Well, I wasn’t going to write anything about this. I had seen it a few days before WUWT had posted on it. I didn’t think it was going to get much reaction so I didn’t bother. But, after seeing it elsewhere, on WUWT and now at SkS, I thought I’d throw my 2¢. Just skimming what Frank Lansner had to say about it, it seems he did a fair job of covering some of the most glaring issues.

ATTN: I didn’t read any comments on any of the blogs. So, if my observations are redundant, then just look at it as affirmation.

For those not familiar, Tamino and Rahmstorf managed to find some complicit ideologues to review a paper that allegedly shows warming has continued unabated throughout the last decade or so; that the warming has a similar rate of warming seen through the 80s and 90s.

The reason why I hadn’t commented earlier is because ……….. this has to be the dumbest paper ever written in direct reference to global temps. From the abstract….. “When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced.”

So, ostensibly, they removed these signals from the temps and got the graph above. Below is HadCrut and RSS of the same period split at 1998. (Because the aim of the paper was an attempt to counter the skeptic observation that we haven’t seen any warming in over a decade.) The first split shows the HadCrut data warming from less than zero to just above 0.4°C and RSS going from -0.2 to just over 0.1°C. If you look at the first graph offered it shows essentially the same rise over the same period of time. Basically, what tweedle dee and dum are saying, ENSO, volcanoes, and solar variations had a net zero effect on our temps for about 19 years, but for the next 14 they’ve held our temps down.

That should be enough to have people laugh at them. But, the most glaringly vapid part of the paper is the assumption there are no other signals which effect our global temps. AO, AMO, AO(Antarctic)? Any of this comes to mind? What of cloud cover? Oh, wait….. that brings another vacant part of the posit to mind. This assumes we know the effects these known factors have on our global temps. We know no such thing. We don’t know how much the volcanoes effect our temps, we don’t know how much ENSO effects our temps, and many alarmists contend the sun is essentially a constant. So, which is it? Does the sun effect our global temps or not?

But, never mind all of that. If, of all of the known events, we knew how much they effected the earth’s temps, we still wouldn’t know anything. Because, we don’t know all that goes into our earth’s temps. If we did, we could accurately predict the earth’s and the earth’s atmospheric temps.

So, to the alarmists out there, come back when you actually see an accurate prediction on our temps……….. then I’ll tell you a story about 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters for 100 years.

I could go into more detail, like showing how if you subtract ENSO from the global temps it would have a negative impact on the temp trend,(how much, would only be a guess) and other neat things like showing different solar impacts and indices, but that’s way too much overkill for a piece of sophistry such as Foster and Rahmstorf 2011.