As I was reading though my blogroll, I found this post by a very smart rodent. Eli has dumped one of the NASA freedom of information act (FOIA for those in the acronym game) requests in the memory hole. I’m sure it’s mentioned somewhere, but there should be a contest about which quote(s) will be taken out of context. My contribution:

I should have kept more data, but I was not interested in US data.

(I’ve only got through about 1/4 of it, so maybe they’ll be something “juicier” later.)

In other rabbit news, Eli references my “wiki work”: “Here is a short derivation of the adiabatic lapse rate.”<ref>[1]<ref /> which isn’t so much writing as fixing, as the previous version was _________ (not sure of the right word, “bad” comes to mind but isn’t quite right).

Dr. Michael E Mann,

I can only hope the readers of this letter are as outraged as I am at Dr. Michael E Mann. First things first: Dr. Mann demands that his papers be discussed in only the most positive light. To ensure that this demand is met, he sends his Praetorian Guard after anyone who fails to show the utmost deference when planting big, wet, sloppy kisses on Dr. Mann’s behind. Every time he tells his minions that his subliminal psywar campaigns can give us deeper insights into the nature of reality, their eyes roll into the backs of their heads as they become mindless receptacles of unsubstantiated information, which they accept without question.
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First: Watergate was named “gate” for a reason. Every other “gate” is just a silly name.

Second: The only emails I’ve read, I’ve read involuntarily as they’ve been posted to Wikipedia. I don’t think it’s right reading the email of others.

Third: I assume the ‘worst’ emails are the ones they’re trying to push.

Fourth: From what I’ve read, this seems much ado about nothing.

I haven’t kept up with the climate blogs/news recently, so maybe my assessment is wrong. But it seems like the email conversations you’d expect scientists to have.

My two cents.

It’s nine o’clock on a Friday,
The regular crowd shuffles in
With their buckets and mops, cleaners and socks
the nightly cleaning begins.

Yeah. I’m not a poet, but I am at work. T’was here until 2:00am “yesterday” night, and back in the chair by 10:00am “today”. So while everyone else is busy getting drunk tonight, I’m reading papers while enjoying a sandwich. Since you asked nicely, the one that caught my attention enough to write blog about it was Kiehl (1994).

This assumes that the clouds determining the cloud forcing are the optically thick cirrostratus clouds associated with deep convective cells. The tops of these clouds are indeed thought to be defined by the strong thermal stability directly above the tropical tropopause.

The strong thermal stability directly above the tropical tropopause? Perhaps caused by [[this phenomenon]]? That Wikipedia article is sadly typical of its dedication to quality. I suppose now that I’ve seen it I have an obligation to fix it. Since it was Kiehl’s paper that made me look it up, I’ll pass the buck to him.

* Kiehl, J., 1994: On the Observed Near Cancellation between Longwave and Shortwave Cloud Forcing in Tropical Regions. J. Climate, 7, 559–565.