Wayne, one vortex, two vortices. Four subvortices in the Vortex. I don't see the problem.

Peter Principle.

I regret that this thread has been largely hijacked by vidaloo and other cyclemongers. I just want to join the many people thanking you for this blog and wishing you a good sabbatical. (And an unburnt return.) This is one of only four blogs I follow (with Hot Whopper, Skeptical Science, and Arctic Sea Ice News). I also hope that guest bloggers can jump in and do some of the heavy lifting you've been doing.

Going back to Tim's post: a fourth reason why the right is so much worse than the left is that their party's delusions about climate are far more dangerous than Democrats' delusions about GMOs or vaccines or whatever.

Not possible. The maps also looked crazy; the Antarctic one was almost psychedelic. The graphs are now fixed but the maps still have problems--big gray wedges.

What surprised me about the reaction to the reversibility paper was that Watts was so confident in his misreading that he quoted material from the press release(?) that directly contradicted it. Is this SOP for WUWT? I never visit it but it was one of the top Google hits on Arctic sea ice so I thought I'd take a look.

navegante, I responded, let us say, forcefully, because your original notes struck me as typical denialist crap. But no self-respecting denialist would ever admit to being wrong. However, though you might be not be a denialist, you are still missing the point of the posts you replied to: climatologists do not force their models in order to account for Arctic paleowarming. They use the fact that they can't reproduce it without forcing as an impetus to improve their models so that natural inputs give accurate outputs. Which is what you want. And A.D.'s paper is an attempt to use information from the mismatch to improve. And this is no excuse for denigrating current models. 'All models are false, but some models are useful.' With all their uncertainties, models are the only predictive climatesensitivitometers we have, and they have far better records than the denialists'. When planning for the future, we have to use the best methods we have now, not the best we'll have in ten years.

Incredibly arrogant navegante: What reason do you have to claim that the atmospheric composition should be 'extremely different'? Or the geodynamics? Why do you think that you are so brilliant that you have thought of something that all the professional climatologists never thought of investigating? Does it make you feel better to know that, insofar as climate models don't match the Pliocene, it's because they underestimate the dangers of global warming? C'mon!

Much as I'm enjoying the race to a possible new max, I wonder how we know we haven't already reached it. JAXA SIE says it's now 13.76 square megameters, as compared to 13.94 on Feb 15, and you say the difference of .186 is 'quite significant'. But do we really know SIE to three significant figures? SIE is determined by 15% coverage, but is that 15% or 15.0% or 15.00%? In 'Mad max?' we're told that 'IARC-JAXA (IJIS) sea ice extent grew to 13,942,060 square kilometres', which is certainly impossible precision. Basically, I'm asking what the error bars are.

I see no sarcasm in the use of 'rebound'. By any reasonable standard 2013 was a big jump upward: about three times the size of the 2012 fall, whether by square miles or percentage, and that was big enough that people were predicting a quick collapse in ensuing years. What 2013 was not, was a recovery: 'regaining a normal position or condition'. Denialists conflate the two, as Bill Fothergill says; that doesn't mean we have to.

Does anyone else find it striking how the 2014 SIE trend line in NSIDC precisely hugged the 1981-2010 average -2SD line for all of July before lagging the last couple of days? Yeah, I don't see how it could mean anything, but it's a remarkable coincidence, and the longest straight-line drop on the graph.

AFU, I don't see any signs of the mean dismissal that makes you sad, certainly not with regard to the Curry/Wyatt paper. People have expressed interest, have offered non-ad hominem reasons to question it, and have expressed wariness. That third point, I would say, is absolutely proper. If, like Curry, you have been spouting ultracrepidarian nonsense for years, you should not get a free pass for your latest efforts and nobody is obliged to put it as high on their to-read lists as work from people who have shown a grasp of the subject.