It's back - WUWT is heading for an ice age

Not exactly, but the way has been paved by Paul Homewood, who usually brings updates of UK weather to WUWT.  He's shown that using RSS data and Woodfortrees the the lower troposphere as measured by RSS has cooled since 2001 therefore all the science is wrong! (archived here).

Paul didn't post this chart:

Data Source: SkepticalScience Nuccitelli et al (2012)

Or this one:

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

But Paul did get a slew of "ice age cometh" and similar responses from the WUWT DuKEs :

Richard Hill is looking for a bet on a "new Ice Age" meme, but with what he thinks is a twist:

September 29, 2013 at 4:36 pm

Anthony, how about a bet on how soon a “new Ice Age” meme will arise?.

Just finished reading “Why the West Rules – for Now” by Ian Morris 2010. Gripping analysis of how history can be linked to archaeology to get the broad sweep. Morris shows how climate influences social development in both Asia and Europe. The response to the warm periods and cool downs are strikingly similar on both sides of Eurasia. It might have been luck that the West got past the Little Ice Age better than the East. But the threat of global cooling is real and our ability to respond to it is a worry. Morris has a chapter on future outlook but doesnt include the new ice age possibility. Maybe we are just a couple of Pinatubos away from a real bad scene.

Eric Worrall says he knows what the real threat is.  Maybe he's looking forward to chasing an antelope when it's 50º degrees (122º F) in the shade:

September 29, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Its obvious that the real threat is global cooling – shorter growing seasons, unseasonal frosts, hardship and hunger.

Humans have nothing to fear from a warmer climate, we are one of the most hot climate adapted animals on the planet. In anything except the baking tropical savannahs and jungles of our distant ancestors, we have to wear clothes to protect us from the cold.

Why are we so well adapted to the heat? It goes back to how our ancestors used to hunt. We couldn’t run faster than an antelope, but we could run further than an antelope, in hotter weather, until the antelope ran out of steam and simply lay down and died.

Other_Andy would probably swear on his mother's grave that the "long term trend is down":

September 29, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Jimbo says: What if it cools?

It is……Over the past 10,000 years the current Holocene epoch the world has cooled by about 1.0 °C. The latest ‘blip’ up might last a bit longer but the long term trend is down.

Scute says "It's not fair, I deliberately cherry picked 1997 not 1998!" - he knows little about trends:

September 29, 2013 at 5:04 pm
JJ I had just that problem yesterday in the comments on this BBC article.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24308509
I was accused of using a start date ‘around’ a high El Niño event. I had stated ’1997′ so this guy knew I was avoiding the 1998 peak in order not to cherry-pick. He still went for that knee jerk argument thinking I wouldn’t call him on it. I did.

Luke Warmist admits he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he can tell a lie as big as the next denier when he talks about "joined at the hip marching upward":

September 29, 2013 at 6:32 pm
A quick observation from a passerby. For years IPCC told us co2 and temp were joined at the hip forever marching upward on that 45 degree incline. Somehow, about 1998 the right side twin (temp) separated and went on his merry way ever so slightly rising, while co2 continued rising like a homesick angel. Now they’re trying to feed me some line about ‘total energy budget’ and ‘deep ocean below 2000m sequestration of heat’. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I recognize what’s in the bowl they’re trying to give me ain’t food.
Regards, T.

John Mason has a message for "warmists" - it's the Little Ice Age bouncing ball meme again (excerpt):

September 29, 2013 at 7:38 pm...And if warmists see this blog post and think we don’t see the warming trend, we do and it started a couple of hundred years ago as we came out of the LIA and we have little to do with it nor little we can do about it whether nature drives the temps up or as we swing back down to the return of the ice age.

dbstealey has slipped his leash (again) calling another WUWT commenter "hater".  He reckons the Little Ice Age leprechauns have debunked the "alarmist fantasy" (aka the findings of scientific experts):

September 29, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Hater, your entire argument is based on unmeasurable assertions. That fails here at the internet’s “Best Science” site. So run along back to Pseudo-skeptical pseudo-science, they like unmeasurable assertions there.

And FYI, the planet has been warming naturally since the LIA. Doesn’t matter if CO2 is low or high, the warming is repeated exactly. Thus, the alarmist fantasy is once again debunked.

And this one is really cute.  JJ tells how fake skeptics "do it" by working backwards till they get an answer they like!  I'd have to be convinced that JJ understands the first thing about climate models.  JJ also has to fib about what the Santer et al study found (it found at least 17 years was necessary, not at most 17 years):

September 29, 2013 at 4:37 pm

“One reason is that 1998, the year invariably chosen by sceptics, was one of the warmest ever.”

Typical strawman. Skeptics don’t make the argument that they declare “invariable”.

First, we don’t start at a point in the past. Our starting point is not 1998, it is 2013. Then we see how far back we can go, and still have a trend so low that it demonstrates the lack of skill of the climate models. If temps were rising as the models had predicted, we would no be able to go back very far.

Second, we don’t end in 1998, either. Most analyses of the model-busting break in trend currently indicate ~17 years of insignificant trend. They end in 1996 or 1997 – the pre-trough or mid-rise rather than the El Nino peak in 1998. This 17 year period is longer than the NASA modelers had previously claimed was the longest period consistent with their predictions. It is as long as the period that Santer et al gave as the starting point for its soon to be continuous goal-post-moving exercise.

Manfred sees a conspiracy and says:

September 29, 2013 at 8:24 pm
According to figure 3, they used the coldest year as their start point. Any other reason for such an odd number of years like 62 ?

The answer to Manfred's question is most probably because the second half of the twentieth century started in 1951, which is 62 years ago.  Manfred is also wrong about 1951 being the coldest year.  The years 1950, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1964 and 1965 were all colder than 1951.

Data source: NASA

WUWT is on the mend - slowly

Good to see WUWT recovering (slowly) after the walloping they suffered when the IPCC SPM report was released.  They've still got a way to go before they recover fully.  The sign of full recovery will be when Anthony puts up another article by David Archibald predicting an "ice age by 2020" or sez  OMG it's insects and we should just kill off all the mammals.