Yucky tasting medicine: You can't do that - only us - sez CEI

At WUWT today, Eric Worrall has written how the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is getting a taste of its own medicine (archived here). The CEI is complaining that they've been issued with a subpoena to produce twenty years of emails and other documents relating to their climate science denial campaigns. You might have heard of CEI, they are the same mob who usually appear at WUWT boasting how they asked for decades of emails from other people. Now the tables have turned and CEI doesn't like it.

In a complete about face, the CEI is now claiming that letting people know what is said in emails is a violation of freedom of speech! The article claims it to be part of "an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate". Wow! (Is that why Chris Horner and the CEI spend almost all their time suing people for emails - to intimidate and stop research on climate?)

Dave Burton wants to level the seas at WUWT

Over at WUWT, deniers are clutching at straws to continue to reject science in the face of all the "hottest evers". They really, really liked the last big El Nino in 1997-98, but they really, really dislike this current El Nino of 2015-16. It means they'll have to wait a while before they can start pointing to a drop in the surface temperature although Anthony Watts keeps jumping the gun and is excitedly telling his readers that a La Nina is just about here.

Here is some of what they got up to today, with a moan and lots of misdirection from a WUWT regular commenter called Dave Burton about another bane of deniers' existence - rising seas (archived here). But first, what's been happening...

Most of the Arctic sea ice is on land and other WUWT musings

Arctic sea ice from 1953

 Willis Eschenbach has been wondering about sea ice trends of the past few decades. He's written a couple of articles but seems to me to be more interested in hiding the trends than exploring them. In today's article (archived here, latest here), he has used HadISST data from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. I don't know why he chose that over the more often cited Sea Ice Index from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  I think he's meant his title to this latest article to be sarcastic, in the way that the Dunning-Kruger set use sarcasm: "The Awful Terrible Horrible Global Sea Ice Crisis".

Willis decided to look at the data from 1974 only because he found that for Antarctica before that time there was not good data. Then he said he removed the seasonal component, which looks like he deducted something from each month. Since Willis used HadISST data, let's look at what the authors of the authoritative text on the subject found in the 2003 paper by Rayner et al:

Some early history about Australia's deeply troubled R&D organisation, CSIRO

Peter Hannam at the Sydney Morning Herald has been writing a series of articles about the deep troubles at Australia's flagship R&D organisation, CSIRO. Some of you won't be aware of the early history of this institution, so I thought I'd pull a few threads together to give you a taste.

Billy Hughes vision for a national focus on science

The origin of the CSIRO goes back to 1916, when the Australian Government established the Advisory Council of Science and Industry. The purpose was to put a national focus on scientific research. This was during the first World War when Labor politician William Morris ("Billy") Hughes was Prime Minister. It was Hughes who convened the conference in January 1916, with the purpose of establishing the organisation. The main offices were in Melbourne originally (Canberra didn't exist).

Denier weirdness: Ari Halperin thinks the IPCC's climate change definition is too broad

The Stupid It Burns Credit: Plognark

There could be an entire field of study devoted to how the brain of a climate science denier is wired, or miswired. There is a very strange article at WUWT (archived here) that shows up the deep flaws in thinking processes of deniers. The best explanation I can come up with is that Ari Halperin doesn't understand what climate is and the people commenting at WUWT are not able to process logic.

Lower troposphere temperatures March 2016

The lower troposphere temperatures are out for March 2016, as UAH v6 beta 5 and RSS v3.3. In both cases the global anomaly is lower than it was for February, but the hottest March in the record. Below are charts for the month of March only for each year going back to 1979. First is RSS lower troposphere. The anomaly was 0.842 °C above the 1979-1998 mean, which was 0.26 °C higher than the previously hottest March in 2010 and 1998 (equal at 0.585 °C):

Figure 1 | Lower troposphere temperature for March only. Data source: RSS

Anthony Watts protests the California drought

Anthony Watts has another "claim" article at WUWT (archived here). This time it's about the extreme drought afflicting his home state of California. Anthony seems to think it's not so bad. He'd not find too many people who would agree. He didn't actually commit himself to a position other than the dogwhistle "claim" in his headline. He wrote up top:

Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford is a well-known source of papers claiming alarming things about weather and climate. He churns out a paper about 2-3 times a year, with the typical bent of climate change is causing “X”. This one is no different. 

Anthony's wrong as usual. Dr Diffenbaugh has a lot more than 2 or 3 papers published each year. Last year Google Scholar shows he had thirteen papers published.

Climate hustlers are impaling Palin at WUWT

Credit: Gage Skidmore

Over at WUWT there's an almost (not quite) complete condemnation of the people promoting the deniers latest travesty, Marc Morano's climate conspiracy film "Climate Hustle". As if the name of the film isn't bad enough, the promo published at WUWT today (archived here) has the headline:

"Climate Hustle" goes to Washington: Skeptical film to premiere on Capitol Hill; Riveting panel with Gov. Sarah Palin and other guests

If you've never experienced cognitive dissonance before, now you know what it feels like. The word "riveting" in the same sentence as "Gov. Sarah Palin" must be making you squirm in discomfort. Of course it might have provoked a guffaw and memories of Tina Fey. Or you might have wondered if Sarah Palin has started reading any newspapers yet (or if she still can't remember the name of even one news source).

A longer view of Arctic sea ice: 1953 to now

The other day I wrote about Arctic sea ice and showed a chart from Meier et al (2012). The chart went from 1953 to 2011. In case you can use these somewhere while you're talking Arctic sea ice, I've now got updated data and have plotted charts from 1953 to the present. I can do others if you want (just ask in the comments).

I'll be a bit busy over the next few days, so won't be able to respond immediately - should be within a few hours tops.

Desperate Deniers: Bob Tisdale is lost in uncertainty of February temperatures

Bob Tisdale has got himself lost in a world of uncertainty. He's written an article at WUWT (archived here) with the headline: "February 2016 Global Surface Temperature Anomalies May or May Not Have Been Highest on Record, According to the UKMO".

In fact it was the hottest February on record. What Bob does to support his claim is say how the UK Met Office Hadley Centre publishes uncertainty limits with the global surface temperature data. Bob went looking for any month that might have had an anomaly that came close. He couldn't find any other February, but he did find a January. He wrote: