I agree about the use of anecdotal evidence or single data points to try to prove or disprove what is a very gradual long term phenomenon obscured by noise. This is why I haven't felt the need to call attention to the fact that South Florida is now going through its warmest February since records were first taken. Attacking errors in popular or non-technical pieces is also a technically fair, but still somewhat misleading, way of trying to discredit the opposition.

But the post I was attacking above, the one referring to the article on saturated greenhouse gases, is a little different. To be specific, the Weart/Pierrehumbert article we were discussing above is actually about the authors dismissing one of the popular explanations of global warming, and showing that it IS oversimplified and incorrect. They then proceed to lay out what is actually going on, the physics, as well as the historical background. It is the deliberate misinterpretation and cherry-picking of this piece, the selective quoting of supporting statements while coyly skipping over the qualifying clauses, the "but" part of the sentence, that I find infuriating. I find it difficult to believe this is merely an ignorance of the science or difficulties with the language at work here. It is deliberate and malicious propaganda.

Normally I don't try to get into the nuts and bolts of this debate because I am ignorant of climatology and not qualified to comment on it. But in this case, atmospheric thermodynamics and radiative transfer is something I do have some knowledge of and I was exposed as an undergraduate to many of the same points in the article,;this is old science, and an established and mature field of astrophysics. What the man says in broad outline is true, whether the levels and concentrations and results derived from it are, I concede may be in question, but not the science.

Read the article, and the discussion which follows on the Realclimate website. I particularly call your attention to Pierrehumbert's response to one of the inevitable denialist critics, it is appropriate in the context of this post:

"You’re quite wrong about much of what you’ve said in this comment. For one thing, you’re confusing the Stefan-Boltzman law with the Wien displacement law; the wavelength of peak emission is inversely proportional to the temperature itself, not to the fourth power of the temperature. Further, because of the Planck law, the emission tails off very sharply at wavelengths shorter than the peak, but only rather gradually at wavelengths longer than the peak. For that reason, the emission of the Earth at wavelengths where CO2 is a good absorber is extremely important. You’d understand this if you had bothered to play around with Dave Archer’s online spectrally resolved model. Really, you are rather ignorant for one who makes pronouncements of this sort with such confidence. I won’t even get into how your prejudice against Al Gore blinds you to the essential correctness of what he presents in 'An Inconvenient Truth.' "