Desperate Deniers Part 6: David Whitehouse sez it's just a blob and ENSO

Deniers are still trickling in excuses for why they deny the world is warming, trying to dispute or downplay the latest "hottest year" - 2015. Today Anthony Watts put up an article by David Whitehouse of the denier lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, sorry, Forum (it was from the anti-science lobbying arm of the GWPF) (archived here, latest here). David chose to mimic Bob Tisdale and claim it's only got hotter because it got hotter - pointing to hot blobs and hot El Niños.

What he doesn't explain, and what no denier at WUWT has the brains to ask him, are the following:

1. What made the blob and El Niño so hot?
2. How did the blob and El Niño make the entire earth so hot when they've never done it before?
3. What about all the other hot blobs that appeared last year, didn't they make any difference?

How on earth could a blob and El Niño make the entire global mean temperature so high? The fact is that the earth was the hottest it's ever been in the last 150 years at least, and possibly in the entire time since civilisation began.

Here's David Whitehouse's excuse:

Figure 1 | Land and Ocean Temperature Percentiles Jan-Dec 2015. Annotations show the "blob" and El Niño. Source: NOAA

Here's my reply to David Whitehouse. That's no excuse!

Figure 2 | Land and Ocean Temperature Percentiles Jan-Dec 2015. Annotations show the "blob" and El Niño and other record hot regions. Source: NOAA

David "not a climate scientist" Whitehouse proclaimed:

Despite what some scientists have said the large increase over 2014 is far too great and swift to be due to a resurgence of forced global warming. It must be due to short-term natural variability, and you don’t have to look far to find it. 2015 was the year of the El Nino which boosted the year’s temperature. (In the Nasa press conference about the 2015 global temperature see how long it takes the presenters to mention the El Nino).

Let's pick that paragraph apart. David takes it on himself to dispute Dr Gavin "climate scientist" Schmidt who said:

What about the impact of El Niño on the 2015 record? It gave an assist - but record would have been broken anyway pic.twitter.com/BXFOQQUWbE

— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) January 21, 2016

Not the very strongest El Niño

While David Whitehouse wants to blame the hottest year on ENSO and a blob, Bob Tisdale at WUWT has been working furiously to argue that this El Niño is NOT the biggest ever. He's written umpteen articles mostly arguing how it probably wasn't the strongest ever (based on a strawman). None of the agencies that study and report ENSO events (to my knowledge) have claimed it was the biggest El Niño ever. The Bureau of Meteorology has been saying: "The 2015–16 El Niño is strong, and likely to rank in the top three events of the past 50 years." The papers reported it as "'among the four strongest events since 1950". (Someone ought to get Bob and David together to get their story straight.)

Anyway, my question to David Whitehouse is:

If El Nino is likely to rank in the top three events of the past 50 years, then why wasn't the world as hot in 1997 or 1982 or 1972, which were the first years of the "strongest El Niños", equivalent to this year's, using ONI as a benchmark.

Here is a chart of global mean surface temperature, with the first years of the strongest El Niños marked with a dotted line:

Figure 3 | Global Mean Surface Temperature. The years of the four strongest El Nino's since the 1950s are marked by a dashed line and labeled. Data source: GISS NASA

David Whitehouse's excuse is not only pathetic, it falls completely apart when you look at the evidence.

Interestingly, David contradicts himself multiple times. He admits that "2015 was an exceptional year for weather". Yet he claims that this "is not the way some scientists presented it". WTF?

• In its Annual Climate Statement, Australia's Bureau of Meteorology used the words "exceptional" and "exceptionally" no less than seven times.
• The Financial Times states: "Climate scientists pin responsibility for the exceptional weather on man-made warming"
• The BBC reports scientist Dr Stott saying "The end of 2015 was very exceptional in many ways. Here in the UK we had both the wettest and the warmest December in our records going back to 1910, but also globally,".

David claims that scientists have ignored the blob of warm water in the Pacific, which largely dissipated by the second half of the year. Yet he would not have heard of the "blob" if one of his denier mates had not alerted him to the fact that scientists were researching it. He whined:

None of them mentioned the “blob” and as for the El Nino it was the “little bit on the top” merely a minor contribution. Most of the temperature rise was down to forced global warming, they said.

If you look again at Figure 1 and Figure 2 up top, you'll see why many scientists didn't pick out the "blob" for special attention. It was only one small area out of all the huge areas that were in the top percentile - the "record warmest".

Is it any wonder that David Whitehouse didn't put up any charts or maps to "prove" his points?

ALL the warming from 1951 is because of human activity

David isn't above telling lies, either. He wrote:

The IPCC says that just over half of the warming since the fifties is forced so most of the contribution to 2015′s temperature is natural variability. In addition the factor that makes 2015 warmer than its previous years is not a resurgence of forced global warming but the “blob” and the El Nino.

That's quite a blatant lie, isn't it. What the IPCC stated in it's most recent report (2013) was that for the period from from 1951 to 2010:

The best estimate of the human induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.

In other words, the IPCC report effectively says that all the global warming observed since the 1951 is because of human activity.

David speculates what if it hadn't got warmer?

David wonders what the 2015 global mean surface temperature would have been if parts of the planet hadn't got hotter. He wrote:

One can speculate what the temperature of 2014 and 2015 would have been without the blob and the El Nino.

That sounds suspiciously like the argument put forward by Bob Carter, Chris de Frietas and John McLean, when they removed the warming trend from the global surface temperature record and pronounced that the world hadn't warmed! Others have tried that trick, too. It doesn't work.

David wants to delete 2015 from the temperature record, writing:

Consequently it is unsafe to use 2015 in any trend analysis to eliminate the “pause.” It is essential to view the 2015 along with subsequent years to catch the cooling La Nina effect. Only this way can the El Nino contribution be properly assessed.

Yet he ends with the fact that:

The main conclusion that can be drawn about 2015 is that it was a truly exceptional year for weather, and for misleading press releases. 

(He didn't really link to his own article. That was just me having a dig.)

From the WUWT comments

I expect that Anthony Watts' followers won't know what to make of the mixed up article from David Whitehouse. Was 2015 an exceptional year or wasn't it? Was it a lot hotter or wasn't it? Is global warming real or isn't it? What would have happened if there hadn't been so many record warm areas on the planet?

Jared has a (conspiracy) theory, and claims to have found reports where temperatures are reported to the fifth decimal place. Typical of deniers, he doesn't cite any evidence:

January 23, 2016 at 12:10 pm
Just wait until 2017 when they readjust all the temps. These temps are incorrect as they always have to readjust them, yet at the same time they are very precise to the tune of .00001 degrees.

Pat Ch refuses to accept that the hottest year on record is something "unusual". Is his amygdala in overdrive? I expect that he'd think he could break all the world records broken by athletes, too, if given half a chance.

January 23, 2016 at 12:30 pm
Absolutely nothing unusual is happening and has happened, yet thousand of politicians and scientists paid by those very politicians, as well as shockingly ignorant media types, are running around screaming panic.

Notanist thinks deniers will be saved by the next La Niña, which he or she predicts will surface in "a year or two from now". Yet if it's anything like the recent La Niña's it will temporarily dent, but won't stop global warming. The planet will still be hotter than in any previous La Niña year.

January 23, 2016 at 12:48 pm
Can’t wait to see how they’re going to keep the game going a year or two from now when we get the next La Nina. 

In the chart below, La Niña years are in blue and El Niño years are in orange. When the next La Niña arrives, will Notanist and David Whitehouse argue that the planet would have been a lot hotter except for the La Niña?

Figure 4: Global Mean Surface Temperature with ENSO years. El Nino years are in orange, La Nina years are in blue. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index is shown shaded. Data sources: GISS NASA, JMA, BoM.

Nicholas Schroeder wants to look at things in 30 year bundles.

January 23, 2016 at 12:50 pm
According to IPCC AR5 glossary and WMO climate is weather averaged over thirty years. I would take that to mean at least thirty years. So the “record” has to start no later than 1986. Better yet let’s go back three “climates,” 90 years or 1926.

Let's see what it looks like in 30 year blocks of averages, going back from 2015, with the dashed lines showing the global mean surface temperature in 2015, 2005, 1995, 1985 and 1926:

Figure 5 | Global Mean Surface Temperature averaged in 30 year blocks. The annual temperature anomaly for selected years is shown as a dashed line. Data source: GISS NASA

Bill Treuren decides it's been heating up by magic, a "rebound" from the Little Ice Age that has magically "bound" higher than it's ever bounded since civilisation began, and shows no sign of unbounding. That sure was some kick that the Little Ice Age gave the planet. Wait a minute - I thought the Little Ice Age was supposed to be cold? How on earth (or in heaven or hell) did the coldest period since civilisation manage to heat up the planet?

January 23, 2016 at 1:46 pm
Trafa but first you need to correct the temperatures for the LIA rebound and then see how many of those 16 record highs survive and how many new record lows enter.
CAGW is about the impact of Humans not the impact of natural changes such as LIA rebounds etc.

In the mantra of the IPCC any misfortune suffered by man due to nature is to be celebrated.

There were lots of people who decided to ignore the data that they don't like. There were lots of empty wails of "error margins" and "I don't believe it" and "algoreisfat".

HotWhopper regular Brandon R Gates stirs up the rabble with some sensible comments, (how can this year end a pause that never was, after all), and another regular Harry Twinotter says:

January 23, 2016 at 2:05 pm
I can’t say I understand the headline for this article. It would take a brave person to call conditions averaged over the globe for a year or more “weather”.

Variation is the global climate, yes. Try comparing the global mean temperature of 2014-2015 with the last Great El nino of 1997/98.

ShrNfr wants to look at enthalpy, not temperature:

January 23, 2016 at 2:07 pm
The problem is that surface temperatures, be they up or down mean zip. What you need to compute is the excess retained enthalpy of the earth. A comprehensive map using satellite that can compute the radiation budget across all wavelength on a global basis would come the closest to being the only practical way to do it. The El Nino and surface temperatures are a vivid example of the uselessness of surface temperatures for computation of either global warming or cooling. But you have to have an academic background in reality to understand that. Sadly that is largely missing in today’s academia. 

This chart is for ShrNfr. It shows the change in ocean heat content as a percentage of the total 1865 to 2015 change, from a new paper by Peter Gleckler et al. More than 90% of the heat is building up in the oceans, so that should satisfy him.

Figure 6 | Change in Ocean heat content as a percentage of the total 1865 to 2015 change. Source: Gleckler16

Tony thinks it's not enough for David Whitehouse to rant and rave about weather. He thinks that the claims that the global surface temperature is rising ought to be checked.

January 23, 2016 at 4:06 pm
Has anyone checked these ratbags’ calculations and claims?
Not that anyone questions that the Earth has warmed from the LIA. A tad more warming is just a trick to divert attention from the fact that there is zero evidence that man’s CO2 caused any of it.

Well, yes they have been checked. Below is a chart showing the results of six independent teams of people who compile surface temperature data and two that compile upper air temperature data:

Figure 7 | Global mean temperature from six datasets. The 2015 line is the average of the 2015 temperature from all four surface sources. Data sources: GISS NASA, UK Met Office, NOAA, Berkeley Earth, UAH, RSS.

That leaves no doubt that the world is getting hotter. Below is a table showing the trends at the surface since the last time the trend changed in the beginning of the 1970s:

Table 1 | Temperature trend per decades since 1970. Data sources: GISS NASA, UK Met Office, NOAA, Berkeley Earth

Berkeley Earth was hailed by science deniers as being truly independent, and shows the second steepest rise of the lot.

That's more than enough, surely. Deniers need to work together to come up with a single protest. I don't think I saw an "it's the sun" comment, or "it's volcanoes". Some of the dimwits try to claim it's not warming. The rest are fossicking about trying to find a reason for the warming that's not to do with the massive hike in greenhouse gases. None have been successful.

References and further reading

Peter J. Gleckler, Paul J. Durack, Ronald J. Stouffer, Gregory C. Johnson, Chris E. Forest. Industrial-era global ocean heat uptake doubles in recent decades. Nature Climate Change, 2016; DOI:10.1038/nclimate2915

• Global ocean warming has doubled in recent decades, scientists find - press release at ScienceDaily
• World's oceans warming at increasingly faster rate, new study finds - article by  Oliver Milman at the Guardian

2015 Temperatures - article by Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.org

History of Record Warm Years - article by Nick Stokes at Moyhu

From the HotWhopper archives

• Desperate Deniers Part 5 - Anthony "surface station" Watts flunks NOAA temperature chart 101 - January 2016
• Desperate Deniers Part 1: Stephen Hodgart from University of Surrey and HadCRUT4 - January 2016
• Desperate Deniers Part 2: David Middleton fakes a satellite data "Just for grins"- January 2016
• Desperate Deniers Part 3: Rud Istvan mixes up GISTemp data versions - January 2016
• Desperate Deniers Part 4: Anthony Watts is shame-proof despite all his bloopers about NOAA - January 2016
• 2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C - January 2016
• More "the seas got hotter because they got hotter" from Bob Tisdale at WUWT - December 2015
• Why did the water in the kettle boil? Because it got hot! - November 2015