But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown

I'm amused to see Roger Pielke Jr playing the Galileo Gambit regarding his (Klotzbach et al) paper:

Had Michael been blogging around the time of Copernicus, he would have explained to his readers that the world is in fact flat, and that Copernicus guy must be wrong, because Michael and all of his Ptolemian friends said the world was flat, so those saying differently must be wrong because they do not jibe with his "coherence network."

Of course Roger wants to talk about politics and tribes, but I'd rather talk about science which is where this disagreement properly resides (IMO). Just to recap briefly:

Pielke and Matsui 2005 claims to have investigated the effect of temperature trends "such as due to increases in the atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane" on the lapse rate at night. However, they do this by applying a heat flux to the bottom boundary of the atmosphere. This is not how GHGs (or indeed any of the main climate forcings) act. Thus, their result, cited by Klotzbach et al as: "Monitoring temperature at a single height will produce a significant warm bias when the atmosphere has warmed over time [Pielke and Matsui, 2005]" is simply not valid, and there is absolutely no basis for this belief.

Roger also adds:

"Will Michael's or James' critiques of our work appear in the peer reviewed literature? Of course not (because their critiques are off target and simply wrong)."

Well, that's a hostage to fortune if ever I saw one. I will simply remark here that Myles Allen said similar things not so long ago, and I'll have a blog post or two to add on that particular topic shortly :-)

Roger Pielke Sr has also weighed in again, although I really wonder how he expects to benefit by keeping on going on about this. His persistent appeals to his own authority are somewhat undermined by his error of confusing a downwelling forcing at the land surface with a direct warming of the base of the atmosphere. His self-published email to me contains the following:

The P&M paper just looked at the issue as to whether if there was less loss of heat at night out of the top of the boundary layer, even if the loss was the same, would the vertical distribution of the heat loss be uniform between strong and windy nights?

I can't make much sense of the apparent contradiction in less loss of heat at night out of the top of the boundary layer, even if the loss was the same, but a bigger issue is why he claims to have looked at changing the heat loss at the top of the boundary layer when he clearly changed it at the bottom. The distinction is absolutely crucial, and anyone with any sort of knowledge of geophysics knows that thermally stratified fluids can behave very differently when heated from the top versus the bottom. It's a surprising error for an expert in boundary layer meteorology to make. I have emailed him directly and look forward to his explanation on this point.

As for their complaints about tone, well motes and beams come to mind. Not to mention pots and kettles.