Tuesday, February 26, 2013

A Whopper of a Watt-ism

This from WUWT. Anthony Watts in-line comment in an article on ocean temperatures:





Heating the entire surface of the earth by 0.7 degrees Celsius (which has happened since about the 1950s), isn't 'statistically significant' compared to daily temperature variations in a single location?  Strange comparison. We are well on our way to causing the planet to heat up much much faster than in past warming events - dangerously so.

Mr Watts would no doubt argue that winter temperatures are no different to summer temperatures when you compare them to 'daily diurnal' (sic) variation.  (He'd likely think that if his pay was docked by 10% it would be exactly the same thing as the GDP of the entire USA dropping by 10%)  >:-o

Dunce cap drawing

Numbers, arithmetic and statistics are not among Anthony's strong suits. If you bother to go to the article, Anthony thinks that having the first half readings in a time series below a flat line and the second half readings above the same flat line means 'no trend' 'pause'.  Double dunce!


Addendum:
In the fashion of the denialiti, in his blog article, Watts cherry picked data, pointing only to the top 700 meters of ocean heat and ignoring the heating at depth.  Visit this NOAA page and scroll through the images (versions with and without error bars) to see how the ocean is heating:


Actually that Watts thread is a bucket full of crazy.  We've got Smokey (DB Stealey) saying that 'Ockham’s Razor says that the simplest explanation is probably the best explanation: global warming is a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age' and Anthony jumping in to defend his stance.  And our old friend fredberple writing that:
Rather than a warming agent, CO2 is a radiator to space that cools the atmosphere, increasing convection, directly opposite to the process found in real greenhouses. 
If CO2 actually heated the surface then we would see the atmosphere warm first, then the surface. This is what all the models predict. However, such an effect has never been observed during a warming period. The surface warms first, then the atmosphere. During a cooling period the surface cools first, then the atmosphere.
Really, fred?  Why is the earth warming instead of cooling?  (I still reckon fredberple must be a fake denier.)

And from Grant who writes: February 26, 2013 at 9:51 am
As a final comment. I am, as I think most of the ‘deniers’ that frequent this site are proponents of indefinite, unlimited increases in CO2 in our atmosphere.  
Watts and his followers are not just proud members of the scientific illiterati, they have set out to hasten the demise of life on earth as we know it.

2 comments:

  1. That's a mind-numbingly stupid comment from Watts,up amongst his 'best'. Comparing the significance of a change in global average temperature over many years to the daily range of individual stations is utterly meaningless. "Not even wrong" comes to mind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "Not even wrong" is considered a strength on WUWT :(

      Delete

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