.

Monday, June 29, 2015

David Burton @wattsupwiththat denies what's really warming the world

Sou | 8:12 PM Go to the first of 33 comments. Add a comment
If you've been around climate stuff these last few days you may well have come across a neat climate graphic at Bloomberg. Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi, with help from Kate Marvel and Gavin Schmidt, have charts of global surface temperatures and more. What their charts show are the various contributions to global surface temperature changes since 1880, modeled and observed. There are a number of different charts illustrating the observed annual mean global surface temperature against modeled, as affected by:

1. Natural factors:
  • orbital changes only
  • solar variation
  • volcanic eruptions
  • all three natural factors together.
2. Human activity:
  • land use changes
  • ozone changes
  • aerosols
  • greenhouse gas accumulation
  • all human activity together.
3. Natural factors and human activity combined.

The graphic is worth bookmarking for showing to (normal) people to illustrate how human activity has led to the large rise in global surface temperatures since 1880. There's not much point showing it to deniers, the sort of people who relish articles like the one by David Burton at WUWT the other day (archived here).

You might remember David. He's the chap who spent 547.5 days and nights fretting about Doran & Zimmerman (2009) before coming up with a number-fudging brainwave (It was not a brainwave, it was nothing but Dave's bad arithmetic.)

Friday, June 26, 2015

The secretive Open Atmospheric Society shows tentative signs of life @wattsupwiththat

Sou | 11:27 AM Go to the first of 45 comments. Add a comment
Unnoticed by almost everyone, Anthony Watts announced earlier this month that US taxpayers will be subsidising his secret open society, the OAS. He's managed to get 501c3 tax exempt status in the USA. I only found out because he's snuck in another tiny promo at the bottom of an article today. He has also finally provided a name associated with the OAS, announcing himself as "acting executive director" of what now appears to be a one man show, so far. Until now the society didn't have a single person associated with it in any official capacity. It's not announced any Board of Directors yet, despite its Charter mandating it be established by 1 January this year. Not publicly anyway. Maybe its board of directors is a secret.

Anthony has extended the time to be able to call yourself a "founding member" of his society. It's been extended from December last year until the end of December this year.

Does this mean the OAS is not quite brain dead and will awake from it's slumber? Time will tell. At this rate, a lot more time will probably be needed.


Moderation change - no more Smokey


In other news, I was given a tip the other day that long time sock-puppet and lapdog of Anthony Watts, dbstealey aka Smokey plus other aliases has been dropped as moderator. It happened sometime between 10 April this year and June. I didn't see any public announcement or public word of thanks for all the efforts dbstealey has made to rid WUWT of any presence of science commenters, since at least 1 November 2010. Ungrateful is what I call it :(


Related articles

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Undermining 50 years of gains. Wild claims from @wattsupwiththat

Sou | 3:35 AM Go to the first of 25 comments. Add a comment
Anthony Watts is stuck for superlatives. He's still recovering from the demise of the "pause" and his appalling reaction, then the Pope came out and spoke about the moral implications of climate change. Now The Lancet has hit him again. This time with a message about the health impacts of climate change. Anthony responded in the only way he knew how, he wrote a "claim" preface to his headline about the study. Not just any "claim" headline. This time it was a "wild claim". Here is the sum total of Anthony's thoughts on the subject: "Wild Claim: ‘climate change…could wipe out health progress over the past 50 years’". He was otherwise lost for words. (Archived here)

The passage below is from The Lancet report:
The implications of climate change for a global population of 9 billion people threatens to undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health. The direct effects of climate change include increased heat stress, floods, drought, and increased frequency of intense storms, with the indirect threatening population health through adverse changes in air pollution, the spread of disease vectors, food insecurity and under-nutrition, displacement, and mental ill health.

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Denier weirdness post of the day @wattsupwiththat

Sou | 3:53 AM Go to the first of 24 comments. Add a comment
An odd admission at WUWT (archived here). Not that what is written is wrong, just that deniers at WUWT aren't normally as up front about their deviant behaviour. By deviant I'm referring to the fact that in their real worlds, deniers wouldn't as often come across people who reject science with such vim and vigour. It's only because of the Internet that they can find other people receptive to their wacky ideas. The Internet enables a small pool of science deniers from around the world (or the US, Canada and Australia) indulge in the illusion that their conspiracy theories are "normal" - taking comfort in numbers.

Anthony's put up a postcard with words that all WUWT-ers live by:

That was a very well laid out, rational point.

But I will still hold to my emotional opinion based on no facts or evidence.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Matt Ridley spins Lysenko conspiracy theories and more in a classic denial of science

Sou | 3:55 AM Go to the first of 56 comments. Add a comment
Was it Pope Francis who pushed deniers over the edge? Is it the climate negotiations taking place this year? Matt Ridley, a science denier from the UK who claims to be a "lukewarmer", has written a Gish gallop worthy of Tim Ball. It's as if he collected up all the worst WUWT conspiracy theories and rolled them into Quadrant.

Quadrant is a right wing outlet for the extremists. It publishes dumb articles from deniers fairly often. Today Matt Ridley, a denier turned defamer has written an article (archived here). Anthony Watts has published bits of it on his blog, too (archived here).


Matt Ridley's Lysenkoism conspiracy theory


Matt lurched from one conspiracy theory to another. To illustrate how far he's gone he starts out with the Lysenko conspiracy theory that deniers call upon when they run out of ideas. The conspiracy goes something like this. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was an agricultural official who rose to prominence under Joseph Stalin. He denied genetic inheritance in plants (as described by Gregor Mendel in his famous experiments with peas in the 1800s). He even managed to outlaw research in genetics. It set plant breeding back a lot in the Soviet Union. Well, the climate conspiracy theorists claim that Lysenkoism is alive and well throughout the entire world, and has been for the past couple of hundred years. I've never seen anyone name a person who is supposedly filling the role of Lysenko and banning climate science research of any kind. Nor have I ever seen anyone say just what aspect of climate science is forbidden.

I wonder if Matt will be calling upon Hitler and Osama bin Laden next (like Tim Ball has done)?

Friday, June 19, 2015

Hottest May on record at NOAA. Has the "pause" gone for good?

Sou | 10:10 AM Go to the first of 8 comments. Add a comment
NOAA has released the global analysis for May 2015. It reports that May was the hottest on record, beating the 2014 record by 0.08°C. NOAA has May higher than GISTemp, but that doesn't mean a whole lot.  For one thing it's only one month. For another, GISTemp does change as it receives reports from around the world. Not all data comes in at the same time.

Here is a chart with both GISTemp and NOAA data. The chart includes 2015 year to date average, which might or might not drop as the year progresses.

Data sources: NOAA and NASA GISS

You'll notice that the Y axis is shifting higher. If it stays hot this year, any "hiatus" looks as if it will be nothing but a memory soon, with all the other hiati, sorry, I mean hiatuses of the past.

The Papal Encyclical: On Care For Our Common Home

Sou | 6:15 AM Go to the first of 22 comments. Add a comment
The Encyclical from Pope Francis was released a short while ago, after a press conference. In some areas it is much stronger than I expected it to be. Even in the English translation the words are powerful. I expect they resonate even more strongly in the original Italian. In other parts it's almost schizophrenic. What seems clear is that there were multiple (teams of) authors.

These are just my first impressions, which may change if I study the document more closely. The letter is divided into six chapters. (I've added bookmarks to my version. It's not till you get to the end that you find a table of contents.)

First of all, the letter starts with a reminder that this is not the first pontiff to sound the alarm about how we are hurting our environment. There are quotes from preceding Popes, going back to 1971, more than forty years ago including Paul VI in 1971, John Paul II in 1979. and Benedict XVI in 2007. (You'd think from reading the outcry on denier blogs that no religious leader had ever spoken about the environment before. It's not so.)

Chapter One is hard-hitting. It's got very strong messages about the environment and what is happening. The language and imagery is powerful. It's the chapter that most climate hawks will go to if they are looking for a quote. I've listed some below. It covers pollution, climate change, biodiversity, and water quality as well as social order (over-crowded cities etc).

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Live streaming of the Encyclical "Be praised: on the care of our common home"

Sou | 6:52 PM Go to the first of 22 comments. Add a comment
If you're up and about, the much-awaited Encyclical from Pope Francis on the environment is to be live streamed, starting in just a few minutes. Here is the link.



For italian speakers.

Here is the link to the official English Language version - just released.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

From Lewandowsky with love: climate conspiracies from WUWT

Sou | 11:30 PM Go to the first of 30 comments. Add a comment
This week, Anthony Watts and his followers at wattsupwiththat (WUWT) are competing among themselves to see who can come up with the best climate conspiracy. Anthony Watts himself hasn't got a lot of imagination. All he could come up with was accusing the NOAA of fraud and lying. His fans know that the climate conspiracy goes way beyond NOAA. It goes way beyond the whole of the USA (at least for the WUWT-ers who've begun to realise that the USA is not the entire world).

The Catholic Church is in on the climate conspiracy too. And it's all because it was infiltrated by the KGB, who planted Pope Francis as its leader.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with May 2015

Sou | 3:29 AM Go to the first of 8 comments. Add a comment
This is the update of the progressive year-to-date global average surface temperature, from GISS. This update includes May.

Worth noting

  • May was an average of 0.71°C above the 1951-1980 mean.
  • April was adjusted back to 0.71°C from 0.75°C 
  • May this year was equal second hottest with May 2012.
  • Every month this year has been at least 0.71°C above the 1951-1980 mean. 
  • The progressive year to date average up to and including May is 0.77°C above the 1951-1980 mean.

Explaining the chart


The chart is a progressive year to date average for all years from 1995 to the present. What that means is for January each year, it just shows the anomaly for January. For February it shows the average of January and February for each year. For March, its the average of the monthly anomaly from January to March.

If you look at December, each year shows the annual average temperature for the full year. For November, each year has the average for the year up to November, not including December. (As before, I've made it extra large because of all the fine detail.)

Data Source: NASA GISS

2015 is still ahead of the pack so far, just ahead of 2010 for this time of the year. The years to watch are 2014, 2010 and 2005. I've plotted them with slightly thicker lines so they stand out more easily.

The coldest year of the lot was 1996, which still ended up more than 0.3°C above the 1950 to 1981 average.  The next time someone tries to tell you that "it hasn't warmed since 1996" then show them this chart :)


Related articles and data file


I promised to provide a data file because the chart is so messy. You can access it here on Google drive.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date with April 2015 and the same with YTD to March this year.

Monday, June 15, 2015

Anthony Watts publicly accuses NOAA scientists of fraud (again) - plus his "people go to jail"!

Sou | 9:43 AM Go to the first of 60 comments. Add a comment
If you mistakenly thought that deniers like Anthony Watts might have some ethics or even a tiny shred of decency hidden very deep, you're wrong. In a topsy turvy and ugly article at WUWT today, Anthony Watts has someone trying to defend his appalling email to Tom Peterson of NOAA, in which he accuses Dr Peterson of fraud. Kip Hansen (archived here) tries to twist this into it being Andy Revkin who committed "a public journalistic offense". (I did say "that's gotta hurt".)

Andy Revkin wrote this after learning about Anthony's defamatory email:
Any notion that Watts is interested in fostering an atmosphere of civility and constructive discourse evaporates pretty quickly in considering how he handled his questions about that paper. Alternating between happy talk about rooftop solar and slanderous accusations is not constructive or civil.

Anthony Watts has discovered pristine US temperature (and MS Excel)

Sou | 7:47 AM Go to the first of 34 comments. Add a comment
Today, after having no opinion on whether or not greenhouse gases work, Anthony Watts has decided to get an opinion. In his opinion the US temperature record maintained by NOAA is pristine. That is, the NOAA Climate Reference Network is pristine. Just how long he'll think it will remain pristine is the question. He wrote an article (archived here) with the headline: "Despite attempts to erase it globally, “the pause” still exists in pristine US surface temperature data"

This time Anthony had nothing but praise for the scientists who work at NOAA. (He did sneak in some snide comments verging on the defamatory by implication. He's got to keep his disreputable reputation intact.) His praise was only because he liked what he saw or he would have hidden it from his readers. He saw a temperature chart from 2005 to 2014 and figured that was good enough for his purposes. Anthony wrote:
But, what if there were a dataset of temperature that was so well done, so scientifically accurate, and so completely free of bias that by its design, there would never be any need nor justification for any adjustments to the data?
Such a temperature record exists, it is called the U.S. Climate Reference Network, (USCRN) and it is also operated by NOAA/NCDC’s (NCEI) head administrator,Tom Karl:

Given that Anthony has been busy for years trying to prove that the record isn't pristine, this is a bit of an about face. Is he admitting defeat? You might think so, mightn't you. Let's come back in five years time, and see if Anthony still says the data is pristine.

Data source: NOAA


Here is a comparison of the pristine with the non-pristine, on an annual basis. I'll let you spot the difference:

Data source: NOAA


OMG. Anthony Watts is right. The USA temperature has paused! Ooh, it's worse than that - it's cooling!

Let's just see how much the USA has cooled over the past 120 years. If you read WUWT you'll probably think the USA is practically in an ice age.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Anthony Watts sez he has "no opinion"

Sou | 8:35 PM Go to the first of 13 comments. Add a comment
It seems to me that over recent months, the owner of the anti-science blog WUWT has been shifting further away from science and shifting further conspiracy theories of "climate science is a scam" type. He has in the past claimed that he accepts that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect. Today he takes a step back from that, and is now claiming to have no opinion on the subject. He wrote this at the top of an article (archived here) that basically claims that the world is warming by magic, not because of the greenhouse effect:
Note: I present this for discussion, I have no opinion on its validity -Anthony Watts
Anthony seems to be admitting now what his long time guest, Willis Eschenbach wrote about him. That he doesn't know the difference between science and crackpottery. Willis Eschenbach has been devastatingly scathing of Anthony Watts inabilities, writing (my emphasis):
When Anthony publishes scientific claims from the edges of the field, generally they are quickly either confirmed or falsified. This is hugely educational for scientists of all kinds, to know how to counter some of the incorrect arguments, as well as giving room for those unusual ideas which tomorrow may be mainstream ideas.
So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job. There’s no way that one man’s wisdom can substitute for that of the crowd in the free marketplace of scientific ideas. Bear in mind that even with peer review, something like two-thirds of peer-reviewed science is falsified within a year, and Anthony is making judgements, publish or don’t publish, on dozens of papers every week.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Free speech advocates make a fresh start by banning free speech

Sou | 1:37 AM Go to the first of 63 comments. Add a comment
There's some sort of denier shindig going on in Washington, I've heard. WUWT is quiet, probably because Anthony Watts is away receiving his "dumbest fake sceptic of the year" award. (He's already been exercising what he thinks is his right to defame.) No-one can say much about this fresh start for fake sceptics, because the organisers have decided to ban some of the media.

What's clear is that The Heartland Institute has made a "fresh start" for "free speech". What that means is that these champions of free speech are going to preserve their right to make up whatever they like and say it to anyone dumb enough to listen, while making sure there is no-one around to disagree with them.

Seriously. You couldn't make it up.

(Kyla Mandel at DeSmog UK has the details. Check the headline, and the link at the bottom of the page.)

Maybe the Heartland Institute is going to adopt Free Speech HotCopper-style:
We fully endorse unfettered free speech (which is the right of every full-blooded proudly conservative white male, especially those over 50), and will do our best to suppress all stray bleeding heart liberals and feminazis who invade our space, so that you can exercise your right to free speech without fear of contradiction.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

That's gotta hurt!

Sou | 4:27 PM Go to the first of 29 comments. Add a comment




Right up the top of a WUWT search on Twitter:



For what's gotta hurt - see this.

I might need to explain - if the link no longer shows it. I caught a coincidental juxtaposition, a tweet from Andy Revkin sitting right above a tweet from Anthony Watts - in the WUWT twitter timeline.

Andy Revkin's update has got to hurt Anthony. Andy's tweet was sitting right on top of a tweet from Anthony Watts. Anthony was gloating that the book "Climate Change the Facts" is rated higher at Amazon than the new (2nd) edition of the book Dire Predictions by Michael Mann and Lee R. Kump.

I happened to grab a screenshot of them both one sitting on top of the other. It struck me a funny at the time. You probably had to be there :)

The second edition of Dire Predictions (print version) is moving up the ranks quite quickly, incidentally. It's already at #34 in Books > Environmental Studies and #56 in Books > Climatology. I'm told the Kindle version will be out in July.

WUWT Quote of the Day - Conspiracy Eyes

Sou | 1:37 PM Go to the first of 11 comments. Add a comment
This was seen at WUWT just now:
we're not conspiracy theorists but it's a conspiracy, right in front of our eyes :)


Paul Westhaver
June 9, 2015 at 12:16 pm
Skeptics we may well be. But contrary to Lewandowski’s opinion, we are NOT also conspiracy theorists.
NOW with the government, in front of our eyes, changing the historical temperature plot,
I wonder if a statement of conspiracy REALITY is appropriate.
Come on guys… right in front of our eyes!?

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

"Scientifically illiterate" David Rose has his "ill-posed question" floated in Nature Climate Change

Sou | 7:12 AM Go to the first of 73 comments. Add a comment
There's a new paper out in Nature Climate Change that caught the eye of Anthony Watts (archived here). I bet he's relieved to have something else to talk about, instead of the demise of global warming (which is as alive as ever, unfortunately).

Update: There's now a published comment to the Hollin and Pearce paper, which is discussed here: The IPCC climate message is clear based on the evidence: The fundamental flaws of Hollin & Pearce
Sou 24 October 2015


The paper is both timely and out of date. Timely because it relates to "seepage" - which was the subject of a recent paper discussed here a short while ago. Timely also because it's all about the so-called "hiatus", with the authors even claiming (in their press release blog article) that there was a "short-term decrease in temperature" (which there wasn't). Out of date for the same reason.

The paper is by one of the UK "deniophiles" called Warren Pearce, together with a post-doc at his university called G. J. S. (Gregory) Hollin, who looks to be studying autism (updated dead link Oct 15). This unlikely pair somehow got their unlikely paper accepted and published in Nature Climate Change. I don't know what the editors were thinking.


Monday, June 8, 2015

More perversity from Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat

Sou | 3:26 PM Go to the first of 37 comments. Add a comment
The day before yesterday, with approval of the author, I promoted a comment to an article, which needed very little introduction. Anthony Watts had already publicly accused the NOAA of fraud, and of lying. In an email to Dr Peterson he went one further and accused Dr Peterson and his colleagues of fraud and prostitution. [See also addendum below.]

I just noticed a very long Twitter exchange in which Anthony Watts is trying to perversely twist around his own accusation of fraud, and claim that it is Dr Peterson who is "sliming" Anthony Watts. And apparently I also "slimed" Anthony by hosting his comment, despite saying very little about it. Anthony's email said it all. Here's his email again - this time I'll emphasise his allegations in bold italics:

Pausing for a dozen protests at WUWT

Sou | 2:03 AM Go to the first of 29 comments. Add a comment
So far there have been 12 articles at WUWT protesting the NOAA paper that came out last Thursday - by my count. Not including the first two, which broke embargo, that's more than two protests a day. We're still waiting for Anthony's promised fatal weakness.

Saturday, June 6, 2015

The perversity of deniers - and the "pause" that never was with Tom Peterson

Sou | 9:11 PM Go to the first of 111 comments. Add a comment
Below is a TedX talk from Dr Tom Peterson on "What is Science: How it Differs from Art, Law and Quackery":




Tom quoted Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard geologist, from the video (which provided the title for this article):
Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.

What follows is copied from a comment posted here at HotWhopper, from Tom Peterson of NOAA, co-author of the new paper in Science, and President of the WMO Commission for Climatology. The email exchange is about a subject of much recent discussion - the new Science paper, which I described here (with lots of links at the bottom for further reading).

Tom has subsequently confirmed the email exchange and kindly gave me permission to repost his comment as a blog article. Apart from remarking on Anthony's conspiracy ideation, there's not really anything more I need add. The exchange speaks for itself - and speaks volumes.


Email exchange between Anthony Watts and Tom Peterson


Dear Sou et al.,

I thought you might find an email exchange I had yesterday with Anthony Watts interesting. 16 hours ago I received this email from Anthony Watts:

Friday, June 5, 2015

NOAA global temperature paper prompts a torrent of paranoid conspiracies at WUWT

Sou | 6:09 PM Go to the first of 50 comments. Add a comment
If you ever want to get overloaded with conspiracy ideation, just go to a denier blog. It's almost unbelievable that there really are people whose first thought, when they think "climate science" is: it's a hoax; scientists are faking it. Some might argue that it's just that gullible people who are fed lies are being deceived. I don't see it as that. It's that people go to disinformation sites because it's only there that they will find what they want to believe. The visitors to conspiracy theory sites are by nature prone to conspiracy ideation.

This article won't interest everyone. It documents the conspiratorial and illogical reaction to climate science that you read every day on anti-science blogs. This article is a record of some of the reaction to the new NOAA paper on global surface temperature. You can read the main article about Karl15, if you want to know what caused such a knee-jerk response of conspiratorial thinking in the deniosphere.

No pause in the frenzy of denial: at WUWT

Sou | 5:08 AM Go to the first of 5 comments. Add a comment
Anthony Watts wrote about the new NOAA paper in Science that: "WUWT has already found the fatal weakness in the paper". Already he's published two protest articles. We're still waiting. There's not a mention of any "fatal weakness".

As I wrote in the main article about it, the new paper describes an analysis of global surface temperature trends, and shows that the trend in surface temperature this century is indistinguishable from that for the second half of last century. Global warming continues at the surface. There is no "hiatus".

No pause in the frenzy of denial: S. Fred Singer

Sou | 4:15 AM Feel free to comment!
The new paper published today in Science, by researchers at NOAA, shows that global temperatures have continued to rise at the same rate this century as they did in the second half of last century. I've discussed that paper already, in a separate article.

This article is (probably) part of a series of the "frenzy of denial" by science deniers. They really don't want to read anything that shows the world continues to warm.


Deniers are "Wow-ed"


Anthony Watts was the first out the gate, arguably breaking the embargo on the Science paper. He made no impression the first time, so he tried again. Maybe Daily Mail reporter, David Rose, beat his second article by a nose. Fred Singer from the denier lobby group, the Heartland Institute, was the first to convincingly break the embargo, with an article at some extremist right wing website, that began with the exclamation "Wow!"

Fred's article isn't fit for publishing anywhere else. It was nothing more than red herrings, squirrels and waffle, sprinkled with lies. He wrote rather enthusiastically in a style I've never seen from him before, with his "wow's" and "oh boy's". Not that I've read much of what he's written. Who would bother? Here's his opening paragraph, retaining the poor spacing:
 Wow!Science mag is publishing a blockbuster paper today, June 4.Oh boy!Get ready to watch yet another big fight about climate change -- this time mainly among different groups of climate alarmists.Is there a “pause”?Did global climate really stop warming during the last dozen years, 18 years, or even 40 years, in spite of rising levels of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide?
Sorry Fred. There won't be any big fuss about this from scientists. I doubt too many will be saying that the paper is wrong. Not that I've seen at any rate. The world continues to warm and the only people who dispute that are deniers.

NOAA: No pause in the global surface temperature

Sou | 4:00 AM Go to the first of 56 comments. Add a comment
Anthony Watts prepared the ground on Monday, with an article, in which he alleged fraud and skulduggery at NOAA. At the time I wrote the response, I didn't know what he was referring to (and neither did anyone at WUWT). Peter Thorne was awake to it, however, and gave me time to prepare for the upcoming "frenzy of denial". He was coyly referring to a new Science paper about global surface temperature.

Anthony Watts has since written another article, breaking the embargo on this new paper, which was published in ScienceXpress today. He rationalised his behaviour by saying that "multiple sources have sent me a press release and advance copies of a paper", meaning maybe two people.

The new paper is by a team of scientists, mostly from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The title is:
Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

The paper describes an analysis of global surface temperature trends, using much more data from land stations in particular. It also includes corrections, particularly for time-related bias in sea surface temperatures. The main finding is that the trend in surface temperature this century is indistinguishable from that for the second half of last century. Global warming continues at the surface.

Update: I've added more links to blog articles elsewhere about this new paper.

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Anthony Watts fails fossil fuel arithmetic test posed by Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira

Sou | 2:51 PM Go to the first of 18 comments. Add a comment
A new paper in GRL by Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira works out how long it takes for the greenhouse forcing by CO2 to exceed the combustion warming by fossil fuels. The heat from burning fossil fuels is soon outpaced by the heat retained from putting the CO2 into the atmosphere, released when those fossil fuels were burnt.

Update: See below

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Anthony Watts alleges fraud by the NOAA

Sou | 7:21 PM Go to the first of 17 comments. Add a comment
Anthony Watts is spreading his tattered wings, reaching beyond the Serengeti Strategy of isolating a single animal from the safety of its herd, to targeting an entire herd. Today, as if tempting a defamation suit, he boldly alleged that the NOAA is committing fraud (archived here). He wrote:
Grandma Learns About Data Adjustment: A little story about how data adjustment might work in everyday life.
Anthony Watts / 8 hours ago June 1, 2015
Note: On Thursday of this week, NOAA/NCDC will attempt to rewrite the surface temperature record yet again, making even more “adjustments” to the data to achieve a desired effect. This story by Mr. Core is worth noting in the context of data spin that we are about to be subjected to – Anthony Watts

Here is the global surface temperature anomaly as reported by NOAA:

Data Source: NOAA

co2's thread

Sou | 5:06 AM Feel free to comment!
This thread is just for co2isnotevil to comment on.

Monday, June 1, 2015

More conspiracy theories from WUWT: It's a strong climate plot

Sou | 10:52 PM Go to the first of 17 comments. Add a comment
WUWT is one of a multitude of conspiracy theory blogs on the internet. Anthony Watts, the blog owner, specialises in conspiracy theories of the climate kind. Today he's posted another article from one of his nuttier paranoid guests, whose name is Tim Ball (archived here). He's a frequent guest also on one of the even nuttier websites in Canada, which promotes "Freedom Water".

Tim is just writing about his normal (normal for him that is) theories that global warming is a plot hatched by a man called Maurice Strong. You can read an interview with Maurice Strong at the Guardian - by Leo Hickman, back in 2010.

Apparently Maurice Strong created global warming back in the 1980s. He must have had thousands of people in on the conspiracy, because he was able to alter scientific journals dating back to the beginning of the 19th century. That means he must have not only co-opted some of the world's leading scientific publishers and all their staff, he must have hauled in librarians all around the world to doctor old copies of scientific journals.


Job vacancy at WUWT: Wanted - a young charismatic conspiracy theorising scientist

Sou | 5:33 PM Go to the first of 4 comments. Add a comment
There's a job going at WUWT for a charismatic young scientist. This charismatic young scientist needs the following attributes:
  • Subscribes to the conspiracy theory that "climate science is a hoax"
  • Is willing to deny that humans are causing global warming
  • Doesn't vote Republican (it is assumed that the scientist will be from the USA)
  • Appeals to US-style libertarians
  • Isn't an anti-vaxxer
  • Isn't a flat-earther
  • Isn't a young earth creationist
  • Doesn't (openly) subscribe to any other well-known conspiracy theory like "NASA faked the moon landing"; 911-truth; birtherism etc
  • Knows how to spell "pause", and isn't shy about saying "pause, pause, pause" every time someone points to the rapid rise in surface temperature, ocean heat, melting ice etc
  • Is willing to waffle and avoid mentioning any climate science
  • Is able to figure out what he or she "stands for"
  • "Believes" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas
  • "Believes" that greenhouse gases don't work any more