Denier Smorgasbord: Old men want freedom to vacuum madly, the Arctic and Judith Curry's "interesting"

There are two reasons why you've not seen the usual number of articles here the last few days. The first is I've been busy on other things, unrelated to climate science and its denial. The second is that deniers have been deadly dull. They've been recycling the same old tired and wrong denier memes for the most part. Nevertheless, there's always some entertainment to be had at denier blogs, even when the pickings are thin.

Making criminals of "average" people who clean their home?

The ageing conservative American men who dominate WUWT have been bemoaning the latest news about their favourite task, vacuum cleaning. A subject I'm sure they are intimately familiar with. They probably see it done several times a week, from the comfort of their favourite rocker. If they aren't out playing golf. And I'll bet that most of them swear they could do the job better than the person who actually does the vacuuming. What they are up in arms about is the idea that were they to live in Europe, in a few weeks they wouldn't be able to buy their womenfolk vacuum cleaners that suck up any more than 1600 watts of electricity (archived here). Anthony Watts even goes so far as to claim that:

"One more reason to dump the EU- they are going to make criminals out of average people who just want to keep their home clean. – Anthony". 

He probably meant "who just want their women to clean up after them". And of course, he's wrong. People can continue to use their old vacuum cleaners. Even men can do so. Even conservative ageing men who deny climate science can do the vacuuming any time. It's just that in future, if they want to buy a new vacuum cleaner, their purchasing choice will be restricted to more energy efficient units.

The Arctic is melting and it's driving deniers mad

Anthony Watts posted an extremely long (>13,000 words) and what seems to me a convoluted article by Tony Brown, of central England temperature / an ice age cometh fame. It was more of a novella than a "guest essay". (Archived here.) I might come back to that one later on. I did notice a comment by Steve Mosher at Curry's place, which related to Tony's article. Steven Mosher wrote:

August 23, 2014 at 10:14 pm
tony “However, the conclusion must be that drawn that warming was more widespread in the arctic generally -not just the Atlantic side-than is currently noted in the official sea ice data bases covering1920-1945/50 and that the official records appear to substantially overstate the ice area extent. Some of the thinning of the ice and reduction of glaciers noted today appears to have had their genesis in the period referenced, or earlier.”

with no actual numbers, no actual method, no actual uncertainty calculations, I fail to see how your conclusion MUST BE drawn.

In general we have a collection of text that is long on adjectives and short on quantitative analysis. Further since we have apples and oranges to compare its hard to say anything MUST be drawn.

Finally, I find it odd that today when it warms and the arctic melts, skeptics, such as Anthony point to the wind and soot .. as if warmer temps did nothing. but when looking at historical records they quickly assume that warmer temps mean less ice. I dont doubt the latter, I only note the inconsistent application of a principle amongst skeptics

Judith Curry finds John McLean "interesting"

Judith continues to wallow in the depths of denialism, finding an article by Australia's John McLean "interesting". John's the computer operater / climate science denier who somehow managed to get a paper published, in which he removed the temperature trend from global surface temperatures and then looked at what remained and declared there was no trend. To much hilarity from all whose knowledge of statistics was at least sufficient for them to calculate an average of two numbers. John also declared, in 2011, that  "It is likely that 2011 will be the coolest year since 1956". Guess how that turned out! John is a denier of the utter nutter kind and so is Judith Curry, for giving him the slightest bit of credibility.

From the WUWT comments

This is a bit of a mish mash from a couple of WUWT articles. First from the vacuum-cleaning experts:

Andrew N has done his sums. I wonder how many times he's pulled out a vacuum cleaner? He says:

August 22, 2014 at 9:18 pm
It appears the ecocrats of the EU have confused power with energy. If it takes you twice as long to clean while using half the power then you have used the same amount of energy. Have they factored in the CO2 generated by the increased effort required by the vacuumer in any of their saving the planet calculations?

Eric Worrall decides that using an energy efficient vacuum cleaner is the worst punishment that could be doled out to anyone, causing much pain and misery all around. He visits from time to time. Perhaps he'll share some tips from his years of experience with vacuuming cleaning his floors. He says:

August 22, 2014 at 9:46 pm
In a totalitarian state, the measure of your power is how much misery you can cause.
Anyone can be nice – but spreading pain and misery proves to your colleagues that you are powerful. 

There were 58 comments to Tony Brown's book. Here is a sample:

Nick Stokes says, of Tony Brown's article:

August 22, 2014 at 5:52 pm
Congratulations, Tony
A very informative post

I don't know which bits Nick found informative.

Paul Homewood says (extract):

August 22, 2014 at 2:43 pm
It’s a bit long!!

FergalR says:

August 22, 2014 at 2:54 pm
I can’t possibly read all this while drunk. Maybe tomorrow afternoon. More likely Monday evening.

Hans H says:

August 22, 2014 at 3:32 pm
Dunno why u spread this Noaa/Giss stuff ? Check raw data n do it again. ” as seen in the graph” is not ok..n really Wuwt must know by now ?

Sorry for the paucity of articles the last few days. I'll hope to do better this coming week.  BTW, feel free to point out how sexist I was, poking fun at all the old conservative men getting upset about vacuum cleaners. I think I was being ageist rather than sexist. And there's good grounds for the stereotyping, don't you think?

---

Foster, G., J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth. "Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” by JD McLean, CR de Freitas, and RM Carter." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 115, no. D9 (2010).  doi:10.1029/2009JD012960
.