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Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Rgbatduke is bored at WUWT and reduced to getting it all wrong. Ho hum!

Sou | 6:41 AM Go to the first of 9 comments. Add a comment

I've added a few more catchy comments! (see below)


I suppose it's because he was so bored that he decided to write such a silly comment at WUWT.  Anthony Watts must have been bored too, because he raised rgbatduke's comment to article status.

rgbatduke teaches physics at Duke.  It's easy to tell he knows precious little about climate science.

His comment was very, very long. rgbatduke doesn't believe in pithy and concise.  He doesn't believe in checking facts either. Here is just one little paragraph of many.  Count the wrongs!  (Archived here - updated.)
Let’s face it. The climate has never been more boring. Even the weather blogs trying to toe the party line and promote public panic — I mean “awareness” — of global warming are reduced to reporting one of GISS’s excessive spikes as being “the fourth warmest September on record” while quietly neglecting the fact that in HADCRUT4, RSS and UAH it was nothing of the sort and while even more quietly neglecting the fact that if one goes back a few months the report might have been that June was the fourth coldest in 20 years. Reduced to reporting a carefully cherry-picked fourth warmest event? Ho hum.

GISTemp - Hottest September on record


The fourth warmest September recorded at GISTemp?  Wrong! Actually, at 0.74°C above the 1951-80 mean, it's the equal hottest September on record, with that in 2005.

Data Source: NASA


HadCRUT equal third hottest September on record


I wouldn't say HadCRUT4  was "nothing of the sort".  It came fairly close with September registering as equal third hottest on record at 0.534 above the 1961-90 mean, just pipped at the post by 2005 and 2009.

Data Source: HadCRU



UAH fourth hottest September on record


UAH was next, with September 2013 coming in fourth hottest after 2009, 2010 and 2012.

Data Source: UAH



RSS ninth hottest September on record


The only one where rgbatduke could argue he was right with his "nothing like" comment was RSS, although this September still scraped into the top ten and was the ninth hottest in the record:

Data Source: RSS


It's 112 (or 172) months since the fourth coldest June in twenty years


As for rgbatduke claiming that:
while even more quietly neglecting the fact that if one goes back a few months the report might have been that June was the fourth coldest in 20 years

Well, you'd have to go back 112 months in GISTemp to find the fourth coldest June in 20 years.  It was back in June 2004, with June 1999 equal third coldest with June 1994.  Or if you went by HadCRUT, you'd go back 172 months to June 1999 - just in case you think I'm cherry picking :)

Data Source: NASA

Looks as if rgbatduke is the one who is "reduced to getting it all wrong? Ho hum."  He didn't even bother to check the data, let alone pick cherries!

1,252 months since the coldest June on record


Anonymous in the comments pointed out that rgbatduke cherry-picked 20 years for the coldest June.  If you look at the entire instrumental record, it's 1,252 months (GISTemp) or 1,228 months (HadCRUT) since the coldest June on record.  It's 184 months since the hottest June on record.  1998 was a very hot year!


From the WUWT comments

The comments demonstrate again that WUWT-ers don't have a skeptical bone in their body as long as they can read what they want to believe.  The comments are mostly (boring) content-free adoration from the illiterati - archived here - updated here.

Jim Cripwell says:
November 4, 2013 at 10:09 am
Thank you for writing so well, what I have been trying to say for months.

leon0112 says:
November 4, 2013 at 10:15 am
Dr. Brown,
This is a great article. AR5 includes known ****. It should be cleansed.
Thank you for your well done peer review of AR5.

Lon Hocker misses the big errors and nitpicks little ones and says:
November 4, 2013 at 10:33 am
Great Article. A couple of details, though:
“it will no longer be possible to conceal this fact even from ignorant politicians by 2000 if there is no statistically significant warming by that time.” Did you mean 2020?
“if CAGW is a true hypothesis, them maybe — just maybe —” Should be “then” not “them”

UK Marcus says:
November 4, 2013 at 10:58 am
Thank you Dr. Brown for your elegant and concise summary.
Sometimes Masterly Inactivity is a sensible course of action. When so much is known and so little is changing wrt climate, for some people to try to persuade us that we must immediately alter our way of life is willfully to ignore the facts. We require disinterested science and honest political leadership, not endless propaganda. I’m not holding my breath…
In the meantime, thank goodness for Anthony, WUWT and the world-wide community of commentators here.

lurker, passing through laughing says:
November 4, 2013 at 11:09 am
Yes. CO2 is a trivial player in the climate, if we are to judge by actual evidence.
I had to update the archive because I couldn't pass up this comment from markstoval, who can't believe there is a real person on WUWT who knows even a little bit about climate science.  Or maybe he's amazed that anyone would stand up to richardscourtney.  He says:
November 4, 2013 at 1:18 pm
I have been reading comments here for a long time. I have made only a few comments myself but have read many. There is this one name, “Steven Mosher”, that shows up a lot and I am beginning to think it is a parody account. Does anyone know if this is a real fellow and not a regular playing games just to keep the comments section lively?
TIA, Mark

Here are a couple more

taxed has figured out what causes climate extremes and ice ages, they are caused by stable weather!:
November 4, 2013 at 1:02 pm
l don’t think we should be so quick we welcome boring weather.
Because its when the weather does become stable with little in the way of change over the longer term, is just when you do get extremes in climate.
lts what causes deserts to form, and l also think its what causes ice ages to form when the weather gets locked into a certain pattern

Walt The Physicist accepts without question whatever nonsense and pseudoscience rants he reads at WUWT, but doesn't accept real science.  He fancies himself as a ladies' man too and says:
November 4, 2013 at 12:54 pm
“This really is shocking. Shockingly bad science, shockingly dishonest political manipulation of policy makers on the part of scientists who participated in the creation of AR5 and permitted their names to give the report its weight.”
====================================================================
It is shocking indeed. As I am scientist, frequently laymen and more frequently laywomen ask me at the parties of what is the reason for highly educated scientists and academics to commit such fraud. I have no answer. It would be interesting to know what Dr. Brown as well as this blog participants think. Is this necessity of producing research funding and vain of awards and prizes that drives Mann, Schmidt, Hansen, Caldeira and multitudes others from Center for Climate Risk Management (CLIMA), Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk, Department of Global Ecology, Climate Change Research Center, Climate System Research Center, etc.? Is this dishonesty unique to the climate science, or similar situations are prevailing in all sciences – the proponents of an idea “choke” all competition and the idea finally becomes a dogma supported by fraudulent “science”?

9 comments:

  1. "He didn't even bother to check the data, let alone pick cherries!"

    Actually, he did pick a cherry: the last 20 years

    The September warm records weren't just for the last 20 years, they were for the entire instrumental record. But we don't get comments of the coolest June in the instrumental record from rgbatduke, we only get the comment of the coolest one in 20 years.

    Deliberate cherry-picking.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In fact, I gotta ask (if anyone knows off the top of their head), when was the last time there was a record cold anything? in relation to the global average and the entire instrumental record?

      Delete
    2. I've added the coldest and hottest June on record to the article :)

      Delete
    3. Thanks for looking into that! I figured it would be a long time ago...

      Delete
    4. Talk about serendipity. I was discussing the September GISTemp result with someone after raising the Fitzroy Crossing record:

      http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2013/s3881396.htm

      and I made the point that the time to the last global maximum temperature record was somewhat shorter than the time to the last global minimum one. I was going to chase it up but now it's be done for me!


      Bernard J.

      Delete
  2. Isn't RGB nothing more than a glorified lab assistant nowadays? He's published f-all (and been ignored for damn good reason) for years from what I can see. He has a 2008 updat on his CV with 1(!) paper since 2000. Duke uni Physics...Scaffetta & Brown... Well done guys... http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Research/CV/CV/index.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous

    "... I gotta ask (if anyone knows off the top of their head), when was the last time there was a record cold anything?"

    Since we're talking about monthly records, the last coldest month on any of the records was March 1993 in RSS and before that August 1992 in UAH. But those are both satellite sets that only go back to the late 1970s.

    For the surface data sets, the last coldest monthly record was May 1917 in NASA; then March 1917 in HadCRUT4; then Dec 1916 in NOAA. (Sounds like a pretty miserable 6 month stretch, what with World War I still in full swing too.)

    For annual temperatures, then in the satellite era RSS has 1985 as the coolest and UAH has 1984. In the land temps, both HadCRUT4 and NOAA agree on 1911 as the coolest, while NASA has 1909.

    Incidentally, all monthly and annual warmest records in all data sets have occurred since 1998. Base lined to a common period (I used 1981-2010) then the warmest average year across all data sets was 2010.

    DWR

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DWR, yes the period from late 1916 to early 1918 was bloody miserable (at least in Europe and the States). The cold wet weather wiped out much of the German potato crop, leading to the "Turnip Winter" of 1916-17. US and Russian grain harvests were also well down, leading to shortages on the other side of the wire. The winter of 17-18 was also pretty bad - very cold, but at least drier than most of the previous 12 months.

      Germany started seeing food riots by the beginning of 1918 and were on the brink of starvation by the end of that year - that was partly due to the war (blockade of imports and diversion of labour), but due to the weather too, at a non-trivial level.

      FrankD

      Delete
    2. FrankD

      That's interesting.

      Let's hope David Archibald doesn't spot this and come up with a new 100-year solar cycle that's about to plunge the world into a period of prolonged cooling?

      Wait; too late.

      Delete

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