"Yes, these models can be improved. And it is not even unclear where they need to improve. " well, you its hard to get Ice right as long as absolute temperatures are off.. Here is the spread in models, not in ANOMALY, but in absolute temperatures. http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/files/2015/12/hawkins_sutton_bams_fig1.jpg this is for GCMs..

" I always explain the range of possibilities, even if they seem far-fetched at that moment." de lurking.. That captures EXACTLY why I read you every day. It's what I expect from a good analyst and you never fail to deliver.. re lurking

This blog is a treasure. I read it several times a day and forget to thank you. So, let me remedy that. Thank you.

"Apologies to Mr Mosher, but that's why I had the caveat about "teaching you suck eggs" haha, no apologies required. @Jim Hunt, thanks for the link. I lurk at neven's place. So much to learn I just keep my mouth shut. I was kinda surprised that folks haven't "taken" to the approach of using SST under the ice. Anyway, this whole DMI escapade just makes me angry. Months back a commenter on Lucia's Rank Exploits pointed me to the chart and demanded an explanation ( as if it were my data). It was pretty clear that the chart was broken, but I didn't even think to give any one a head's up. That won't happen again.

"I read some buoy data and it seems that sea water temperatures are rock solid steady during the dark season... But I have not seen all of the data." When we were doing our global product one of the things I puzzled over was this. Global products are a combination of SST and SAT. But then there is ICE? What to do? A) estimate SAT over ice ( treat the ice like "land" B) Estimate the SST under ice.. Treat the ice like frozen water. In the end we did things both ways, but in estimating the SST under ice we just used a constant ( so the effect on the global trend is slightly downward ) In any case, if I got a pointer to some data to look at I would appreciate it... Not that any differences will have a "impact" on the science. This is just one of those details..

"I suspect he's cranky cuz his life's work - his surface station heatsink theory- is going nowhere fast. Hausfather et al's comparison of USHCN (ClimDiv) to USCRN pretty much shot his whole AGU 2015 poster/paper out of the water before it ever saw print." yup..

"Second, from the model-driven viewpoint there's the unsurprising problem of models not exactly matching the (surface) temp data. That's because theres natural variation. " The dont match in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. Here is how they do not match. 1. They get absolute temperatures wrong with a spread of 3K. This means they will get any type of temperature driven process (like melting ice ) wrong. 2. They get the land ocean contrast wrong 3. They get arctic and antarctic amplification wrong. 4. They get the response to volcanos wrong and the rebound wrong. 5. We know that higher sensitivity models are ruled out by observational constraints. 6. They get the tropospheric warming wrong. Some of these, as you should be able to tell, are utterly unrelated to getting natural variation correct. At best the models let us know that there is trouble ahead. But we knew that already from simple energy balance considerations. The problem is that people rely on them as some sort of argument closer. They are not.

Actually the Curry paper has some interesting data sources ( Russian ) that I havent come across before.. and an interesting testable prognostication. "We found that the stadium-wave signal propagates through four different stages of climate regime evolution. Each stage reflects a particular behavior or a particular set of sub- process interactions. And at each stage, activity is heightened in a particular geographic region. 600 At all stages, seeds of regime reversal are embedded within the collection of sub-processes regulating the Arctic freshwater balance, thereby subtly and incrementally imposing ‘curbs’ on the prevailing trend of sea ice coverage, assuring an inevitable regime reversal years in the future. These negative feedbacks modify the Arctic freshwater balance through: i) sea ice related shifts in the Arctic Front and associated zones of precipitation and continental runoff; ii) ice- 605 cover associated sea-level-pressure changes that reorganize winds and thereby direction of freshwater and sea ice export between the Arctic Basin and marginal seas; iii) modified influx of warm, saline water into the marginal seas, particularly in the Atlantic sector; iv) and Pacific atmospheric circulation anomalies negatively feeding back onto the Atlantic freshwater balance 609 through remote modification of precipitation regimes."

Eli makes a good point. Jeff Id tried to make a similar point by looking at the ice loss above 72N ( as I recall) That is,every year all the ice below 72N always melts out, so he looked at melt above 72N. kinda interesting it cause a brief kerfuffle but its interesting to look at http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/sea-ice-code/#more-13512

neven & crandles, are you guys going to enter the "sweep stakes" this year with a estimate of the minimum?