The last 10 years are the hottest ever, yet deniers are still in denial

Summary: Despite three years of La Nina, 2022 was the sixth hottest year on record. The last decade was the hottest decade on record.

As you all know by now, we're causing the world to heat up. We've not got to a stage where we've stabilised the global temperature. In fact, we seem to be nowhere near stabilisation. Yet strangely there are still a few global warming deniers floating about. These deniers are arguing once again that an ice age is coming, or it's started cooling, or global warming has stopped, or "CO2 warming is a hoax" or some such nonsense. It's prompted me to write another article about how global temperature has been changing.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for 2022 was 0.89 °C. This is 0.13°C below the hottest year so far. The hottest was 2020 at 1.02°C above the 1951 to 1980 average.

Victor Venema, climate scientist, valued friend to many

Victor Venema died earlier this month. His friends, colleagues and everyone who knew of him were shocked and felt an immense sadness when his friend and colleague, Frank Sonntag, let us know.

Victor Venema was a climate scientist in the Meteorological Institute, University of Bonn, Germany. His main scientific interest was in the variability of data in complex systems. In particular, the study of variability in weather data and homogenization. In his own words (archived): 

"At the moment most of my work and this blog is about the removal of non-climatic changes (variability) from historical stations data, which is called homogenization." 

Dr Venema contributed to climate science on many fronts beyond the university. He was an advocate for open science, inclusivity in science, scientific communication and bringing science to the general public. He did not merely advocate for change, he helped make change. He was active in various roles with the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) over many years. He was Chair of the Parallel Observations Science Team (POST) of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) and a member of the ISTI Benchmarking and Assessment working group. He was also prolific online, including with Climate Feedback and Hypothesis, a web tool that enabled experts and others to comment on articles published on the web. He was very keen to overcome language and other barriers including through GrassRoots Journals and the Translate Science initiative. (I've probably left out many of his contributions and achievements.)

Victor was a keen observer of behaviour on social media. On occasion he referred to some aspects as "toxic", particularly on Twitter and on climate science denial blogs. Once again, he wasn't just talk. Together with Frank Sonntag, he set up an instance for scientists at Mastodon, FediScience.org.

Victor was a wonderful science communicator. He was able to explain otherwise difficult concepts in ways that everyone, scientist or not, could understand. It was Eli Rabbet on RabbetRun who first introduced me to his blog. It was hard to resist his wit, perspicacity and disdain of efforts from deniers to claim that climate science is a hoax. Back in 2012, Victor wrote an article "Blog review of the Watts et al. (2012) manuscript on surface temperature trends". He also wrote a blog article on one of the points science deniers seemed unable to understand with weather data, "A short introduction to the time of observation bias and its correction." (Watts later promised a rebuttal to his own paper, which has yet to see the light of day.)

Victor was a regular commenter at HotWhopper almost from its beginning. He supported my efforts publicly and in private over many years. We shared the same sense of humour. Victor was a valued friend to me and to many, many people. (See also the tribute at ATTP - ...and Then There's Physics.) His death is a great loss to me personally, to climate science, to science in general, and to the world at large.

In his most recent blog post, Victor wrote: "Dying is naturally not nice for the ones you leave behind." It is not nice at all, particularly with someone young who gave so much to so many. His work doing and explaining science and making science open and more inclusive will endure.

Post script: Tributes to Victor Venema may be posted to a condolence website set up by his family.

Email went down, now it's back

I've been with the same hosting company for many years. Yesterday (Australian time), first time ever, their email servers went down for several hours. It's back again now. 

If anyone tried to send an email during that time, particularly anyone who is wanting to subscribe to email alerts, please try again. I'm referring to the article I posted a couple of days ago.

We've got to get serious about climate, we've wasted too much time

The IPCC Summary for Policymakers WG1 report has just been released. You can download it here.

I will be going through it and the technical report (when it comes out) over the next few days. You can download the full report here. Warning: it's 3949 pages long! An initial glance shows that we need to do more to reduce emissions. A whole lot more.

The press conference is on YouTube:

This report will have a lot more space devoted to regional changes. There is a fabulous interactive atlas which allows you to drill down and across in all sorts of ways.

There is so much to work through. Here are some initial points that might interest you:

Alert for HotWhopper email subscribers to resubscribe

Sorry for not following up my last post sooner. There'll be another climate post shortly. 

My excuse is being consumed by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2. Not me personally, I hasten to add. It's a big problem in the state next door, NSW, and has slipped from there into my home state, Victoria, a couple of times (and other parts of Australia). That's meant lockdowns to get us back to zero COVID-19. Having a slightly obsessive tendency, I've been spending too much time on the endless press conferences, news articles and tweets about the subject. This has been at the expense of writing blog articles about climate change, I'm sorry to say.

While I'm preparing the next article (or procrastinating on its writing) I want to alert people who signed up for email alerts to new articles here on HotWhopper. The normal emails will stop because Feedburner is being shut down this month. Here's the notice:

Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in August 2021.

After August 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported. If you’d like to continue sending emails, you can download your subscriber contacts.

If you'd like to continue to receive email alerts, please let me know directly, using the email address to which you want them sent. You can do the same if you no longer want alerts, although the subs will be opt-in, not opt-out. That is, if you don't let me know you want to continue, you will no longer receive email updates. 

You can let me know either way by sending an email to subscribeHW at HotWhopper.com (replacing the "at" with @).  If you're already a subscriber, you should be receiving this article as an email already, but the emailed articles will only continue if I set it up. I'll probably use mailchimp, which AFAIK is reliable and secure.

Beware of internal conflicts, rivalries and toxic behaviour polluting climate action

Today I'm going to tackle a difficult but important topic - internal conflict. Given the number of people involved, the number and complexity of the issues, and the decades over which the climate movement is likely to be needed, it's a pipe dream to think there will always be harmony. At the same time, if the sort of problems mentioned here aren't acknowledged and, preferably, dealt with well, they can spread and become very destructive. Sweeping things under the carpet, pretending conflict doesn't exist, only allows it to fester and grow.

Where to from here?

I spent a lot of time in western Canada in the early 1970s. That's 50 years ago for all you young ones. The world was very different then. Edmonton was experiencing it's longest winter since, almost, forever. It was a long cold winter. In the summer in British Columbia they kidnapped whoever happened to be in the local pubs to fight the annual forest fires, but the temperatures rarely exceeded 80F. It was what people thought of as a bit unusual but not completely abnormal.

Today the world is different. Hard to believe this week, but this is what we should have expected. 

#Canada just had a temperature of nearly 50°C (Lytton, 49.6°C)
"Without human-induced climate change, it would have been almost impossible ...as the chances of natural occurrence is once every tens of thousands of years," says @metoffice scientist
Details https://t.co/fb1nIF8wny pic.twitter.com/rxKGmQqZZM

— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) June 30, 2021

Western Canada is wondering if it has been relocated to Death Valley. 

There was famine somewhere in the world back then as there is now, but today, all of a sudden we need to find food for three times as many people. 

We're trying to get on top of a global pandemic that everyone says was anticipated but that no-one prepared for.

We've accepted and supported and elected leaders who aren't game to read the writing on the wall, aren't able to act, and keep pointing the finger at someone else for their inadequacies - anyone else will do.

Alright - it's not all gloom and doom. There are some elected leaders in various countries around the world who are realists and who are keen to make sure the human race survives until at least 2100.

There are journos and communicators who are still quite sure, or at least hopeful, the message coming from the harbingers of knowledge and science will make its way through to political leaders, if not the general population. And that we'll act on it.

For even more good news - I'm coming back, soon, with some analysis and information about where we are today and what's in store. It won't be pretty.

Are you up for it?

Everything climate disinformation from the climate conspiracy-theorists at WattsUpWithThat

Anthony Watts has set up a new website for climate disinformers and wilful deniers. (H/t CJ in the comments here at HotWhopper.)

His disinformation website is called Everything Climate. Translating its stated aim from denier-speak, it is to hook people who aren't yet knowledgeable about climate to recruit them as conspiracy theorists for the climate disinformation cult.

Questionable claims from the outset

Anthony Watts is known in climate science denier circles as a climate science disinformer and conspiracy theorist. True to form, he made a number of questionable claims in his introductory article. He wrote "We have four categories at the moment, and a few dozen sub-titles covering specific claims/arguments that are commonly in the news and are contentious."  The bit about "a few dozen sub-titles" is weird, because I can only see 23 articles. I've no idea what the "few dozen sub-titles" relate to. As for the topics he claims are all contentious, some of them are so well-established they are indisputable, some are the topic of active scientific research, and some are strawmen (i.e. the Everything Climate topic is not a claim or argument in scientific circles).

Rating climate science deniers to decide how/if to engage

Climate science deniers can be grouped in different ways. Having observed them for more than a decade now, this is how I see them:

1. The uninformed - ignorant about climate, doesn't read articles on climate. Strictly speaking the uninformed are not science deniers. They just don't know anything about climate.
2. The misinformed - previously uninformed who've read & unwittingly accepted climate disinformation.
3. Wilful deniers (aka wilfully ignorant) - previously misinformed but have since been exposed to climate science findings and rejected them (usually for ideological or other reasons). All of this category by definition are conspiracy theorists.
4. Climate disinformers - know the facts but are in the business of spreading lies to feed the previous categories (usually for monetary gain and/or ideological reasons). All of this category are by definition weavers of conspiracy theories.

I'd be interested to read how other people might categorise climate science deniers.

Greetings of the season, happy hols, stay safe

 As we approach the end of this unbelievably horrid year, my greetings are more muted.

I wish all of you a happy time, whether you're with friends, family or on your lonesome. There are better times to come (and undoubtedly worse times, too). Make the most of what you have and be careful. Stay safe. 

This day last year (Christmas Eve in south eastern Australia) it was hot and smoky:

This year there's no smoke, just clear skies and a gentle summer breeze blowing. Lovely. 

In closing, here's a pic of one of the friends I made this year.