I had found his original hedged statement incredible as well but I had not responded before you posted. So I monitored the blog for weeks, periodically posting reminding Andy he had yet to come up with any responses from his stable of scientists. As far as I know he never did.

I made an argument based on the WMO definition of climate, i.e. 30 years of records, selected a record set consisting of every year since industrial civilization began, I stated there were no records before this century of a navigable NorthWest Passage, therefore I concluded there was proof that climate had changed. Then, I referred him to Hansen, who I said laughs at the caveats the IPCC comes up with when they explain what is causing the warming they’ve stated is unequivocal.

He did write differently about the Arctic ice the next time I observed him writing about it. I believe he used the words “almost certainly”.

I have concluded, perhaps unfairly, that there is editorial direction imposed on the reporting on climate in the NY Times.

It is my humble opinion that some of the warming that would have occurred during the past 20 years has been “mitigated” by the fact that China and India (along with a few other smaller contributors) have largely built their growing economies on burning coal in power stations without any bag houses to capture fly ash or scrubbers to remove sulfur oxides.

Both fly ash and SOx essentially result in a dirty greenhouse that is not quite as effective in heating as one with the same amount of CO2 but less of the dirt. We all saw the photos of what many parts of China look like on normal days, but friends who have spend time on the Pacific have told me that they see that kind of smokey haze routinely heading east.

Much is made in the denier literature of steady or even slightly lowering temperature trends during certain carefully selected periods. Similar pauses in global warming can be roughly correlated to other periods of industrialization where the most common form of increasing power consumption was a dirty fuel with few controls. The temperatures start climbing rapidly once the pollution advances to the point where it hurts (think London in the 1930s-60s, Pittsburgh in the 1940s-60s, and now Beijing) and controls are put into place.

Once China and India start cleaning up their coal emissions, I worry about how rapidly the warming will occur since it is still happening even with the shade produced by the particles and ash.