the implausible one, it’s the obvious one.....

...at least one of the primary causes of the relatively warm decade of the 2000s is obvious: WE’VE MUCKED WITH THE ATMOSPHERE SO MUCH THAT IT HAD TO GET WARMER. Even just the direct effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be enough for a few tenths of a degree of warming, and the odds are overwhelming that climate feedbacks would further enhance the warming. Heck, we’ve probably done so much to the atmosphere that some of the natural processes are no longer in play. My guess is that we’ve fairly successfully prevented the next glacial period, for example....

In my previous post, I discussed some of the things that affect the Earth’s climate. I need to know more about them to see how they affected the Roman Warm Period. How much brighter was the Sun during that time? Was there a lull in volcanic activity? How much did the Romans clear forests and alter the local climate? I need to know how the climate forcings changed before I can say which one (or which combination) caused the Roman Warm Period.

After all, the only reason we know that greenhouse gases have been a major contributor to the current warming is that we’ve got decent global measurements of them, we’ve got observations from space that show the reduced infrared emissions because of those gases, and we can calculate (with simple or complex models, it doesn’t matter) that the expected rise in temperature is in the right ballpark to be greenhouse-gas induced. Oh, and we can measure the other forcings, such as solar output and aerosols from volcanoes, and they’re nowhere near large enough. Many of them, in fact, would cause cooling!

And no, I’m not impressed by how much the Earth has cooled over the past decade.

Wow.

I see that Anthony Watts has re-posted Nielsen-Gammon's post about the surfacestations.org results on diurnal temperature range (the significance of which remains unclear, but at least Watts can claim it as a useful result). I would not however, hold my breath waiting for Dr John's strongly pro-AGW post to turn up at Watts Up With That.