JohnMashey posted this at Skeptical Science.

A bathtub is being filled [sun], slightly faster than it is being drained [heat radiation]. You have a few floats, measuring the depth of the water. The depth would go up smoothly, except there’s a kid splashing around in the bath.

Sometimes the kid lies back in the water, in which case the overall water level goes up [El Nino], but with waves, so that some floats go down.
Sometimes the kid sits up, in which case the overall water level temporarily goes down [La Nina], but with waves, so a few of the floats go up.

The kid splashes around the whole time, jiggling all floats second by second.

At any point in time, there is a certain amount of water, but the average as measured by 1% of the floats is subject to lots of jiggles.

Still, the water *is* going up, as long as more as coming in than draining out, and the physics of GHGs say that we’re slowly plugging the drain.

The sun crowd is back at it again. I guess because we’ve had a cold January and we’re currently at a minimum in the solar cycle that must mean the two are related. That’s bullocks of course. A few months ago it was the sun that was causing the warming. The sun has approximately 11 year cycles, so it can’t be both. So has the sun caused the recent warming, or the recent cooling? Neither or both? This post attempts to find out the answer.
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There’s an interesting new paper in press about how volcanic aerosols can influence cloud radiative properties. It has been highlighted as an Image of the Day at NASA Earth Observatory.

Gasso, S. (2008), Satellite observations of the impact of weak volcanic activity on marine clouds, J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2007JD009106, in press.
pre-print (when published)
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In my previous post, Is There a True Average Global Temperature, I compared the mean temperature to the fourth root of the fourth moment of the temperature (the mean of T^4). Dr. Pielke was kind enough to post a comment that I misinterpreted his weblog. He says the “it is easy to show that weighting by (T+T’)**4 significantly emphasizes the lower latitudes”.

In this post, I will calculate the radiative imbalance due to the change in temperature for several years. I will briefly describe the procedure. I used the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data as before, and calculated the mean temperature for the entire time series. I assume that each grid emits as a blackbody, and thus used the Stefan-Bolzemann Law to calculate the blackbody irradiance for both the mean temperature and the yearly mean temperature. These were then subtracted to give the “radiative imbalance” at each point for the given year.
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