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Sunday, September 15, 2013

Anthony Watts repeats David Rose's fibs and more denier weirdness from WUWT

Sou | 9:41 PM Go to the first of 5 comments. Add a comment


Poor old Anthony is late to the party but he still wants a piece of the action.  Anthony Watts has repeated the disinformation and lies from David Rose, the anti-science propagandist for the Mail Online. I'll give Anthony the benefit of the doubt because he's not that bright.  He wouldn't understand an IPCC report if he decided to try and read one - but I've not seen any evidence that he's attempted that.

This is a follow up to my previous articles here and here.


Anthony Watts and David Rose are wrong again - the IPCC reported 0.13°C per decade from 1956 to 2006.


Anthony Watts writes (archived here):
What they say: ‘The rate of warming since 1951 [has been] 0.12C per decade.’
What this means: In their last hugely influential report in 2007, the IPCC claimed the world was warming at 0.2C per decade. Here they admit there has been a massive cut in the speed of global warming – although it’s buried in a section on the recent warming ‘pause’. The true figure, it now turns out, is not only just over half what they thought – it’s below their lowest previous estimate.
What this really means: David Rose and Anthony Watts are telling big fat lies again.  Here is what is written in the IPCC AR4 report - a linear trend from 1956 to 2005 = 0.13°C per decade.  Not a 0.2°C per decade in sight!
Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850). The 100-year linear trend (1906-2005) of 0.74 [0.56 to 0.92]°C is larger than the corresponding trend of 0.6 [0.4 to 0.8]°C (1901-2000) given in the TAR (Figure 1.1). The linear warming trend over the 50 years from 1956 to 2005 (0.13 [0.10 to 0.16]°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the 100 years from 1906 to 2005. {WGI 3.2, SPM}
And because they are not crash hot at comprehension, or they are deliberately setting out to decieve their readers, this is most probably what David Rose and Anthony Watts are misrepresenting - pretending a future likelihood was a statement about the past:
For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emissions scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all GHGs and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected. Afterwards, temperature projections increasingly depend on specific emissions scenarios. {3.2}


Anthony Watts confuses regional and global - again!

Once again, Anthony Watts doesn't understand the difference between regional and global.  I don't know why he loves the medieval climate anomaly so much.  Does he think it "disproves" the greenhouse effect? What a nutter of a denier. He writes (my bold italics):
What they say: ‘Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly  (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century.’
What this means: As recently as October 2012, in an earlier draft of this report, the IPCC was adamant that the world is warmer than at any time for at least 1,300 years. Their new inclusion  of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ – long before the Industrial Revolution and  its associated fossil fuel burning – is a concession that its earlier statement  is highly questionable.
What this really means - Anthony Watts can't tell the difference between regional and global.  What a plonker!  There is no "concession" at all.  The two statements are different.  One is about "some regions" and the other is about global surface temperatures.  It's just that Anthony can't tell the difference between regional and global.  Not that it's relevant to the rapid rise in temperature of the past few decades, which everyone knows is caused by human activity.


Anthony Watts falls back on ad hominem


Anthony is also feeling the pressure of not writing too many ad homs for a while.  He seems to think that playing in a band as a teenager is relevant to one's professional career - maybe even "murky", which will be news to every amateur and professional musician and their parents and siblings.  It's also a bit rich coming from someone like Anthony Watts, whose primary goal is to reject scientific knowledge and to spread lies and disinformation about science and scientists.

He also complains that John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli didn't delete some comments from their blog on the UK Guardian.  Guess what, Anthony.  They don't have the power to do so.  They aren't moderators. They can't delete comments.  In any case, that is just too, too hypocritical coming from someone like Anthony Watts who encourages worse on his own blog!

I've covered most of the rest in my article on the latest David Rose blurb in Mail Online.

What all this really means: as usual, the denialati are trying to get ahead of the game and control the message.  They are intent on delaying action to mitigate global warming and will go to any lengths to do so.

HotWhopper readers probably know most of what will be in the new IPCC report, because they keep up with the science.  There will be some parts of interest, like how the report treats different aspects like climate sensitivity, modeled projections for surface temperature and sea level rise etc.  Overall though, we know the clock is ticking down.  It's about one minute to midnight.

This is the critical decade.

5 comments:

  1. Roses article has been updated. Now the title says:

    "World's top climate scientists confess: Global warming is just QUARTER what we thought - and computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He's got to be kidding. It's not April fool's day already is it?

      I'll take a look later on.

      Delete
    2. Thanks! Just don't take too much upon yourself.

      Delete
    3. Some background on David Rose
      http://desmogblog.com/2013/09/17/david-rose-s-misinformation-legacy-weapons-mass-destruction-climate-change

      The more extreme Rose makes his claims, the more laughable he becomes. This is likely a clickbait strategy for the Daily Mail and an attempt to capture the tinfoil hat demographic.

      Given they are largely angry old conservatives, I would imagine that is a demographic that advertisers like.

      Delete
    4. I agree. I think that's all it is. Get people from all over clicking for a look see. Do Mail journos get a bonus if their article gets more hits?

      Delete

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