Oh go on guess, who do you think it was. Well, you're wrong: it was Piers Corbyn. To be fair to Piers, he doesn't appear to use the "honour" himself, its been used for him on his signature to the recent OPEN CLIMATE LETTER TO UN SECRETARY-GENERAL: Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125-plus scientists. Those 125 are the usual pile of NN, non-scientists, and a very small sprinkling of people with reputations. Though this time no-one with anything close to first-rank in met/climate: even Lindzen and Christie have deserted. I think this in aid of opposing Doha. It seems rather sweet and naive of them; I can't see the point.
As far as I can see, the only interesting bit of the "open letter" is
The NOAA “State of the Climate in 2008” report asserted that 15 years or more without any statistically-significant warming would indicate a discrepancy between observation and prediction.
But it isn't true (as you'd expect). The bit they are misreading appears to be:
ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2–25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervalsof 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.
So this is the familiar situation: the denialists are cherry-picking their starting year of 1998. If you don't do that, or if you take out ENSO (as the 2008 report explicitly did; or as Foster and Rahmstorf did), then you see the warming you expect.
Refs
* The Winner of This Year's 'Best Climate Predictor' Award (Clue: It Wasn't Al Gore!) (the article is such drivel I don't think its even worth shredding).
* Doubling Down on Climate Change Denial
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"Thought this time" maybe should read "Though .."?
[Fixed thanks -W]
So how many errors did they fit into that 'interesting bit'? I see that they omitted 'ENSO-adjusted' and instead invented 'statistically-significant'.
The Dry Caravanserai Best Dressed Climate Forecaster of 1434 award has gone to Sharif al-Brenchley
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2012/12/burmese-daze-in-doha.html
Paraphrasing Richard Feynman: Regardless of how many experts believe it or how many organizations concur, if it doesn’t agree with observation, it’s wrong.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), some politicians and many others stubbornly continue to proclaim that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide was the primary cause of global warming.
Measurements demonstrate that they are wrong.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide level has now increased since 2001 by 23.2 ppmv (an amount equal to 25.9% of the increase that took place from 1800 to 2001) (1800, 281.6 ppmv; 2001, 371.13 ppmv; October, 2012, 394.32 ppmv).
The average global temperature trend since 2001 is flat. (Some agencies show flat since 1997)
That is the observation. No amount of spin can rationalize that the temperature increase to 2001 was caused by a CO2 increase of 89.5 ppmv but that 23.2 ppmv additional CO2 increase had no effect on the average global temperature trend after 2001.
[This is the same old ignorant denialist nonsense. Why do you bother? See for example http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/ -W]
I think the difference is that "statistically significant" does not mean the same as "zero". The trend can be positive and still fail to be statistically significant. So the NOAA SOTC in 2008 wasn't talking about the absence of statistically significant warming, it was talking about zero warming. Of course, such subtleties are irrelevant to global warming denial.
[That's part of it. Its also important to realise that they were talking about ENSO-adjusted temperatures, whereas the no-trend-for-15-years junk relies on cherry-picking 1998 as your start year -W]
They do two types of things. First type is to start with 1998 which gives zero or negative trend (with HadCrut3): http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/plot/hadcrut3vgl…
Second type starts before 1998 (to get a longer period of claim) so there is some positive trend but it's not "statistically significant", i.e. there is greater than 2.5% that the positive trend is due to random variation: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997/to:2012/plot/had…
I checked WFT and you can get HadCrut3 cooling trend from May 2007 until the latest: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.33/plot/hadcrut3…
i.e. more than 15 years. So the denialists could correct their statement to:
"The NOAA “State of the Climate in 2008” report asserted that 15 years or more without any warming (zero or negative trend) would indicate a discrepancy between observation and prediction."
NOAA's statement was unconditional on corrections for El Nino/La Nina, I believe. But the zero trend condition only exists for HadCrut3, which is no longer considered to be accurate enough.