How Anthony Watts gets a bit confused about ocean heat content

Willis Eschenbach has posted an article on Anthony Watts' WUWT blog.  He's wondering this time about ocean heat and forcing.  He's done something similar to what Bob Tisdale did a little while ago and wrote about here.

Here is Willis' chart.  Willis has done some sums on ocean temperature and plotted this chart in units of watts/sq metre.  Willis calculated from scratch and may not have got the conversion ratios quite right.  I didn't check.  I do know that it's not that easy to work out the specific heat of sea water going all the way down to two kilometres deep into the ocean.

This next chart is also from Willis' spreadsheet.  He doesn't plot it or show it in his article, but it shows up in his calculations.  This time it's what he calculated as the heat accumulated in the ocean.  He did this calculation before working out the year to year differences and converting to Watts/sq metre.  In other words, it's part of the very same data he used to generate the chart above.  This one shows the cumulative effect on the ocean of the year to year changes shown in the top chart.  

This next chart is based on a chart from SkepticalScience.  What I did was take the Skeptical Science ocean heat content and added in the heat content from the latest few years from NODC/NOAA (with an estimate from ocean temperature to fill the missing year 2004) and worked out the difference in heat being added to the ocean each year.  This is the same as Willis chart shown above but using data from a different and more trusted source.  It looks like more accumulated heat than Willis' chart in part because the base is different and in part because of Willis' different calculation, but both show a large accumulation.

Lots of people fall for Willis' line and go on about how the ocean isn't really heating up etc.  What is a surprise (but probably shouldn't be) is a comment from Anthony Watts.

How Anthony Watts is tricked...

In the comments to Willis' article, Anthony Watts put up the SkS version of the above chart (which looks pretty much the same except it includes land and atmosphere as well), writing (my bold):

June 19, 2013 at 4:13 am

Hmmm, this rather puts the kibosh on this graph from the SkS zealots:
Makes me wonder how Murphy finds such a large trend in OHC, but Levitus does not find any trend in forcing.

 No, Anthony, it's Willis who says he found the "average forcing is small" and that the overall mean is "not significantly different from zero" and that only a few of the individual years are significantly different from zero.  Willis finally gets around to pointing out Anthony's error, though he argues again that "it's not statistically significant" writing:

[REPLY: Thanks, Anthony. There is a large trend in OHC, as you show in your graph, but it is not statistically significant. This is because of the high autocorrelation of the data (lag-1 autocorrelation of 0.92). As usual, SkS forgot to mention that ... w.].

I'm not about to check that out but will just observe that the standard errors quoted by NOAA are much lower than the heat content reported.  SkepticalScience has links to relevant papers, but they are behind a paywall.  It's certain that the ocean is heating up (sea levels are rising etc) just as it's certain the oceans are getting more acidic.

Small mercies.  I suppose Willis could have denied it was warming altogether or put it down to one of Bob Tisdale's magical ENSO leaps.

Addendum:

20 June 2013 3:50 pm AEST

Thanks to Dana, here is the up-to-date SkepticalScience.com chart showing how heat is accumulating on Earth:

Source: SkepticalScience.com

Read the comments below for some good insights and further information, including other references to scientific publications and data.

Will WUWT's David Archibald be right and severe cold hit Central England?

Anthony Watts of WUWT infamy favours David Archibald, who makes funny sunny predictions.  This time Archibald is asking if Central England will have a sudden drop in temperature for a bit.  He bases his surmise on "wiggle matching" with the temperature drop in 1740.  The Archibald post oddly enough comes straight after a post by a physicist denier, rbgatduke, who slammed Christy and Monckton for what he saw as their abuse of statistics and charting.

Anyway, I thought I'd do some pattern matching of my own to see how well that would have worked for David Archibald in the past.  I've superimposed the bit around 1740 onto what look like the closest matches later on.  Same as David Archibald did only he just did it for the current period.

Here's the result - you'll probably have to click on the animated gif chart to see the larger version.

Source: Adapted from UK Met - Hadley Centre

So there was a dip in the late 1879, but not as great as the 1740 drop, other than that nothing.  Like David Archibald says, we'll have to wait and see.  With the jet stream the way it is, climate change and the weather in the UK being a bit weird lately, I suppose anything could happen.


There is a paper on the 1740 event written by Dr Phil Jones but I can't find a full copy.  Here is another paper by Dr Jones (2008) that touches on the subject and is a good read in its own right; and a myth-buster.

Anthony Watts attacks Christy, Spencer and Monckton

How Anthony Watts and rgbatduke attempt to expose the chicanery of Christy, Spencer and Monckton

Anthony Watts puts up an article slamming the chart of Roy Spencer and John Christie and Christopher Monckton's charts all in a few words.  All his commenters agree they are nonsense.  They've run out of arguments against "warmists" so now they are attacking each other.  Good to see.

Here's the slam from rgbatduke:

This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above (Sou: see below), where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.

Note the implicit swindle in this graph (Sou: he is referring to Monckton's chart as shown below) — by forming a mean and standard deviation over model projections and then using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error, one (Sou: ie Monckton) is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!.

Say what?

I kind of like they way rgbatduke wishes climate behaved the way a single particle behaves in a laboratory-controlled physics experiment.  If only.  (By the way, I'm not twisting this in any way.  rgbatduke is referring directly to the workings of Christy, Spencer and Monckton.  He may think he's criticising the IPCC but they are not IPCC charts.  It's not the IPCC that used the data that way.  It's only Christy, Spencer and Monckton who did the charts and calculations in the way they did.)

The rest of his article reads as if it's written by a person (maybe a physicist) who doesn't know anything about climate science.  rgbatduke says as much, admitting his "comparative ignorance".  It comes across as the logical fallacy of personal incredulity.


Anyway, here are some reactions:

Ian W says:
June 18, 2013 at 5:24 pm  An excellent post – it would be assisted if it had Viscount Monckton’s and Roy Spencer’s graphs displayed with references.

mark says:
June 18, 2013 at 5:43 pm damn. just damn.

Chuck Nolan says:
June 18, 2013 at 6:02 pm I believe you’re correct. I’m not smart enough to know if what you are saying is true, but I like your logic.  Posting this on WUWT tells me you are not afraid of critique. Everyone knows nobody gets away with bad science or math here.

Abe says:
June 18, 2013 at 6:04 pm WINNER!!!!!  The vast majority of what you said went WAY over my head, but the notion of averaging models for stats as if they were actual data being totally wrong I totally agree.

Rob Ricket says:
June 18, 2013 at 8:03 pm  What a brilliant application of scientific logic in exposing the futility of attempting to prognosticate the future with inadequate tools. It takes a measure of moral courage to expose fellow academics as morally bankrupt infants bumbling about in a dank universe of deception. Bravo!

Jeef says:
June 18, 2013 at 7:32 pm  That. Is. Brilliant.  Thank you.

Only a couple of people seemed to understand what rgbatduke wrote.  

Once again, Nick Stokes asks some pertinent questions (my bold):
June 18, 2013 at 6:22 pm  As I said on the other thread, what is lacking here is a proper reference. Who does this? Where? “Whoever it was that assembled the graph” is actually Lord Monckton. But I don’t think even that graph has most of these sins, and certainly the AR5 graph cited with it does not. Where in the AR5 do they make use of ‘the variance and mean of the “ensemble” of models’?

Monckton pops in and thanks Nick Stokes for being gracious and coming to his defense.  

No, that's not what he does.  Monckton calls Nick Stokes a liar and a troll and and then goes on to say he did exactly what Nick Stokes and rgbatduke said he did. He writes: "in my own graph I merely represented the interval of projections encompassed by the spaghetti graph and added a line to represent the IPCC’s central projection."  That's precisely what rgbatduke was referring to when he originally wrote in reference to Monckton's chart, of the:

"implicit swindle in this graph — by forming a mean and standard deviation over model projections and then using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error, one is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!"

Monckton somehow "forgets" to mention the variance he shows on his chart (see below).

Monckton also admits to using a confidential draft AR5 chart, which if he was an expert reviewer he pledged to keep confidential.  The AR5 chart itself has errors AFAIK and the public version will no doubt be different.

Monckton shows his lack of moral fibre and his lack of grace.  His behaviour shows he is not an upright citizen, an honest man of his word or a gentleman.  Monckton is a bombastic ignorant fool who has lost his entertainment value.  I've noticed that some people who are in the wrong are incapable of admitting it, and have a tendency to get very aggro.  As if they think it will fool anyone but other fools.  Monckton also has a very compartmentalised brain. It holds his lies and truths in different compartments but he can spout either or both at the same time, usually mixed with his misplaced self-righteous venom.

A final mention to Tsk Tsk who observes the strawman (my bold):

June 18, 2013 at 7:01 pm  Brown raises a potentially valid point about the statistical analysis of the ensemble, but his carbon atom comparison risks venturing into strawman territory. If he’s claiming that much of the variance amongst the models is driven by the actual sophistication of the physics that each incorporates, then he should provide a bit more evidence to support that conclusion.

Here are the charts prepared by Christy, Spencer and Monckton that so offended rgbatduke, all the WUWT deniers and Anthony Watts, but which they are only now saying so.

Spencer and Christy's Spaghetti

Monckton's Swindle

Here are my previous articles on:

• Spencer and Christy's exercise
• Monckton's diatribe

Here is a figure from the 2007 IPCC report - Summary for Policy Makers. The left panel is emission scenarios, the right panel shows multi-model means of surface temperature for different scenarios. The bars at the right show the "best estimate" surface temperature and likely range for 2090-2099.  The best estimate is not the same as the model means you'll notice. Click to enlarge.

Figure SPM.5. Left Panel: Global GHG emissions (in GtCO2-eq) in the absence of climate policies: six illustrative SRES marker scenarios (coloured lines) and the 80th percentile range of recent scenarios published since SRES (post-SRES) (gray shaded area). Dashed lines show the full range of post-SRES scenarios. The emissions include CO2, CH4, N2O and F-gases. Right Panel: Solid lines are multi-model global averages of surface warming for scenarios A2, A1B and B1, shown as continuations of the 20th-century simulations. These projections also take into account emissions of short-lived GHGs and aerosols. The pink line is not a scenario, but is for Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model (AOGCM) simulations where atmospheric concentrations are held constant at year 2000 values. The bars at the right of the figure indicate the best estimate (solid line within each bar) and the likely range assessed for the six SRES marker scenarios at 2090-2099. All temperatures are relative to the period 1980-1999. {Figures 3.1 and 3.2}

How an economist seeks fame and riches...

Update: Apparently Richard Tol can't even categorise the abstracts to his own papers correctly, so he has a bit of cheek jumping up and down trying to find fault with Cook13.

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This one is funny peculiar.  Anthony Watts of WUWT was so irate that yet another study showing the 97% consensus among scientists who work in the area that humans are causing global warming, that he told big fat lies about the study.

See here and here and here and here for previous studies that found there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming.

Now Anthony has reported that an economist, Richard Tol, who happens to agree that humans cause global warming and doesn't appear to dispute the 97% consensus, has had a comment on the Cook paper rejected.

How (not) to become rich and famous

Tol tweeted that he wanted to become "rich and famous" by courting deniers at WUWT (Curry-style) . Tol figured he'd write a formal comment to the journal  that published the Cook et al study, Environmental Research Letters.

Maybe they got tired  ....

One of Tol's 'arguments' against the Cook et al paper was his speculation that the researchers surely got tired assessing so many abstracts.  I'm not kidding.  This is from the rejection letter as published on WUWT:

The author offers much speculation (e.g. about raters perhaps getting tired) which has no place in the scientific literature

Tol didn't make any rational argument that the method was unsound (which might have warranted a comment) or that he had come up with a different number using the same or different method (which might have warranted a comment or maybe a paper).  No - he argued that the authors might have got a bit sleepy.

Oh my!  What can I say.  Perhaps he's projecting his experience onto others?  Might be a new argument against all the hockey sticks that keep popping up in the literature - all the climate scientists are tired :)

It's a conspiracy!

As for Anthony Watts, he of Kenji fame decides it must be a conspiracy of one, writing:

Also, it appears the opinion of ONE board member is all it takes, so much for consensus.

Anthony doesn't know much about comments on scientific papers.  He says he thinks Tol's paper might have got rejected because Dr Gleick is on the ERL Board, because Dr Gleick helped expose Heartland Institute's dirty linen.  I wasn't aware of a relationship between Richard Tol and the Heartland Institute - maybe by way of the GWPF?   (Richard Tol is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation - along with climate science deniers like David Whitehouse and Ian Plimer).  Anyway, Anthony Watts implies there is a connection and he should know I suppose.

Dogwhistling the dwindling, raggedy, dispirited troop of deniers

While Anthony Watts conspiracy theorises, Richard Tol takes a guess at which Editorial Board member wrote the rejecting report.  That's enough for Anthony Watts, who posts the credentials of the Editor In Chief (which are very impressive) and blows his dog whistle calling for WUWT readers to spam that Board member, posting a link to the editor's email address "for those that wish to query him" (most WUWT readers don't know how to use a search engine).

Unabashed and uncaring...

Unabashed and uncaring of his professional reputation, Richard Tol has published the rejection letter and his rejected comment on his blog for all the world to see.  He really must want that "fame and riches" very badly.  Seeking a career change perhaps?  Maybe Richard Tol is tired of being a lead author of the IPCC AR5 report.

Time to take a nap.

Wake up to the 97% consensus

Okay, I'm awake again and have read a couple of the comments below, which brought to mind a tweet from a wise man who wrote that Anthony Watts at WUWT just "doesn't get it":

Science isn't strong because of the consensus; 

the consensus is strong because of science.

---

When is it time to stop digging the hole you've dug yourself into?

Perhaps when new-found "friends" say it's time?

One side show is the three way fight among the denialati: poptech vs Shollenberger vs  Tol, sort of.

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Bad Hair Day: Eli points out that this silly episode was just one of three losses the deniosaurs had recently!

Be worried..."logarithmic" does not mean what some people think it means

There's a straight science article up at WUWT for a change, without any snark.  It's a press release of this new paper (sans reference): McAnena et al (2013) Atlantic cooling associated with a marine biotic crisis during the mid-Cretaceous period, Nature Geoscience: doi:10.1038/ngeo1850.

The research describes how tectonic activity led to changes in the ocean and resulted in massive CO2 fixing by photosynthetic organisms in the seas.  This in turn caused a 5° Celsius drop in the temperature of sea surface waters.  All this took place more than a hundred million years ago, way back in the late Aptian and occurred over a couple of million years.  So the pace of change was a tad slower than the current extinction event.  Here are some excerpts from ScienceDaily.com:

A "cold snap" 116 million years ago triggered a similar marine ecosystem crisis to the ones witnessed in the past as a result of global warming, according to research published in Nature Geoscience....

...Analysing the geochemistry and micropaleontology of a marine sediment core taken from the North Atlantic Ocean, the team show that a global temperature drop of up to 5°C resulted in a major shift in the global carbon cycle over a period of 2.5 million years.

Occurring during a time of high tectonic activity that drove the breaking up of the super-continent Pangaea, the research explains how the opening and widening of new ocean basins around Africa, South America and Europe created additional space where large amounts of atmospheric CO2 was fixed by photosynthetic organisms like marine algae. The dead organisms were then buried in the sediments on the sea bed, producing organic, carbon rich shale in these new basins, locking away the carbon that was previously in the atmosphere.

The result of this massive carbon fixing mechanism was a drop in the levels of atmospheric CO2, reducing the greenhouse effect and lowering global temperature.

This period of global cooling came to an end after about 2 million years following the onset of a period of intense local volcanic activity in the Indian Ocean. Producing huge volumes of volcanic gas, carbon that had been removed from the atmosphere when it was locked away in the shale was replaced with CO2 from Earth's interior, re-instating a greenhouse effect which led to warmer climate and an end to the "cold snap."

Out of the keyboards of deniers

Couldn't help but remark on this comment on WUWT.  Ian W says:

June 17, 2013 at 3:45 am  The result of this massive carbon fixing mechanism was a drop in the levels of atmospheric CO2, reducing the greenhouse effect and lowering global temperature.

Why do these academics continue to claim carbon dioxide must be the cause of every global temperature change? The level of carbon dioxide changes after the change in temperature. The effect of carbon dioxide is logarithmic in any case so large reductions from 1200 to 600ppm would only have the same effect as 600 to 300ppm.

Walking back out of this ‘carbon fixation’ is going to be very difficult for academia.

What a mixed up chappie.  First he says that CO2 levels change after a change in temperature.  Then in the very next sentence he agrees that there is an effect of CO2 on temperature - or at least implies it, saying the effect is logarithmic.

He says a reduction from 1200 ppm to 600 ppm would 'only have the same effect' as 600 to 300 ppm.  Only? Well, not unless he is talking about the degree change.  Does he realise what he has written I wonder?

There would be a big difference in the world if it got five degrees colder (think lots of ice and dry), just as there will be a big difference in a world that is five degrees hotter than now (think lots of heat and wet). Is that what he really wants?

What does Ian think "logarithmic" means?

I almost have the impression that Ian W thinks that logarithmic equals "not much change, not so you'd notice".  If CO2 goes from 300 to 600 ppm and the average global temperature jumps by, say, 3 degrees;  and then CO2 goes from 600 to 1200 ppm and the average global temperature goes up another 3 degrees;  I somehow think Ian W would notice the changes in the world around him.  Just like he would if the average global temperature dropped by three or six degrees and the world got very icy.

I wonder if he will ever figure it out.


PS Ian W's comment is the most 'intelligent' of the lot so far, believe it or not!  They really are a bunch of numbskulls over at WUWT.

A very predictable pattern...

Anthony Watts of WUWT has posted a quote from a Canadian denialist called McIntyre, referring to a new paper by Briffa et al, writing in part: "unsurprisingly there is issue after issue" - but then as far as I can see, doesn't list a single one of his "issues". (McIntyre is not a climate scientist but likes to pretend.)

Watts is a real card sometimes!

Anthony seems to think it will destroy the hockey stick - ROTFL.

McIntyre does make snide comments and suggests the scientists are deceitful and incompetent - but that's par for the course with that dreadful man. He's like the town gossip who has to make up stuff to retain an audience.



I don't normally bother with the Auditor.  He's a very nasty piece of work but is a bit too weird for most people to bother with.  He's also a very good example of the Dunning Kruger Effect.

A very predictable pattern...

If anyone is interested in his latest mud-slinging attempt, referred to by Anthony Watts on WUWT, I suggest you read this 2009 article from Tim Lambert at Deltoid and substitute today's date.  Nothing's changed.  Note especially this quote from realclimate.org referring to yet another example of McIntyre's attempts to discredit science and scientists - back in 2007:

What is clear however, is that there is a very predictable pattern to the reaction to these blog posts that has been discussed many times. As we said last time there was such a kerfuffle:

However, there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake. This led to some truly death-defying leaping to conclusions when this issue hit the blogosphere.

Plus ça change… 

And then read this article in realclimate.org about the new paper by Briffa et al, in which is detailed some of the appalling behaviour of McIntyre.  The Briffa paper and supplementary material can be accessed here (no paywall).

No matter how many times McIntyre gets it wrong he continues to try to tear down the reputations of some of the world's best scientists.  It's like a game to him and is all part of his disinformation campaign.  Luckily no one understands him.  Unfortunately, because they don't understand him, imbeciles like Watts just make up stuff like "all the scientists are wrong and don't no nuffin'".

I'm not wasting any more space on that despicable little man.

Curry on Ice - or How a Denialist Tries to Go Down the Up Escalator

Denialist Judith Curry is trying to rewrite the temperature records

Anthony Watts had a strangely wrong WUWT Quote of the Week from Judith Curry about a supposed "cooling trend".

This period since 2002 is scientifically interesting, since it coincides with the ‘climate shift’ circa 2001/2002 posited by Tsonis and others. This shift and the subsequent slight cooling trend provides a rationale for inferring a slight cooling trend over the next decade or so, rather than a flat trend from the 15 yr ‘pause’.

You can read about the work of Tsonis "and others" here on SkepticalScience.com, which includes links to their papers including one published in 2009, the year before the hottest year on record so far.

Anyway, I went to Curry's blog and found that denialists are apparently now trying to downplay what was the hottest decade on record using wordplay: shifting from a "slowdown" to a "15 to 17 year pause" to a "slight cooling". We wish!

Apparently Judith Curry has been "receiving inquiries from journalists" about the "cooling" since 2002, ignoring the fact that three of the ten years since 2002 were hotter than it was that year.

JC note: Attention in the public debate seems to be moving away from the 15-17 yr ‘pause’ to the cooling since 2002 (note: I am receiving inquiries about this from journalists).

What cooling do you legitimately ask?  I think Curry mixed up her binaries and decimals, her "twos" and "tens" when she speaks of "cooling" and "slight cooling".  If she wanted to be accurate and since she doesn't mind coming across as a total idiot, she could try to say "cooling since 2010", since that was hottest year on record or, in some series, the equal hottest year on record with 2005.

Source: NASA

As for the rest of the earth system - well it certainly hasn't "stopped cooling" or "paused" in the last 15 to 17 years either:

Source: University of Colorado

Source: PIOMAS

Source: NODC/NOAA

Let's stick Curry in ice for a couple of years and see what happens with her fake "cooling trend".

Iced Curry

Postscript

I notice in that blurb that Anthony Watts says he is going to elevate to an article ratbagduke's rgbatduke's rant in which he slammed one of Monckton's charts as "an implicit swindle".  That should be fun, given the way Anthony worships the ground the potty peer walks upon.  Another real, doggone DuKE.