Deniers have lost it - utterly, completely - it's the heat!

Deniers have all gone completely nuts. It must be the heat.

2014 is the hottest year - and deniers protest

Since NASA and NOAA declared 2014 as the hottest year on record, there have now been six protest articles at WUWT. The latest is archived here.

David Rose at the Daily Mail kicked the deniers into stupidsville. He got his numbers up the spout and decided it was all too uncertain. He confuses deniers by writing that observations  are "subject to a margin of error". Well, duh. Of course they are. How does he know that? Well guess what - the scientists told him so. Yep, those very same scientists who told him how hot last year was. By using the trigger word "admit", David tries to kid his readers that the numbers are somehow wrong. Deniers are dumb when it comes to climate. Their brains stop working. And David Rose knows they are dumb enough to fall for word play. (Anthony Watts knows his WUWT readers are dumb. It's dumb deniers who are Anthony Watts' target market. He uses the same cheap journalist trick on them in his "claim" headlines. It works with his target audience, but that's all it works with.)

2014 is the hottest year on record - you can bet on it!

David Rose decided to misinterpret the numbers that NOAA and NASA put up.  His headline was:

Nasa (sic) climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record... but we're only 38% sure we were right 

David is wrong. I explained why already. The scientists know that the odds in favour of 2014 being the hottest year on record are from 1.6 to almost three times greater than the next hottest year, 2010, being the hottest year on record. You can read the explanation of the numbers here.

But David knows that deniers are dumb when it comes to anything climate (by definition), and would fall for his trick. And fall they did. Hard. Very hard. So hard that they've written article after article denying that NASA and NOAA have determined that 2014 is the hottest year on record.

Deniers are innumerate

Deniers like Anthony Watts' readers are innumerate. It's like how they fell for when Anthony Watts got 97% wrong. He played with the numbers that made up the 97%, removed the 97% from the set and added in the not 97%. Then he told his readers that 97% was actually 3%.  He knew his readers failed kindergarten arithmetic. And logic. And would perpetuate his lie.

Yesterday Judith Curry played with numbers and couldn't figure out if more than 50% was the same as more than half or not. Really and truly. I'm not joking. This former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech is asking her readers to explain to her if more than 50% is the same as more than half.  Seriously. This isn't a throw away line buried in a blog article. It is the substance of her article, even the title. She takes up oodles of her article musing about this. She has lost her ability to think in numbers. And she's still got a job as a scientist.

I think they all need to go back to kindergarten. Or look for a place in a nursing home.

Diminished capability or were they always innumerate?

I took my aunt to a GP who gave her a standard test that GPs use for cognitive function. (My aunt was a clever woman who, until the end, had a head for numbers.) The cognitive test includes a question to see if you know what day it is. I'd have failed that particular question more than 50% of the time. (Judith Curry would wonder if that meant I would have failed it more than half the time or not. She'd have had to ask her readers. Most, the predominant fraction, more than 50% of them, would not have been able to tell her.)  The test also includes questions on simple arithmetic (seven plus 3 plus 100 minus 5 etc). I would have got the arithmetic test okay. Judith would have failed it.

I was at school before the days of those coloured blocks of wood that my younger sisters used, to show if one block (number) was longer than another. The name of those blocks of wood eludes me. Not my memory of numbers though. The fact I didn't have blocks of wood to help didn't hurt. I had no trouble with knowing that four was bigger than 3. I don't know when I figured that out - the knowledge was acquired before that of my earliest memory. Deniers are adults as far as I know and they still haven't worked it out. Or they've lost the ability somewhere along the line.

Judith Curry's mind has disintegrated to the point that she is wondering out loud, on her blog, whether 50% is more than 1/2 and whether or not predominant means larger than the small bit. I kid you not.

Protesting the hottest year on record

The cognitive function of deniers at WUWT is impaired to such an extent that they are protesting last year's weather. Here are some of the headlines at WUWT:

• 2014: The Most Dishonest Year on Record
• ‘Warmest Year On Record’ Claims Falling Apart Under Scrutiny
• GISS & NCDC Need to Be More Open with the Public when Making Proclamations about Global Warming Records
• Saturday silliness – it’s the Warmist Year Evah!
• On the Biases Caused by Omissions in the 2014 NOAA State of the Climate Report
• Does the Uptick in Global Surface Temperatures in 2014 Help the Growing Difference between Climate Models and Reality?

That last one is in the same vein as Judith Curry trying to figure out if 50% is the same as 1/2 or not. It's suggesting that a downtick in global surface temperatures would lessen the gap between climate models and observations. Wrong, back to front thinking.

In his latest article, Anthony Watts briefly reappears on his blog (he's been noticeable by his absence these last few weeks) to quote a whole bunch of deniers who fail statistics. The innumerate are:

• Anthony Watts himself (his numeracy skills have shown to be lacking on many occasions such as here)
• David Rose from the Mail on Sunday
• Michael Bastasch from The Daily Caller
• Robert Tracinsk at The Federalist
• An anoymous at Inquisitr
• Paul Homewood, a denier blogger.

I included Anthony Watts because even though he hasn't yet recovered from whatever has been ailing him lately, to write anything other than the headline, by quoting all the other right wing rag deniers he is endorsing their failures.

There's no need for me to repeat myself. I've already explained where they've failed in their interpretation of the numbers.

Deniers often use the trick of quoting other deniers who are equally wrong to try to prove that they are "right". They think that if enough deniers quote each other to each other it will somehow nullify what the scientists say. It doesn't. All it shows is that there are some people in cyberspace who are nuts and some who earn a living from disinformation.

Deniers cannot cope with reality. Their brains explode with cognitive dissonance. They show their true nuttiness when faced with the hard reality that over the past several decades it's been getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

Anthony put up a chart from a denier blogger called Paul Homewood that he seems to think proves something or other. All it shows is that last year was more likely than not to have been the hottest year since before 1998 at least.

Heck, 2014 at the lowest end of the 95% probability is still hotter than four of the last seventeen years at their 95% hottest possible range.

Not only that, but if you go back as far as the records go, 2014 is the hottest year in the entire record:

There's a reason why deniers don't want last year to be the hottest ever. It's because it means that their ice age isn't comething. Especially when you see that the fifteen hottest years ever have all been from 1998. And that fourteen of those fifteen hottest years have been this century. All except 1998. It makes deniers look even more ridiculous, if that's possible, when they claim an ice age cometh every time it snows somewhere in winter.

From the WUWT comments

These are from the article where Anthony pasted his evidence that he and his fellow deniers are innumerate.

There is a group among the innumerate deniers who have got hold of a notion that the 1930s was the hottest decade ever. They are at the weirder end of the weird. KevinM wrote:

January 20, 2015 at 5:55 am
Again the media has been armed with charts starting in 1910 that edit down the 1930’s to accompany the announcement. Also they’re wittling away at 1998-2001 every time I look. Grrr.

Paul Westhaver writes that in this case the error bars favour denier liars at WUWT:

January 20, 2015 at 10:30 am
Error Bars.
Error bars or bands are conspicuously absent from 99.9% of all published public charts concerning temperature trends. I am guilty of being a bit of a nag on this issue.
Interesting to me is the willful inclusion of the error bars in this particular instance. I believe that the science abusers out there come in 2 categories 1) Those who don’t know what error bars mean, and 2) Those who do and choose not to use them because it minimizes their hype of AGW.
In this case the error bars are of some use to the the AGW liars so of course they will include them! According to them, error only ADDS to the anomaly, it doesn’t identify the limits to precision and accuracy and computational dispersion.
I consider this lie a bit of “inside baseball” for disciplined scientists. The oozing mass of the self-interested general public don’t have a clue…. as usual.

Here is the NASA GISS chart as shown on its website, with error bars in green:

Thomas is so irate that he's written to NOAA and demanded an explanation. Will his email be tossed in the crackpot WPB or will he be treated with courtesy? Or both?

January 20, 2015 at 12:01 pm
I think we’re missing the main point here. NOAA, NCDC, and GISS are government funded SCIENTIFIC organizations and as such they are obligated to adhere to the highest possible level of scientific standards.

The claim that 2014 is the hottest year on record is profoundly unscientific.
NOAA/NCDC knew this but they hid the truth in a link that they fraudulently called “Supplemental Information”—information that disproves your premise is not supplementary! This was not only unscientific, it was deceitful.
NOAA’s claim that 2014 is the hottest year is government sponsored PROPAGANDA. It should not be tolerated.

This isn’t a example of liberal media spin, it’s an example of government-funded scientific agencies intentionally lying about scientific results to push an agenda that will have profound consequences. Congress should investigate and those responsible should be fired or disciplined. We need to send a strong message that we will not tolerate government scientists telling lies or espousing opinions that are not clearly designated as mere opinions with no basis in scientific fact.
I emailed NOAA and demanded an explanation or a formal retraction. I strongly encourage others to do the same.

prjindigo is exactly the sort of reader that Anthony wants on his blog:

January 20, 2015 at 12:21 pm
Blaming human CO2 emissions in the atmosphere for having ANYTHING to do with the temperature is like blaming the Hindenburg disaster on a child chewing with their mouth open.

Richard G is deluded - he wants you to look at the squirrel:

January 20, 2015 at 1:59 pm
The N.Y. Times proclaims that “2014 was the hottest year in Earth’s recorded history”. Why did we not see the headline that “2014 had the most ice in Antarctic in Earth’s recorded history”?
Without adjustments to the temperature record, 2014 probably would not have even cracked the top 10 since 1900. Looking at the error bars in the graph at the top of this post, you could even say that 2014 might have only been the 14th hottest in the last 17 years.

He must missed lots of NY Times articles like this and this and these.

Bart is heavily into denial:

January 20, 2015 at 2:04 pm
Quibbling over 100ths of degrees is moot. Temperatures are flat, and much lower than was projected. AGW is dead.

That's enough. You can read more protest comments here.