Post here. Deals with Kaufmann 2011 we thrashed to death in the General Chat comments.

Any chance you could fit jg's cartoon in there somewhere Rob?  Seems like it would fit well at the very end.

Nice post.  I wonder if it's worth discussing that the only thing the so-called "skeptics" took from this study was "they admitted global warming stopped!" (I'm sure we could find a good example of this behavior on WUWT), or if we should just stick to reporting the scientific findings.

I also wonder if this should be a specific rebuttal - "Kaufmann admitted global warming stopped", or something like that.  Or we could just add a discussion of this study to the "global warming stopped in..." rebuttal.  That might be the better option.

That cartoon is great!, although I don't really know how to fit it in, especially with the tone of the post. Maybe you can post it as the first comment? Dunno.

If a new rebuttal is created "Kaufmann admitted global warming stopped" then it needs to be linked to the other "global warming stopped in..." rebuttals. I kinda prefer a standalone rebuttal, but the casual reader needs the other rebuttals to be put in front of them too. 

Looking at the modeling studies, I wonder if the emissions are responsible for the worsening drought in the Horn of Africa. Aerosols are incriminated for the African droughts of the 70's & 80's, by shifting the ITCZ and rains further south. I wonder if we're seeing this happen over again? The models indicate a significant influence of aerosols over the northern part of Africa, although the details are less clear.

Is that cartoon going into the graphics database?

I think it's worth hammering home the point that we still gained a stupendous amount of energy in the meantime.

800 million Hiros in the upper ocean heat content from 1998-2008. Seemed to flatline after 2003, but we know a lot was going into the deep oceans after then. Also, we've lost literally trillions of tons of ice since '98. Warming that, melting it and warming up the cold water is a hefty chunk of heat.

We gained a LOT of heat, nature just dumped it in places other than the atmosphere. This is pretty strong evidence that we weren't in radiative equilibrium beforehand - i.e. there's not just last decades' CO2 warming 'in the pipeline', but more besides.

Last paragraph: will Asia cut back on coal burning? Seems unlikely, they have hundreds of plants planned. They'll start using filters a lot more though.

Cheers Mark, altered the text about cutting back (the Chinese economy is getting the wobbles, so their planned expansion may not bear fruit - we'll see).

Thought about mentioning ocean heat, but wanted to keep the message simple. I'm writing a few posts on OHC at the moment. Probably best to publish them around the same time.

Very good!

Last paragraph: Sulfate aerosols have a short lifetime in the atmosphere, often measured in weeks and months, but up to 3 years if they reach the upper atmosphere, whereas greenhouses gases can linger for centuries.

This is a bit confusing since it looks as though you are saying that GHG can linger for a long time in the Upper atmosphere. I would suggest to reword with something like this:

Sulfate aerosols have a short lifetime in the atmosphere, often measured in weeks and months, but up to 3 years if they reach the upper atmosphere. In contrast, greenhouses gases, especially CO2,  will linger for centuries evrywhere in the atmosphere.

Once East Asia begins to cut back coal burning, or at least install smokestack scrubbers to reduce sulphate pollution, and they need to for reasons such as health, acid rain and limiting Ocean Acidification, then the cooling effect of those reflective aerosols will be lost. 

Sulphate scrubbers won't have much effect on OA, as far as I know.

Nit:

Smith (2011) look at

Smith et al (2011) look at

You might want to look at Mark Lynas's latest puff piece for his new book. He says:

One example of this is the role played by aerosols in the atmosphere. There was a paper in PNAS just this week suggesting that Chinese sulphur emissions from coal-burning have restrained global warming over the last decade. All-told, aerosols may be shaving a degree even off temperatures, like a constant ongoing volcanic eruption. Because of smog and the health effects these have I would expect them to gradually be removed as economies develop and people demand cleaner air. But that will add straight away to global warming. So why not move the sulphate sunshade from the troposphere to the stratosphere, where no-one has to breathe it and it can continue to mitigate global temperature rise? This of course raises real governance issues which may be next to impossible to solve, but it is a real decision nonetheless. I don’t see why an accidental geoengineering decision is necessarily going to deliver a better global outcome than an intentional considered one.

I doubt that you would want to turn this into a geoengineering article.

Thanks Andy, amended both paragraphs you highlighted. Nit - yeah I always leave out the 'et al', kinda find it too alienating for non-scientists.

Mark Lynas "Two nights ago I saw some of the first footage of the humanitarian emergency which is now unfolding in the Horn of Africa.That we still have to see images of pot-bellied children today in 2011 is utterly shocking if you stop to think about it. Whether or not the drought is linked with climate change is irrelevant"

Yeah, I'm sure those dying people consider climate change irrelevant too. Funny how he mentions aerosols on the one hand, and then African drought on the other, and hasn't made the connection. Do we need more unintended consequences? Lynas seems like a jerk.