On Monday, I will have a post on the relationship of the article McKitrick, Ross R. and Lise Tole (2012) “Evaluating Explanatory Models of the Spatial Pattern of Surface Climate Trends using Model Selection and Bayesian Averaging Methods” Climate Dynamics, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s00382-012-1418-9 to our research, as his excellent study bolsters our findings.
However, I need to post this afternoon on a remarkable admission by Gavin Schmidt on the McKitrick and Tole paper.
In a reply to a comment (#260) by someone who labels themselves as MapleLeaf in the Real Climate post
Unforced Variations; June 2012
Gavin writes [highlight added]
“The basic issue is that for short time scales (in this case 1979-2000), grid point temperature trends are not a strong function of the forcings – rather they are a function of the (unique realisation of) internal variability and are thus strongly stochastic…..There are other issues, but his basic conceptual error is big one from which all other stem”
This is an amazing statement with respect to multi-decadal trends. Perhaps Gavin misspoke. Otherwise, he is stating that that multidecadal local temperature trends are dominated by non-global climate effects and not by the global annual surface temperature tend. I agree with this view, and am pleased to see recognition of the behavior of the real world climate system from Gavin.
