WUWT and the headless chooks

Deniers are enraged at Prince Charles for referring to them as "the headless chicken brigade" (see here).  First Jo Nova and now Anthony Watts (archived here).

At least Anthony Watts made a half-hearted attempt to justify his rejection of science - if only by quoting a pair of science deniers, Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels!

Anthony put up a chart of climate sensitivity estimates which were up the spout.  For starters, it reversed IPCC AR4 and IPCC AR5 and had numerous other errors.

Then he put up this chart (click to enlarge).  Just look at the scale on the y axis.

Does Anthony Watts really think it quite reasonable for temperatures to have shot up by more than 1 degree Celsius since 2001? Does he also not realise that climate changes over multiple decades?  Of course he shows monthly data to try to hide the fact that 2010 was the hottest year on record (equal to 2005) - but he can't quite hide that fact even using his denier tricks.

I can't imagine Anthony Watts ever showing these charts. Can you?

The other really weird thing Anthony wrote was this.

Compare that to climate sensitivity predictions, which center around .2°C

That after putting up a diagram showing that climate sensitivity is estimated (by most studies) as lying between 1.5 and 6 degrees Celsius, most probably around 3 degrees Celsius. What he was trying to say, but didn't, was that since 1998, global surface temperatures haven't risen as much as some people expected. Tamino has written a terrific article about that - it's a "must read".

Then Anthony tries to argue (again) that the "response of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is nearing saturation".  Yet even his charts show that a doubling of CO2 could lead to a rise of 3 degrees Celsius or more.  And that's just a doubling.  A quadrupling could lead to a rise of six degrees or more in global surface temperature. (At the rate we're going and if WUWT-ers had their way, CO2 could double before 2050!)

There's a linear relationship between carbon emissions and surface temperature, which is shown by this chart from the IPCC AR5 WG1 report.

After reading his protest, about the only thing that Anthony got almost right was this sentence.  If you strike out the middle bit like I have he's not far wrong:

By making an emotional label about climate skeptics, instead of dealing with facts, Prince Charles demonstrates that’s he’s no different than Bill McKibben and Al Gore. 

Prince Charles has a reputation for being a tad nutty.  But this time he's making sense when he says it's...

"baffling ... that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything — until, that is, it comes to climate science."

And the headless chooks at WUWT and Jo Nova's don't like it.  I expect what is particularly irksome is that WUWT-ers just adore royalty - or at least the ones who live on the other side of the pond do.  They bow and scrape to Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.  But he's not a real royal.  His title is only a generation old.  They'd love to have a proper "royal" on their side.  It won't be the bonny prince.

Deniers running around like headless chooks!