Bob Tisdale hides the warming and tries out a conspiracy theory at WUWT

Did I ever say that Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale can be very long-winded?

If one didn't know better on would mistake today's WUWT article as a Poe.  (Archived here.) But Bob Tisdale is ever so serious.  He didn't see the humour in Tamino's take-down of his antics a couple of weeks ago, and I guess he's been stewing on it ever since.  And as regulars know, Bob has a crush on Dana Nuccitelli, who gets more than a mention.

To cut to the chase, Bob reckons that 1990 wasn't a hot year because, wait for it, he says:

1990 was an ENSO-neutral year, according to NOAA’s Oceanic NINO Index. Therefore, “1990 was…” NOT “…an especially hot year”. 

In Bob's world, if there is neither an El Nino or La Nina, the surface temperature must be normal.  (Tell that to us in Australia!)  The temperature can't lie above the trend unless there's an ENSO event according to Bob.  It doesn't matter to Bob that in 1990 the global surface temperature was above the trend line.  It "was an ENSO-neutral year...Therefore, “1990 was…” NOT “…an especially hot year"!

Did I say Bob Tisdale can be a bit odd?

At this point I can hear some readers say "well, Bob Tisdale might be tedious and a bit odd, but Sou at HotWhopper repeats herself".  And you'd be correct.  Here's a chart from when I wrote about his first attempt, that prompted Tamino and me to respond earlier this month.

Data Source: NASA and WUWT!

The chart above shows 1990 compared to prior years and to the trend, which it lies above.

How Bob hides the warming

Now Bob has a good trick to show that 1990 wasn't warm at all.  He disputes the record and I think he's trying to argue that 1990 wasn't really the hottest year on record until 1995 (which it was).  Here's Bob's "proof".

Source: WUWT of course!

Really and truly.  Bob removed the heat to prove it wasn't hot in 1990!  ha ha ha...

I wonder why he included the years after 1990, which of course over time (from 1995) got warmer because of global warming.  I did say one could mistake his article for a Poe.

(Update: It's been pointed out in the comments that the point of detrending the data is to show how much or how little the temperature deviated from the trend - in Bob's case he wanted to show that some deviations were greater than that of 1990.  But that's not the issue as I discussed previously here.  Tamino showed the same but in his case it was to determine by how much 1990 deviated from the trend, not to see if other years deviated.  The deviation of other years is not relevant.  All that is relevant is by how much 1990 deviated because it gives an indication of how much the model runs were wrongly shifted upwards.

The point about the problems with the display of model runs was twofold.  Firstly: The model runs were all aligned to a single point, which was wrong.  They didn't all converge to a single point in 1990 let alone converge exactly on the observed average global temperature anomaly, and shouldn't have been shown as if they did.  Secondly: that point lay above the trend, which meant that the model runs looked higher than they were in reality.  Both of these combined to make the chart wrong.  So Bob going on and on about whether or not 1990 was especially hot or not isn't the point.  The fact that Bob goes to such lengths is doubly odd given that the heat record broken in 1990 wasn't broken again until 1995.  So it really was especially hot in 1990 - and even more "especially hot" since, as Bob pointed out, it wasn't an El Nino year!)

Bob writes more...

Now for the long-winded observation.  Bob took nearly 3,000 words to say that 1990 wasn't a hot year because it was ENSO-neutral.  This time around.  The first time it took him about half as many words.  Next time will it take him 6,000 words?

(For the curious, this article has 494 words down to the WUWT comments, and 1008 words in total. And I'm not known for being parsimonious with words!)

It's a guvmint plot!

If you're wondering where the conspiracy theorising comes into the picture, this is from Bob's latest attempt to turn 1990 into a year that wasn't hot:

Adapted from source: WUWT of course!

He seems to think that the final draft AR5 report was changed by politicians.  AFAIK it was the second order draft, not the final draft in which the authors changed the chart.  But I could be wrong, because they may have still been doing the model runs up until the final draft.  I don't know. Whenever it was introduced I know for a fact that the "politicians" had nothing to do with it.  The changes to AR5 following the meeting with member governments and observers are listed here.  The chart wasn't changed.  (As you'll recall the chart in the first order draft was flawed.)


I've written enough.  I'll hand you over to some WUWT-ers for their reaction to Bob's tedious, long-winded, serious, boring article :)

From the WUWT comments

Here is a short selection for your edification (archived here).  Just so you know that the scientists are right about being wrong or wrong about being right or whatever twisted logic the WUWT-ers are coming up with today.


François GM has his own conspiracy theory and it's a cute one (my bold italics).  Now this might be a Poe, but who can tell at WUWT?

October 26, 2013 at 4:37 pm
Wonderfully entertaining, Bob. And so much work ….

Amazing how they never thought of disappearing the 1998 temperature peak in the early 2000s when the ENSO-induced warming trend suited their purpose.

Now that the 1998 peak belittles the recent temperatures, they attempt to make it go away by de-ENSOing it. Pathetic. So much deception.

Bill Illis says a whole lot more than this.  I've just chosen enough to give you the gist:

October 26, 2013 at 4:58 pm
1990 was the most neutral year one can get.
The average ENSO value (with a 3 month lag) was 0.03C (certainly Zero in ENSO terms with an impact on the global average temperature of 0.002C).

BarryW is having trouble with his anomalies and says:

October 26, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Comparing anomalies is ridiculous if you don’t align them to the same absolute starting conditions. It’s like taking a 100 volt signal and saying it matches a 1 volt signal because I can aline them on the oscilloscope. The only thing I can compare is the pattern of the two signals. The real values are not comparable by using anomalies. The only valid comparison here is the trends.

Theo Goodwin makes no pretence at scepticism and says:

October 26, 2013 at 7:14 pm
Great work, Mr. Tisdale. Thanks for keeping us up to date on what I will call Tamino’s childish efforts at misinformation.

Post script - what's in a name?

Incidentally, there's a lot of discussion of Tamino's name in the comments.  A whole lot.  By lots and lots of people, starting with Anthony Watts.  Bob Tisdale doesn't buy into it (not so far anyway) and I'm thinking it's just possible that Bob Tisdale is not Bob Tisdale's off-screen name (July 1, 2011 at 3:52 pm).

I could be wrong and it doesn't matter one iota to me and neither to any HW regular I should think.  But such things seem to be important to WUWT-ers.  If someone knows if it is his name (or not) they might let me know privately or here, because I don't want to go spreading unfounded rumours.  It's just a thought I had when I read that comment of his some time back.  Plus I don't think he's ever referred to me as anyone but Sou (plus adjectives), unlike his host.  So whatever name he goes by on or off the internet, Bob does seem to respect other people's preferences, which is a mark in his favour.


Anthony Watts behaves like a jerk again and whistles his WUWT dogs:

October 26, 2013 at 4:06 pm
@Bob Tisdale.

Don’t give this jerk “Tamino” the benefit of anonymity. His name is [Sou: redacted out of courtesy to Tamino], he lives in [Sou: redacted out of courtesy to Tamino].

Use his name when discussing his claims, if he stands behind his work, then he should have any problem with his name being applied to it.