This is one humdinger of a paper and it’s been a long time coming.

It’s a big step forward in the search for the hot-spot. (If the hot spot were a missing person, McKitrick et al have sighted a corpse.)

In 2006 the CCSP quietly admitted with graphs (in distant parts of various reports) that the models were predicting a hot spot that the radiosondes didn’t find (Karl et al 2006).

Obviously this was a bit of a problem for the Scare Campaign. Much of the amplifying feedback created in the models also creates the hot-spot, so without any evidence that the hot-spot is occurring, there goes the disaster (and the urgent need for funding and junkets).
Douglass et al officially pointed out the glaring deficiency in 2007. Santer et al replied in 2008 by discovering a lot of uncertainties, and stretching the error bars. Since the broad errors bars overlapped he could announce that the hot spot wasn’t really missing (even though he didn’t really find it either). He wrote this up in words effectively saying that the inconsistency in temperatures was not so inconsistent.
McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out these key Santer results which used data up to 1999 were overturned with the use of data up to 2009. Somehow, despite all the excitement over Santer et al 2008, the IJOC decided updating it and contradicting it was “not interesting” and it took months to reach that banal conclusion.

Posted on August 11th, 2010 under Global Warming. Tags: Herman (Chad), Hot Spot, IJOC, McIntyre (Steven), McKitrick (Ross), Missing Hot Spot. Comments: 104

It’s taken 21 months, four professors, and three associate/assistant professors, and THIS is the best they could come up with? The printed version listed no author (the pdf has been updated with John Cooks name*) yet wears the logo of the University of Western Australia (UWA), which will embarrass that university as word spreads of [...]

Posted on July 5th, 2010 under AGW socio-political, Global Warming, The Skeptics Handbook. Tags: Alexander 2006, Debunking The Skeptics Handbook, Diurnal Temperature Range (DTR), Harries 2001, Hot Spot, Missing Hot Spot, Sherwood, Sherwood 2008, SkepticalScience (debunking), Tropospheric temperatures (upper), Wang 2009. Comments: 626

The line blurs between peer-reviewed-science and peer-reviewed-public-relations.
The Big-Scare-Campaign needed an answer to the missing hot-spot question. They needed to find the “hot spot”, or failing that, at the very least provide a “hot spot” type graph that would answer the critics; something that passed for a scientific answer that might fool journalists and bloggers. The [...]

Posted on July 3rd, 2010 under AGW socio-political, Global Warming. Tags: Hot Spot, Missing Hot Spot, Sherwood (Steven), Sherwood 2008, Tropospheric temperatures (upper). Comments: 174

John Cook might be skeptical about skeptics, but when it comes to government funded committee reports, not so much.
The author of “skeptical science” has finally decided to try to point out things he thinks are flaws in The Skeptics Handbook. Instead, he misquotes me, shies away from actually displaying the damning graphs I use, gets [...]

Posted on June 26th, 2010 under AGW socio-political, Global Warming. Tags: Cook (John), Debunking The Skeptics Handbook, Hot Spot, Missing Hot Spot, Santer, Sherwood, SkepticalScience (debunking). Comments: 348

The debate with Paleoclimatologist Dr Andrew Glikson about the evidence for Climate change has reached a telling point.  There is a gaping hole.

Through four rounds of to and fro, I’ve been asking for evidence that the predicted (critical) “hot spot” was there above the equator, and we were drilling down to this point. It’s the [...]

Posted on June 1st, 2010 under Global Warming. Tags: Glikson (Dr Andrew), Hurricanes, Missing Hot Spot, Pliocene. Comments: 47

UPDATED Part IV: Andrew Glikson replies below.
I am impressed that Glikson replied politely, rose above any ad hominem or authority based arguments, and focused on the science and the evidence. This kind of exchange is exceedingly rare, and it made it well worth continuing. Links to Part I and II are at the end. Round [...]

Posted on May 12th, 2010 under Global Warming. Tags: Boreholes, Debates, Glikson (Dr Andrew), Hockey Stick Graph, Missing Hot Spot, PETM, Quadrant, Vostok Ice Core. Comments: 135

Dr Andrew Glikson (an Earth and paleoclimate scientist, at the Australian National University) contacted Quadrant offering to write about the evidence for man-made global warming. Quadrant approached me asking for my response. Dr Glikson replied to my reply, and I replied again to him (copied below). No money exchanged hands, but Dr Glikson is, I [...]

Posted on April 29th, 2010 under AGW socio-political, Logic & Reason. Tags: Acidification, Antarctica, Climate Models, Corals, Evidence, Glaciers, Glikson (Dr Andrew), Logic & Reason, Missing Hot Spot, Plant growth, Quadrant, Sea Levels, Sherwood. Comments: 176

Dr Andrew Glikson writes for Quadrant and I respond .
This is a copy. It begs the question. Dr Glikson, is an Earth and paleo-climate scientist at the Australian National University. He’s paid to give us both sides of the story.
No, Dr Glikson
by Joanne Nova
April 19, 2010
Dr Andrew Glikson says the right motherhood lines [see: Case [...]

Posted on April 19th, 2010 under Global Warming. Tags: Acidification, Debates, Glikson (Dr Andrew), Hot Spot, JoNova's Favourites, Missing Hot Spot, Sea Levels. Comments: 421

Carbon dioxide only causes 1.1°C of warming if it doubles. That’s according to the IPCC. Did you know?
The real game is water.
Researchers made guesses about humidity and clouds in the early 1980s and they built these guesses into their models. We now know they were wrong, not about carbon, but about water in the form [...]

Posted on December 5th, 2009 under Global Warming. Tags: Climate Models, Evidence, Feedback, Missing Hot Spot, Skeptics Handbook II. Comments: 170

Big names like Santer, Sherwood, and Schmidt admit that the models predict more warming 10 km above the equator than what the weather balloons could find. Each time they announce that they’ve resolved the differences, they have to start by admitting there are differences to resolve.

Posted on January 3rd, 2009 under Global Warming. Tags: JoNova's Favourites, Missing Hot Spot, Santer, Sherwood. Comments: 25

This is vintage spinmeister-Tim. Overall he claims I’m deluded, confused, constantly repeating discredited arguments, “doesn’t even know what the hot-spot is”, and “doesn’t understand how the greenhouses gases warm the planet”. But when it comes to backing up the giant patronizing put-downs, it amounts to nit-picking phraseology; irrelevant points; straw men; his own false understanding of what a fingerprint is; and then an own goal when he drops in a graph that shows that the hot-spot is indeed missing.

Posted on January 3rd, 2009 under Global Warming. Tags: Alarmist Behaviour, Climate Change, Debunking The Skeptics Handbook, Deltoid, JoNova's Favourites, Lambert (Tim), Missing Hot Spot, The Skeptics Handbook, Tim Lambert. Comments: 41

The gap between real world data and thermometers is a make-or-break issue for the AGW theory. The models predict a hot-spot in the atmosphere above the tropics, but the weather balloons (called radiosondes) can’t find any sign of it. Most claims that the hot-spot has been found are not providing any new data, they are [...]

Posted on October 30th, 2008 under Global Warming. Tags: Climate Change, Evidence, Feedback, JoNova's Favourites, Missing Hot Spot, Water Vapor. Comments: 15