An uncanny ability: Anthony Watts goes to Iceland and figures 2+2=5 or 7

You can try to anticipate deniers, but...

In an article in Time about Icelandic ice melt, rising land and volcanic activity, Jeffrey Kluger wrote (my emphasis):

Perhaps anticipating the climate change deniers’ uncanny ability to put two and two together and come up with five, the researchers took pains to point out that no, it’s not the very fact that Icelandic ice sits above hot magma deposits that’s causing the glacial melting. The magma’s always been there; it’s the rising global temperature that’s new. At best, only 5% of the accelerated melting is geological in origin.

Could he or the scientists have anticipated the "five" that Anthony Watts came up with? I don't know. They didn't in this case. Would you?

Here is Anthony's headline, supporting RationalWiki's notion that "almost all the claims from the anti-science movement revolve around some form of personal incredulity or argument from ignorance":

Time Magazine’s Jeffrey Kluger writes what might possibly be the stupidest article about climate ever – climate change causes volcanoes

Land uplift in Iceland

I'll take a step back. The Time article was about a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters. The paper, by Kathleen Compton, Richard A. Bennett and Sigrun Hreinsdóttir was about land uplift in Iceland. According to their measurements, the land is rising in the central highlands of Iceland and down in the south and east. It's not rising around the coastline to the north and west. Their findings are consistent with and extends previous research.

According to the study, the rising land is because of melting on the surface. Around 95% of the snow and ice melt is down to climate warming. Less than 5% can be attributed to subglacial volcanic eruptions and geothermal heat flow.  Taking the pressure off the surface can lead to more volcanic activity. Hence the headline and article in Time to which Anthony Watts took such exception. The headline read:

How Climate Change Leads to Volcanoes (Really)

Anthony Watts mysteriously selected the following passage from the Time article as what he figured was the part where he could yell "gotcha". Anthony has been "gotcha'd" himself as you will see. He wrote:

Here’s the money quote:

“As the glaciers melt, the pressure on the underlying rocks decreases,” Compton said in an e-mail to TIME. “Rocks at very high temperatures may stay in their solid phase if the pressure is high enough. As you reduce the pressure, you effectively lower the melting temperature.” The result is a softer, more molten subsurface, which increases the amount of eruptive material lying around and makes it easier for more deeply buried magma chambers to escape their confinement and blow the whole mess through the surface.

“High heat content at lower pressure creates an environment prone to melting these rising mantle rocks, which provides magma to the volcanic systems,” says Arizona geoscientist Richard Bennett, another co-author.

Perhaps anticipating the climate change deniers’ uncanny ability to put two and two together and come up with five, the researchers took pains to point out that no, it’s not the very fact that Icelandic ice sits above hot magma deposits that’s causing the glacial melting. The magma’s always been there; it’s the rising global temperature that’s new. At best, only 5% of the accelerated melting is geological in origin.

So, Iceland has had melting glaciers, OK we’ll accept that, but Iceland is not the world, and a good number of volcanoes that have erupted in the last century are in the tropical parts of the world where there are no glaciers on the volcanoes or magma fields, yet somehow, this writer, Jeffrey Kluger, extrapolates Iceland’s glacier melt to volcano link up to to the entire world..

Jeffrey Kluger extrapolates to the whole world? No he didn't.

Did anyone talk about Iceland being the world? No-one except Anthony Watts.

Did anyone mention tropical volcanoes? No-one except Anthony Watts.

Did Jeffrey Kluger extrapolate Iceland's "glacier melt to volcano link up to to the entire world" (sic)? Nope. That was all in the head of Anthony Watts.

Getting inside the mind of a wacky denier

Even when scientists try, they can't always guess where the mental contortions of the denialati will lead. The scientists didn't anticipate that Anthony Watts would come up with that particular result when he tried to put two and two together.

Anthony even went to the trouble of finding a chart of volcanic activity and wrote:

Gosh, it sure looks like another slam dunk for carbon dioxide driven climate hell in a handbasket, doesn’t it? The VEI starts increasing right about the time of the industrial revolution.

For those unfamiliar: The volcanic explosivity index (VEI) was devised by Chris Newhall of the US Geological Survey and Stephen Self at the University of Hawaii in 1982 to provide a relative measure of the explosiveness of volcanic eruptions. (Wikipedia)

But, there’s a hitch, according to NOAA data, volcanic activity worldwide actually went DOWN in the 2000’s while the climate changing carbon dioxide went UP in global concentration:

Anthony's article is full of "gosh's" and "gee's" and other exclamations. Someone better tell him - the paper is about Iceland, not the whole world, you dummy denier you, thinking 2+2=5 :)

Anthony tried for the "tropical volcanoes" and then threw in the AMO for good measure, writing:

Gee, do you think maybe, possibly, that Iceland might have more glacier melt when the AMO is warmer? The authors don’t seem to be cognizant of it, preferring instead to cite the universal bogeyman “climate change”.

It looks as if the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is the denier's latest "rebuttal" to global warming. You'll be waiting forever if you're hopeful of them figuring out how it can cause record hot surface temperatures now, when it's never caused such high temperatures before. Just as you'll be waiting a long time for deniers to figure out that the "O" in AMO stands for "oscillation". (What goes up must come down.)

Land uplift and volcanic activity in Iceland

Forget about Anthony Watts and his tropical volcanoes in Iceland. Let's see what the scientists found. Here's Figure 1 from their paper, showing how the land is rising in different regions of Iceland. Click the image to enlarge it:

Figure 1: Velocity and acceleration measurements from 62 CGPS stations in Iceland and the location of major ice caps. a) Velocity as of 2014.5. b) Time-averaged acceleration. Color bars indicate magnitude while the size of the symbol is inversely proportional to the certainty of the measurement. V=Vatnajökull, H=Hofsjökull, L=Langjökull, ME=Mýrdalsjökull and Eyjafjallajökull, D=Drangajökull.
Source: Compton15

The paper states that the rate of uplift will increase:

Uplift is likely to continue to increase at accelerating rates. In central Iceland, continued acceleration, if maintained at the values we have estimated, would result in uplift rates over 40 mm/yr in central Iceland within the next decade.

For the geologists among you, the authors write about altered "estimates of lithospheric and upper asthenospheric rheology" and "impacts of uplift on volcanic processes [Schmidt et al., 2013] and estimates of plate spreading rates".

ScienceDaily.com reports that in times past, 12,000 years ago, volcanic activity in some parts of Iceland increased thirty-fold. Here's an excerpt (my emphasis):

Geologists have long known that as glaciers melt and become lighter, Earth rebounds as the weight of the ice decreases.

Whether the current rebound geologists detect is related to past deglaciation or modern ice loss has been an open question until now, said co-author Richard Bennett, a UA associate professor of geosciences.

"Iceland is the first place we can say accelerated uplift means accelerated ice mass loss," Bennett said.

To figure out how fast the crust was moving upward, the team used a network of 62 global positioning satellite receivers fastened to rocks throughout Iceland. By tracking the position of the GPS receivers year after year, the scientists "watch" the rocks move and can calculate how far they have traveled -- a technique called geodesy.

The new work shows that, at least for Iceland, the land's current accelerating uplift is directly related to the thinning of glaciers and to global warming.

"What we're observing is a climatically induced change in Earth's surface," Bennett said.

He added there is geological evidence that during the past deglaciation roughly 12,000 years ago, volcanic activity in some regions of Iceland increased thirtyfold....

...The team began systematically analyzing years of signals from the entire network and found the fastest uplift was the region between several large ice caps. The rate of uplift slowed the farther the receiver was from the ice cap region. 

What this recent work all boils down to is a probable increase in volcanic eruptions as global warming intensifies. From the paper (my emphasis):

For example, recent findings indicate that decompression melting due to deglaciation could result in an increase in the volume of erupted volcanics as much as one 2010 Eyjafjallajökull-sized eruption every seven years. It follows that accelerated ice loss could lead to more rapid decompression melting and higher volumes of erupted material, which could have global economic impacts.

As they say, this would have implications well beyond the borders of Iceland. Volcanoes in that part of the world affect air travel for one thing. Remember the headlines in May 2010:

• Eyjafjallajökull Strikes Again: Volcanic Ash Shuts Major European Air Traffic Hubs - Der Spiegel
• Volcanic ash shuts major UK, Dutch airports - IBN
• Eyjafjallajokull volcano ash cloud impedes air traffic - USA Today

Not to be an alarmist, however warnings like these are not to be ignored.  The final sentences in the paper relate to plate tectonics:

Furthermore, there is likely to be a horizontal signal associated with the melt-related rapid uplift and uplift acceleration. Though these horizontal motions will much smaller than the observed vertical motion [e.g.Wahr et al., 2013], they could provide a small correction to current plate spreading rate estimates.

From the WUWT comments

Now Anthony Watts has boasted that he's a "full member of AGU in good standing". I suppose that doesn't necessarily mean that he subscribes to any AGU journals, much less reads the papers he writes about, much much less understands them.  That's only part of the reason his readers are so misinformed. The other reason is that they want to be misinformed. They don't want to accept or understand anything relating to climate science. Here are some examples of what I mean:

ferdberple is a fake sceptic who believes what his idol, Anthony Watts, writes at WUWT:

January 30, 2015 at 5:46 pm
Looking at the graph in the original article, volcanoes started ramping up around 1800. Perhaps someone can explain how that was caused by human CO2 from fossil fuels?

masInt branch 4 C3I in is  is a bit of a nutter himself:

January 30, 2015 at 11:01 am
A true Nut Job and Time Mag. as well as the “Authors” and GRL Editors; psycho-ward escapees!
Did the intrepid GRL Editors even notice the word, Geophysical, in their rags title, or for the Nut Jobs to read that Iceland is built on the Mid-Atlantic Spreading Ridge separating two lithosphere plates above the Iceland Hotspot! 

Idiots all.

Not only did the authors just happen to know that Iceland is on a ridge, they wrote about how the melting ice could affect plate spreading.


Jay Hope doesn't cite the "other experts" he mentions, which is no surprise. Nor is his cry about "the pause" that isn't a surprise.

January 30, 2015 at 3:54 pm
But some other experts have suggested that global cooling is causing more volcanic eruptions! And I thought the warming had stopped 18 years ago?

Bubba Cow mentions the video embedded in the Time article. I think Bubba is a fan of Senator Inhofe:

January 30, 2015 at 12:32 pm
Read that too. In middle of article is video of Jeffrey Kluger taking on Sen. James Inhofe using the 97% fudge. We know that attack. Shut it off, waste of bandwidth.

If you're interested, here's the video Bubba mentioned:

It's not clear whether highflight56433 is referring to Anthony Watts or to the scientists. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say it's Anthony who is "so off the chart stupid", and that highflight56433 isn't so dull after all.

January 30, 2015 at 11:07 am
Here I have been blaming increased taxation for global change everything inclusive natural and unnatural… ufda!

“We’ll have more on this later, readers are encouraged to add comments regarding this inanity (insanity).”

I can’t imagine living with a mind that is so off the chart stupid…and I am not exactly anything bright. lol

David M commits a logical fallacy, writing:

January 30, 2015 at 11:14 am
Gee..here in new Mexico we had volcanoes erupting millions of yrs ago…must have climate change

norah4you posts an irrelevant thought, just because it flew into her head while her fingers were on her keyboard:

January 30, 2015 at 11:26 am
Some people never learn to understand tectonic plates…. that’s one thing. Stupid as it might be…. 

Mac the Knife is a denier of the "I don't understand what you wrote, but it's brilliant" kind:

January 30, 2015 at 11:27 am
Excellent rebuttal analysis, Anthony!

hunter gets his pseudo-science from various denier blogs and his comment suggests he is a right wing authoritarian follower, distrustful of normal authorities:

January 30, 2015 at 11:35 am
Over at Bishop Hill, poster Michael Hart stated:
“The BBC aspire to educate the world, yet they cannot educate themselves.”
Reading this article from Time, it seems clear that the deliberate ignorance of the BBC extends to other media outlets.
It is fair to state that Time Magazine aspires to inform its readers, but declines to educate itself.

ecoGuy is just another run-of-the-mill fake sceptic:

January 30, 2015 at 11:40 am
I blame it on the schools, people are often taught how to write good English at the expense of never been taught basic logic. Common sense and actual fact checking are indeed a rare commodity to most in Journalism. This could have simply been blown out the water by just passing the paper under the noses of a few academics from true sciences first – the BS reaction would have been almost instant.

I've not even got half way down the page at WUWT. They are celebrating the return of their idol, Anthony Watts, and his aspirations to better his "Russian steampipes" article. How many dumb deniers can you fit on a page at WUWT? (I haven't counted, but there were 169 comments at the time of archiving. So it's probably more than 100/7,000,000,000 people on the planet.)

You can read more here if you're feeling really, really bored - or are researching science denial.

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Kathleen Compton, Richard A. Bennett, Sigrun Hreinsdóttir. "Climate driven vertical acceleration of Icelandic crust measured by CGPS geodesy." Geophysical Research Letters, 2015; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL062446