Victor talks about the length of the data at his linked post. One comment is
” With “at least 17 years” Santer does not say that 17 years is enough, only that less is certainly not enough. So also with Santer you can call out people looking at short-term trends longer than 17 years.”
He then states” Sometimes it is argued that to compute climate trends you need at least 30 years of data, that is not a bad rule of thumb and would avoid a lot of nonsense”
but it is a rule of thumb only.
30 year periods are ideal for claiming global warming, just long enough to see “significant ” trends but too long for anyone to ever claim a “pause”.
So game over. Define a length of time longer than your oppositions argument and you cannot lose.
Pause, what pause?
But using the same logic one could say we need 100 years, what then of global warming?
By the same implacable logic[see the anti-hiatus of the last 10 years] the trends are now too short and become statistically insignificant.
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Willard says:
” This is essentially the point. It is paradoxical to argue for high sensitivity to internally-driven warming AND low sensitivity to externally-driven warming” .
Yes. The question though is whether Climate Sensitivity to CO2 is restricted to just the known response to CO2 doubling or whether other factors, other GHG such as water vapour are linked in such a way that Climate Sensitivity to CO2 itself is amplified or damped by the effect of the temperature change on the other volatile GHG, water.
The result of that is that one might have a different high or low sensitivity to CO2 doubling depending on the amount of water vapor at a specific temperature. This could possibly* lead to large swings in temperature in a low CO2 [our] world but a much more damped response at higher levels of CO2[and temperature].
*unlikely but removes a paradox.
