Monday, July 22, 2013

Christopher the expert fiddler...


Update: I missed this, but an astute commenter on Wotts' blog picked it up.  The disrespectful potty peer calls President Obama "Mr" throughout until he gets to the end, when he puts President in quotation marks.  That's his birtherism showing.  Nice that Anthony allows this - not!  (I don't feel any qualms about being disrespectful towards Monckton.)



After a couple of weeks away, Lord Christopher is back on WUWT.   (You were all starting to miss him, weren't you.) This time he's tearing into President Obama, who is reported to have said:
But the flipside is we also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago
The Lord might have missed Obama's speech made in May, but he's now caught up, since it was a much-asked question at the US Senate hearings last week.

First up, Monckton shows us all a stunning drawing in full technicolor like this:


I think it's an improvement on his previous drawings.  It brings to mind a locomotive for some reason.  And there's not quite as much of his ghastly pink background.  Of course it bears no resemblance to anything except Monckton's imagination.

Monckton waffles on in his usual fashion about being an "expert reviewer" for the IPCC.  I expect the IPCC lead authors will give his comments the attention they deserve.  (For the benefit of anyone new to climate discussions, anyone at all can nominate themselves as an 'expert reviewer' for the IPCC, even a potty peer.)

Moncton then makes some huge errors of fact.  For example, he says "the models expect an approximately linear warming...".  I cannot imagine that any of the models expect anything.  It's the scientists who interpret the models who may draw conclusions and thus have some expectations.  And I doubt any climate scientist has an expectation of a linear warming, given the system till now has not demonstrated linear warming.  Here is how the surface temperature has progressed over the past century and more:

Data Source: NASA

Even the five year moving average goes up and down over time, reflecting internal variation like ENSO and other forcings like volcanos, aerosols and the like.  Still, there is a definite upward trend.

Monckton continues his deceptions.  The reason is obvious.  He wants to argue that all the models are wrong.  So what he does is show charts for very short periods of time.  All except RSS is either five years or ten years. Not only does he pick very short intervals, but he puts up monthly charts so he can make sure that the noise of month to month variation masks any signal of the trend.  Not that you would expect to see the signal in a short period of time.  (The longest period he shows is for RSS, for which he puts up a monthly chart of sixteen years and seven months.)

Here's an example with UAH, Monckton's five years by month compared to the same period on an annual basis:

Data Source: UAH


Now Monckton's ten years by month compared to the same period on an annual basis:

Data Source: UAH

Now compare the above with all the data for UAH:

Data Source: UAH
It's pretty easy to see the cherry pick and why it pays to use as much data as you can if you want to see what's happening to the lower troposphere surface temperature.

Dishonest is the best adjective I can come up with to describe the man.


In the comments


One thing you can almost always count on in the comments to a Monckton article, is at least one pompous response.  This from Ben Wilson who says (spoilt only by the exclamation marks):
July 21, 2013 at 8:31 am  Lord Monckton, I would like to personally think you for the work you have done and are doing, and pray that your efforts will bear abundant fruit!!


Jon Jewett says:
July 21, 2013 at 9:13 am  
Dear Lord Monckton of Brenchley,
Thank you.
Should you ever be at loose ends in the Heart of Texas, you would be welcome at our table. We could shoot guns and eat BBQ and drink beer and go to a rousing Bible thumping Baptist Church service (all of the things that the coasters believe of us here.)
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)

Robin sums it up quite well, though unwittingly, when he says (excerpt):
July 21, 2013 at 10:39 am  We are dealing with an ideology here pure and simple. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Instead of commenting as "Anonymous", please comment using "Name/URL" and your name, initials or pseudonym or whatever. You can leave the "URL" box blank. This isn't mandatory. You can also sign in using your Google ID, Wordpress ID etc as indicated. NOTE: Some Wordpress users are having trouble signing in. If that's you, try signing in using Name/URL. Details here.

Click here to read the HotWhopper comment policy.