The presentation concludes:

So where does that leave us?

In my opinion, there are serious and probably fatal problems with the main proxies used as supposed evidence against a warm MWP – the Graybill strip bark chronologies, Briffa’s adjustment to the Tornetrask series, the inconsistency between Briffa’s Yamal substitution and the updated Polar Urals series and so on. For every proxy that supposedly shows a MWP cooler than the present, there seems to be one that is just as good or better evidencing the opposite. For the California and Urals proxies so fundamental to the Hockey Stick, the ecological evidence is further evidence against the Graybill and Briffa chronologies being interpretable as temperature proxies.

Sometimes we wonder if authors of papers are not outright campaigning for coverage in World Climate Report. Chose a title like “Ocean surface warming: The North Atlantic remains within the envelope of previous recorded conditions” and you will be guaranteed coverage by our skeptical scientists!

The latest article, with the title above, appeared recently in Deep-Sea Research which if you don’t know is published by Elsevier (one of the largest publishers of academic journals in the world). The research of interest here was conducted by a team of oceanographers from the United Kingdom’s Swansea University, and Australia’s University of Darwin, the University of Queensland, and CSIRO. Victoria Hobson and her three associates begin the article noting “There is increasing evidence that warming global temperatures will have profound effects on the Earth’s ecosystems, with the global mean air surface temperature rising by around 0.6°C during the 20th century, with 11 of the last 12 years (1995–2006) ranking amongst the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature since 1850.” They could win an award from Al Gore with that mouthful! Turning attention to the ocean, they write “Oceans may play a crucial role in regulating the climate, and since the 1950s the heat content of the world’s oceans has increased by ~2 x 10^23 J, equivalent to a mean volume warming of 0.06°C. While this increase is an order of magnitude less than that observed for terrestrial systems it may be even more important as water heats at a much slower rate than air because of its heat capacity.”

Readers following recent threads know that I've been looking for instances where scientists make claims that some observations are "inconsistent with" the results from climate models. The reason for such a search is that it is all too easy for modelers to claim that anything and everything under the sun is "consistent with" their predictions, sometimes to avoid the perception of a loss of credibility in the political battle over climate change.

I am happy to report that claims of "inconsistent with" do exist. Here is an example from a paper just out by Knutson et al. in Nature Geoscience:

More than 31,000 scientists across the U.S. – including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties – have signed a petition rejecting "global warming," the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate.

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then, between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign.

But now, a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of 'consensus,' release of the movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' by Mr. Al Gore, and related events," according to officials with the project.

“Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) is a massive database containing information on the carbon emissions of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies worldwide. Power generation accounts for 40% of all carbon emissions in the United States and about one-quarter of global emissions. CARMA is the first global inventory of a major, emissions-producing sector of the economy.” At least that is according to CARMA an initiative of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank.

But according to environmental consultant Shakeb Afsah, of Performeks, the overall data and the analytical architecture of CARMA are flawed. Afsah’s findings are detailed in a new report ‘Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA): Climate Activism Built on Specious Data’ at a new website, www.climatedataduediligence.org.