Bob Tisdale's illusion and conspiracy theories: A Book Review

Bob Tisdale's illusion is that global warming is caused by magic, or blobs, or El Niño. Anything but human activity. He's announced at WUWT that he has written a new book (archived here). He's called it "On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control Part 1". It's very long, running to 733 pages. You'll have to wade through 82 pages before you get to the first page of the first chapter. There are three chapters plus the 82 pages of introductory material.

Bob relies on the hard work done by climate scientists for much of his book, he picks bits he likes but ignores or rejects the bits he doesn't like. That is, he rejects all the science that confirms human-caused warming. For the most part, he doesn't understand the data he uses. Certainly he doesn't understand climate models. For the other much of his book, he relies on conspiracy theories dreamt up by him or other science deniers. What his book boils down to is:

• Climate scientists are right, except when their science demonstrates that humans are causing global warming, and except when he can provide an alternative notion, usually involving a gigantic conspiracy of incredible proportions, or no alternative at all
• Bob learnt lots about ENSO from Dr Kevin Trenberth, but doesn't believe him where it matters
• According to Bob, the cause of global warming is hotter oceans (i.e. warming is caused by warming), or a magical bounce from the Little Ice Age with no cause, or the sun heating up the ocean (even though the sun's output has decreased a bit lately), or anything except human activity
• Climate models are wrong - based on Bob not understanding the first thing about them
• The IPCC is [insert conspiracy theory here] - based on Bob's denialist imagination.

Extreme weather: Cyclone Chapala drowns the Yemen desert

The rare cyclone in the Arabian sea, Chapala, is now causing the massive forecast rainfall on land.  Al Jazeera reports that three people were killed on the island of Socotra, and more than 100 homes destroyed. The BBC reports that ten years' rain may fall in parts of that very arid region, and states:

"The sea water level has risen by 9m (29ft) and has destroyed the Mukalla seafront," resident Mohammed Ba Zuhair told the Reuters news agency.

Below are some videos from Sara al aidarous on Twitter, which I can't verify, but I understand from Emirates 24/7 are of Al Mukalla, a city of about 300,000 people on the coast of Yemen:

#المكلا حي أكتوبر #تشابالا_حضرموت_المهرة_شبوه pic.twitter.com/9lyDuIy5CA

— ُSara al aidarous⭐ (@SoS0i0s) November 3, 2015

Antarctic ice - growing or shrinking? NASA vs Princeton and Leeds etc

There's a new paper out about Antarctic ice, from H. Jay Zwally and colleagues at NASA. They report that over the period from 2003 to 2008, there was a net increase in ice over all Antarctica of 82±25 Gt/year. This paper looks to be based on a conference paper at a SCAR workshop back in July 2012 (though that doesn't explain why there wasn't data from the past six years in the final published paper).

These findings are different to the results of work reported earlier this year from two scientists at Princeton, Christopher Harig and Frederik J. Simons. The Princeton team found that over the period January 2003 to 2014, there was a loss of ice overall. the overall mass loss from Antarctica since January 2003 at 92 ±10 Gt/yr.

It's also different from the results reported in a paper by Malcolm McMillan and colleagues last year. They estimated the current mass loss over all Antarctica at 159 ± 48 Gt/year. ".

So one group of scientists find that ice has been on balance increasing, while others find that ice has been on balance decreasing.

Dull Palates: WUWT deniers are not connoisseurs of wine

While flailing about for some science to deny, Anthony Watts has put up another article by Eric Worrall (archived here). Eric copied and pasted an excerpt from an article about wine. If Eric thinks that climate change isn't affecting wine production, he's wrong. Just as science deniers don't have a clue about science, neither do they have a clue about wine.

The article was from Reuters, and it was about winemakers and wine grape growers adapting to climate change. Although it had a positive slant, everyone who knows anything about wine knows that climate change is going to change the type and taste of wine.

The article did put a positive spin on the situation, saying that grapes are adaptable. That may be so, but if a winemaker wants a particular wine, they'll be getting the grapes from different places in the future, if they can. Here's the bit that Eric Worrall copied:

More extreme weather shows up the irrelevance of deniers at WUWT

Say a prayer everyone in south Texas. This is an overpass of Interstate 35 in New Braunfels. #TexasFlood https://t.co/QL6AaXpyQF

— Fort Worth Police OA (@FWPOA) October 31, 2015

Over 10 inches of rain S/SW #austinweather #TexasFlood pic.twitter.com/Ae2RHGP5kl

— Rebecca Stevenson (@Rebecca_Weather) October 31, 2015

This past month (and year) has highlighted the irrelevance of science denying blogs like WUWT. Just this past week, the following have and still are being reported in the media:

• Hurricane Patricia - the most intense cyclone ever recorded in the western hemisphere
• Record almost unbelievable rainfall pelting down on Texas causing record flood levels in places, deaths, and sending someone 20 feet up a "nice little tree"
• A rare Category 4 Cyclone Chapala in the Arabian Sea
• The hottest October day ever recorded anywhere at 48.4 °C, , in South Africa
• A record hottest October in Australia
• A rare heavy hailstorm in Chinchilla, Queensland
• Record rain reaching as far as London, Ontario in the wake of Hurricane Patricia. [Note: the rain was heavy, but turns out it wasn't a record for October, let alone for the year, as Cam explained in the comments - Sou 2 November 2015]

This is the same month that saw:

• The most cyclones above Cat 3 ever recorded in the northern hemisphere in a year
• The hottest temperature in Indonesia in 2006 was equaled
• The most southerly major hurricane ever observed in the Eastern Pacific, Olaf
• Typhoon Koppu causing massive flooding  and at least 41 deaths in the Philippines
• Hurricane Joaquin, which emerged in late September, fueled by very hot seas
• Record heat across southern California and up in Newfoundland
• Catastrophic 1,000 year flooding in South Carolina - have these records already been broken in Texas?
• Huge flash floods in the Riviera, claiming 20 lives

And that was just a sample from this October. September has more than its share of extreme weather, too, in this soon-to-be record-breaking hottest year on record.

Denier Desperation: To Russia with WUWT Love

Now that Stephen Harper has gone from the scene, and Australia's Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott has been dethroned, science deniers don't have too many leaders left (oops - I mean right, right?) who they can adore. They briefly flirted with China, but deniers didn't know the name of the leaders there. In any case, China is, if not panicking, at least very aware that climate change is not going to be kind to them. Particularly when something like 50,500,000 people in China could be at risk of flooding from sea level rise if CO2 emissions continue on their current trajectory. And President Xi Jinping of China has made a joint pledge with President Obama of the USA on climate change.

Free marketers find cosying up to China uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons. Not only would China still be described as sort of communist, even though it's started to embrace capitalism, China is blamed for taking all the jobs from hard-working Americans. And there's still a lot of resentment against China for bailing out the USA in the global financial crisis.

Deniers can now breathe a sigh of relief. They've found a new hero - it's Vladimir Putin from Russia (archived here). Now Russia feels probably a tad more comfortable than China. It's no longer as communist as it once was. Now it can probably be best described as a totalitarian rough house.  This is not a bad fit for right wing authoritarians. They've got a leader they can follow, while at the same time, they would relish the anarchic side of Russian society.

The ozone hole grew bigger this year

If you were a first-time visitor to WUWT, you'd never believe that Anthony Watts had been posting articles about climate and ozone for going on eight years. You'd think he was completely ignorant of all things science. And you'd be correct.

This false-color image shows ozone concentrations above Antarctica on Oct. 2, 2015. Credits: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Today he's got an article about the ozone hole (cached here). It's a mite disturbing, especially for those of us who live in southern Australia. The ozone hole over Antarctica grew to be the fourth largest ever. That's because of the colder stratosphere. Stratosphere cooling arises from greenhouse warming, so as I understand it, this is partly because of our CO2 emissions.

Anthony Watts tells more fibs about NOAA

There's a US congressman who's out of control when it comes to things environmental and climate. His name is Lamar Smith. Not satisfied with data, he wants NOAA to provide him with emails and stuff. The general consensus is that Lamar Smith isn't capable of assessing data. He can't tell one number from the rest. And he's a conspiracy nutter of the type that Peter Sinclair found when he and greenmanbucket installed a hidden camera to record the Science Committee:

Lamar Smith has been vindictively harassing scientists for some time now, in a clear abuse of power. Weirdly, the US legislators have made him, an anti-science advocate, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Smith gets lots of money from oil and gas companies, and from that perspective some would argue he's only doing what he's paid to do. But that would be wrong. He gets paid to represent the American people, not the oil and gas sector. His job is to do what is right for Americans, not to line his campaign chest with donations from lobby groups.

Anyway, he's been on a wild rampage trying to stop climate science from progressing. He's another one who can't wait for the world to burn. As Ars Technica reports, he's also falsely and maliciously accused scientists of "altering data".

Reminds me of James Inhofe, who wanted to send climate scientists to gaol because he didn't like what the research was showing.

More of David Siegel's climate lies and conspiracy theories

Okay - now it's out there. I don't know why David Siegel tells lies. Whether it's because he's stupid and isn't capable of doing his own research, or whether he does it for reward (either tangible or for ideological purposes). But he does tell lies and, unless he falls into the stupid category, he must know it.

Backtrack: A few days ago I wrote about a science denier called David Siegel, who used WUWT to promote a screed he put up somewhere on the internet. That "somewhere" is, as Greg Laden described it: "big giant blog that anybody can go and blog their big giant thoughts on: like tumblr, but more bloggy".

I pretty much dismissed David Siegel's article as the sort of denier tripe that's a dime a dozen in the dark outer reaches of cyberspace. It was nothing more than a mosaic of WUWT or any other climate conspiracy blog. Still, having it all in one place was a good enough reason to write an article. So a few of us got together and that's just what we did. We posted it on the same website that the original article appeared on.

We were gentle with David Siegel in our Medium.com article. We were more interested in presenting the science than in portraying David Siegel as the utter nutter that he is. Here at HotWhopper there are no kid gloves. David Siegel's article was nothing more than a 9,000 word Gish gallop of denier memes. To address every single one in a blog post would have resulted in an article more like 80,000 words rather than the 8,000 or so that we wrote.

Denier weirdness from Philip Lloyd: An extreme rainfall event is a year in the making?

Deniers are weird people. Anthony Watts has another article from science denier Philip Lloyd, who's not unknown at HotWhopper. He's not a climate scientist, that's for sure. Philip decided to look at annual rainfall in England and Wales to see if extreme rainfall events have increased or not.

What's that?

No, I don't think it's a joke article. You can see for yourself.