Pope Francis' endorsement of science has upset deniers at WUWT

The coming encyclical from Pope Francis has really irked deniers. There've been five protest articles in the past week or so, at WUWT. Funny thing is deniers can't make up their mind about what their beef is.

You'd think that by the twenty-first century, most people who've had any sort of education would understand science basics. Yet even in countries as developed as the USA and Australia, there is a sizeable minority of people who are committed flat-earthers. People who not only reject science, they are opposed to the creation of knowledge. These people congregate at disinformation blogs like WUWT. They are the science illiterati. The wilfully ignorant hobnob with the disinformers, so that sometimes you can't tell which is which. Such people are a threat to society.  These anti-science activists are an obstacle to progress. Not an insurmountable obstacle - their greed and selfishness and lack of morals may well be their downfall.

Forget science. Follow your immoral conscience

In one of the Pope Francis protest articles at WUWT, the "guest" is trying to rationalise the immoral stance deniers have taken, by claiming it should be a conscience vote. As you know, deniers have no conscience when it comes to maintaining their cosy and warped view of the world. Their hip pocket takes priority over everything.

The Pope as a filthy capitalist wanting to rob the poor

Some WUWT deniers are claiming that the Pope is in it for the money and doesn't care about the poor people.

marque2 reckons "various governments around the world" are going to pay the Pope "billions of dollar of financing":

April 29, 2015 at 12:05 pm
...So what the Pope is doing is trying to get on these governments’ good side, by supporting the Global Warming doctrine. That way the Church feels it will still be able to get the billions of dollars of financing from various governments around the world, who want to tax us for our carbon.

Joel O'Bryan says the Pope "wants a cut"

April 29, 2015 at 1:30 pm
The Vatican is just looking to get in on a cut of the $100Billion Climate Aid fund. Expression of fealty to this new faith of Climate Change is necessary. 

The Pope as a filthy Marxist wanting to help the poor

Other deniers are claiming that the Pope wants to help the poor by stealing from deniers and giving the money to people who are living in dire poverty.

noloctd

April 28, 2015 at 8:29 am
I grow weary of this Marxist Pope. Nothing good can come from mixing him with the UN and the warmunistas.

classicalhero7

April 29, 2015 at 5:05 pm
The problem with those who want to fight climate change aren’t doing so because they care for the environment, but they only want to do it for income redistribution. It is a watermelon exercise, It looks green on the outside by the core is red, communistic red. 

The Catholic Church and science

The most interesting thread at WUWT (if you find the weird and wacky world of deniers interesting - say, from a psychological perspective) was the one under the silly and wrong article by Eric Worrall (archived here). In that thread, deniers debated Galileo, the role of the Catholic Church in science in general, and one hard-boiled denier even made the point that Pope Francis is not rejecting science - he is endorsing mainstream science. It's deniers who are rejecting science. (Elsewhere the same person describes mainstream science from the most august scientific institutions on the planet, as "pseudo-science".)

Empty rhetoric in empty rooms

The Heartland Institute used it as an excuse to send a couple of deniers to Rome during arguably the most pleasant month of the year for a vacation in Italy. The only price they had to pay was to talk to an almost empty room in a hotel.

Heartland is also running advertisements to try to get people to write to Pope Francis and tell him to forget about climate science, the well-being of the planet, and the vulnerable people and nations. As Joe Bast put it, the earth is here for deniers to rape and pillage to their hearts content. Or, in his words: "Humans are not causing a climate crisis on God’s Green Earth – in fact, they are fulfilling their Biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity."

Deniers will be delighted with UAH v. 6 beta

Roy Spencer and John Christy have finally, nine years later than first mentioned, released version 6.0 beta of the UAH temperature record. Deniers will be delighted. Here is a comparison of v5.6 and v6.0 together with RSS.

Data sources: UAH v6, UAH v5.6 and RSS

UAH v6 is now a touch cooler than RSS and the trend isn't as steep. However v6 beta lines up better with RSS for the last couple of years.

You can read about it on Roy Spencer's blog - I've archived his description of the changes here.

Blog changes

I have changed the blog around a bit, you might have noticed (the main website, not the mobile version). I've moved the menu to the left hand side. This has allowed a bit more space at the top so you can see the latest article better. It's also allowed me to stuff the menu with all sorts of things.

One thing I've added is some news items - that's on the bottom menu item third from the top, together with links to the BoM Enso tracker and WUWT-idget and other widgets in the sidebar and elsewhere. It's probably not the most comprehensive set of news items - however there are things that pop up there that I'd otherwise have missed. I just used a few search terms - you can click on the different search terms like floods, wildfire, drought etc, which are up the top of the news section - to see the news on that item.

Over the next few weeks I'll also try to get a set of commonly used charts up on the web - in a form that makes it easy to copy them or link to them. Things like surface temperature, ocean heat etc. When I do, feel free to use them and post elsewhere - preferably saying where you got them from and the data sources (which I'll include).

Let me know if you have any other suggestions - or if you come across problems.

Bombshell! Dumb Denialism from Anthony Watts about Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly, yet Anthony Watts sez it may rebound! Is he claiming that an ice age cometh? Not really. He usually leaves that nonsense to his "essayists" like David "funny sunny" Archibald. Yet if you read his headline without the article he copied and pasted (archived here), that's the conclusion you'd draw.

Here's Anthony's wrong headline:

BOMBSHELL: Scripps says Arctic Sea Ice may return, forecasts of loss based on ‘oversimplified arguments’

Once again, as usual, Anthony couldn't understand a simple press release - or if he did he decided to mislead his readers.  (Which is worse - being seen as an idiot or as a liar?)

Anthony Watts and his bombshells are usually a flop - his bombshells have a habit of going pear-shaped:)

The paper that he referenced was by Till J.W. Wagner and Ian Eisenman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was about how:

• Arctic sea ice is disappearing because of global warming, but
• IF greenhouse gases dropped (or we were desperate enough to do some geo-engineering) and the Earth cooled again
• THEN the disappeared Arctic sea ice would come back
• ELSE it won't! 

Denier Weirdness: A mock delegation from the Heartland Institute and a fake enquiry from the GWPF

The GWPF and the Heartland Institute are struggling to find a way to undermine The 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Paris later this year. (The GWPF is the main climate science denier lobby group in the UK, and the Heartland Institute is part of a network of denier lobby groups in the USA.)

The Mock Delegation from the Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute claimed it was sending a delegation to the Vatican to persuade the Pope to become a climate science denier. Turns out they were just sending a bunch of deniers to hold a meeting in the Columbus Hotel in Rome, from which the "delegates" could get a view of St. Peter's Basilica, if they got a room with a view, but without any guarantee of a session with Pope Francis. There was no indication they'd tried to get an audience with the Pope - private or public.

The Heartland Institute website didn't even say who it was sending. When I clicked on the link for details, all I got was this "page not found".

The Fake Enquiry by the GWPF

The denier lobby group in the UK has taken a different tack to try to undermine the Paris talks. It has decided to set up a review into temperature records. It doesn't want to "believe" that ice is melting, that oceans are warming, that surface temperatures are going up and that climate change is happening. It also knows precious little about surface temperature, going by the terms of its review. And it doesn't care to, going by the people it has appointed to run its investigation.

Coincidentally at the same time another group has announced a review of the methods to remove non-climatic changes from temperature data, by the Task Team on Homogenization (TT-HOM) of the Commission for Climatology (CCl) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). That review is headed by Dr Victor Venema. The terms of reference and membership are listed further down.

Compare the terms of reference of the GWPF review with that of the Task Team on Homogenization. The former is nothing but a political stunt by a denier lobby group, to try to get people to doubt that climate change is happening. The latter is aimed at improving the global temperature records.

Falsifying projections from WUWT

It is becoming less fashionable to deny climate science these days. As the Paris meeting approaches, more deniers are shifting a tad away from the extreme end of denial. Even James Inhofe, one of the extremist fake sceptics in the USA, favourably quoted Dr James Hansen in a recent op-ed piece promoting nuclear power as a way to reduce emissions.

Anthony Watts at WUWT if anything has shifted toward, not away from, extremist denial. Every now and again he'll publish an article in which a person claims to accept global warming - to a point. That point being that they don't accept that it has or will warm as much as has and will.

Today he's allowed an article from one such science denier, Richard J. Petschauer (archived here). I think he's trying to portray himself as a "reasonable person", though his ideas aren't reasonable at all.

Elevated Denial: Mountains can't get warmer, everyone knows they are cold! sez WUWT

In another spurt of denier weird at WUWT, Anthony Watts from the denier blog WUWT, copied and pasted a press release about a new paper in Nature Climate Change. The paper was about warming at high altitudes.

Anthony again added some words written all by himself (archived here). He seems to be taking a renewed interest in his blog. That must be about ten sentences he's written in two days. About the same number of words he's written on his blog in the past four months or so.

Elevation-dependent warming or how some altitudes are warming faster

Transecto Cordillera Americana TCA Source: MRI

This time the article Anthony copied is about investigations into whether or not some high altitude regions are warming faster than average.

Anthony's headline is wrong. He wrote: "Despite ‘extremely sparse’ data, Mann’s buddy Ray Bradley seems sure that ‘High mountains are warming faster than expected ‘

Notice how he just had to get in a snipe at Professor Michael Mann who had nothing to do with the paper. That is straight from the Disinformer 101 textbook. It was applied give his mob someone else to aim at, in case they were bored with the topic of the article. However that's not what I meant when I said the headline is wrong. In the material that Anthony copied, but didn't absorb, one of the authors said:

Lead author Nick Pepin of the University of Portsmouth, U.K., says, “There is growing evidence that high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations and such warming can accelerate many other environmental changes such as glacial melt and vegetation change, but scientists urgently need more and better data to confirm this. If we are right and mountains are warming more rapidly than other environments, the social and economic consequences could be serious, and we could see more dramatic changes much sooner than previously thought.”

There is a difference between "seems sure" and needing "data to confirm this". The scientists have found evidence that some high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations, but this needs to be confirmed.

Do you believe wheat viruses can disappear by magic?

Some of the deniers at WUWT still believe in magic. They can't or won't see the world for what it is.

Anthony Watts' current stand-in at WUWT, Eric Worrall, has written an article (archived here) about how know-nothing Eric just knows the scientists are wrong, and even if they are right it will all go away - by magic. He's talking about something reported as a "world first" discovery by scientists at an agricultural research station in Horsham, Victoria (Australia).

Even though by now I can probably be considered a slightly jaded denier watcher, the illogic of deniers can still surprise. Every now and again a particularly silly article like that one from Eric, reminds me that if deniers are bad at one thing, it's clear thinking.

More global warming denial from Anthony Watts at WUWT

The denial continues at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He's written a few words all by himself, for a change (archived here). (In the past four or five months, Anthony Watts has written almost nothing. He's handed his blog over to his readers to post their nonsense instead of writing his own nonsense. )

Source: Skeptical Science

Today Anthony is denying something that's plain - that the world is warming and climate change is happening. He was writing about a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, and he topped and tailed it with some words that he wrote all by himself - in what comes across as frustrated denial that the ice age still hasn't cometh.

Global warming will continue in line with long term projections

The paper is by scientists Matthew H. England, Jules B. Kajtar & Nicola Maher of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. What they did was examine about 200 climate model projections, separating those that showed the sort of slowdown of the past few years from those that didn't.

Danley Wolfe continues the long, drawn out hiatus of scepticism at WUWT

At WUWT there's an article by Danley Wolfe (archived here). No, I'd never heard of him before, either. He's not a climate scientist as will become quite clear. He's just another WUWT denier who Anthony Watts decided to trot out for some inexplicable reason.

In his article, Danley is writing about the so-called hiatus in global warming. He has got so much wrong that I'll not hope to cover everything. So I'll just pick him up on a few points.

Not so fast, with that so-called hiatus...

Update: Patrick Brown, the lead author, has just written an article about his paper, at realclimate.org. He is answering some questions in the comments.

Sou 14 May 2015

---

Anthony Watts (archived here) has posted a press release about a new paper in Nature's open access journal, Scientific Reports.  The research was led by Patrick T. Brown, a PhD student Duke University. What the scientists did was compare recent and projected climate change with that which has occurred over the past 1,000 years - mostly in the northern hemisphere (which is where there is most data). They looked at the recent global temperatures and compared them with projections of climate models - and drew what I see as overly-confident conclusions.

I feel a bit stretched on this subject, and am happy to be shown if I'm wrong about this.

A near-perfect example of a CO2 denierism at WUWT

You know how deniers are likely to write along the lines of: Global warming isn't happening or if it is it's not us or if it is us it's good. Well, here's a near-perfect example taken from WUWT today. Allan MacRae and Kim are replying to wickedwenchfan:

wickedwenchfan  April 20, 2015 at 12:18 am

Who cares what is causing the CO2 amount to rise? It doesn’t do squat to alter temperature so it’s irrelevant

Allan MacRae  April 20, 2015 at 12:43 am

Correct.

kim  April 20, 2015 at 12:53 am

Well, if it does, it alters it to the beneficial side, so it’s all good. Relax, and roll with the punches, er, uh, adapt.

Here's what's happened with CO2 over the past several hundred millenia - 800,000 years or so:

Adapted from data from data at NOAA. Original reference: Luthi, D., M. Le Floch, B. Bereiter, T. Blunier, J.-M. Barnola, U. Siegenthaler, D. Raynaud, J. Jouzel, H. Fischer, K. Kawamura, and T.F. Stocker. 2008. High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000-800,000 years before present. Nature, Vol. 453, pp. 379-382, 15 May 2008. doi:10.1038/nature06949

This is what's been happening to the surface temperature as we keep adding CO2 to the air.

Data source: GISS NASA

Lifting the floor at WUWT, to adapt to sea level rise

Over the last couple of days Anthony Watts has handed his WUWT keys over to Eric "eugenics" Worrall. Eric is giving some advice to people living in coastal areas, particularly those areas where rising sea level is going to have a big impact. (Archived here.)

Eric's advice to WUWT-ers who live on the sea shore, is to raise the floor of your house every twenty years. The WUWT article said that Gavin Schmidt's advice was "whacky".  It's Eric's advice that needs to be "whacked".

Eric read an interview with Gavin Schmidt in the Vancouver Sun and picked out one question to write about. Gavin was asked about the future for waterfront cities like Vancouver. He replied that sea levels aren't going to go down. He also pointed out that there is a huge difference between a rise in sea level of one or two feet a century and a rise of one or two metres a century. Gavin wryly commented that the basement won't be the best place for electrical equipment.

Eric did some arithmetic and discovered that two metres in a century worked out at two centimetres a year. (He's not all dumb.) He figured that it would be okay to just lift the house forty centimetres every two decades.

Two little pigs could do it

I don't know what sort of house Eric had in mind. If the house were made of straw, then lifting it wouldn't be too difficult. If it were made of twigs, then it's a bit more of a challenge but do-able. However, if it were built of bricks, then you'd risk the house cracking and collapsing if you tried to lift it by forty centimetres.

Wildfires add to atmospheric CO2: A lesson for Australia from California

There still isn't a lot happening in deniersville. Anthony Watts and his readers are gloating that their campaigns against climate science are having an effect. Well, Anthony doesn't actually admit that denier smear campaigns might be giving graduates second thoughts about doing research in climate - however, he and his denier friends are clearly delighted to hear that some conference in India didn't get enough papers to go ahead. Or so they say. (Archived here.)

Meanwhile, there are lots and lots of scientists beavering away expanding our understanding of the climate and the earth and all its systems.

Just one more example: Anthony hasn't mentioned this new paper about his home state, California. It's from a team led by Patrick Gonzalez, of the U.S. National Park Service. The scientists found that wildfires (and deforestation) are contributing quite a bit more to greenhouse emissions than previously known.

There are rabbits and rabbits and lagomorphs unknown at WUWT

Today Eric Worrall has decided, again, that scientists "don't know nuffin'". He writes about a new paper in PLOS One, which is about rabbits. Or more properly, about the Order Lagormorpha, which includes rabbits. The paper was by a team led by Katie Leach of Queen's University Belfast. It suggests climate change will have an impact on up to two thirds of 87 lagomorph species. In the abstract, the authors write:

Climate change is likely to impact more than two-thirds of lagomorph species, with leporids (rabbits, hares, and jackrabbits) likely to undertake poleward shifts with little overall change in range extent, whilst pikas are likely to show extreme shifts to higher altitudes associated with marked range declines, including the likely extinction of Kozlov’s Pika (Ochotona koslowi).

All lagomorphs look the same to Eric. Not only that, but he goes on to write about how a change in environment affected one particular species of rabbit (though he didn't mention it by name). That's the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). It didn't cause it to die out, it caused it to rise to plague proportions.

Blog enhancements and changes

I think I'm just about done in regard to blog enhancements for the time being. Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.

I've changed the search bar, so that it now searches both this blog and the main HotWhopper site, and has a bit more useful detail about the search results than the old search bar did.

You might also notice advertisements. They'll help bring in a few extra pennies (maybe) that will help in the cost of running HotWhopper. I've expanded the privacy statement. There's a short version here and a longer version here.

The advertisements should be okay, but if you happen to see one that offends or is overly intrusive, or spoils your visit in any way, please let me know.

Is climate science denial going out of fashion? Recycling Fred Singer and his predictions

Update: I've added another chart to illustrate the size of Fred Singer's big Little Ice Age bounce :)


Are climate science deniers taking tentative steps away from denial? Lindsay Abrams wrote at Salon recently:

...it’s no longer fashionable to be a climate denier, or to promote climate denial. And it’s proving to be a rather unprofitable position as well. This has put the group in the rather awkward position of having to defend its belief in climate change.

She was writing an article about how, after lots of prominent companies quit, ALEC (the private sector "regulator") decided to come out and try to paint itself as not really rejecting climate science. Or not all of it.

Fred Singer takes one step forward

Today at WUWT (archived here) Anthony's dredged up and recycled an article from another science denier, Fred Singer. Harrytwinotter noticed that Anthony first posted this article more than three years ago - or part of it (archived here).  He's recycling again. How green can you get :)

In the article, Fred is trying to dissociate himself from the wackier end of climate science denial and paint himself more as a luke warmer. Or is he?

Will Steffen and all of climate science vs Bjorn Lomborg and deniers - no contest! But Tony Abbott picks the loser.

Some Australian readers will have received a copy of this letter from Tim Flannery, which, given it's wide mailout, I think is okay to share more broadly. (Bernard has already posted a copy in the comments).

Deceiving the Australian public

The Australian Government today announced they would contribute $4m for Danish climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg to establish a new “consensus centre” at the University of Western Australia.

In the face of deep cuts to the CSIRO and other scientific research organisations, it's an insult to Australia’s scientific community.

As the Climate Commission, we were abolished by the Abbott Government in 2013 on the basis that our $1.5 million annual operating costs were too expensive. We relaunched as the Climate Council after thousands of Australians chipped in to the nation’s biggest crowd-funding campaign - ​remember this video?

It seems extraordinary that the Climate Commission, which was composed of Australia’s best climate scientists, economists and energy experts, was abolished on the basis of a lack of funding and yet here we are three years later and the money has become available to import a politically-motivated think tank to work in the same space.

This is why the work of the Climate Council is so important- to counter this continuing ideological attempt at deceiving the Australian public. 

Please consider chipping in a few dollars a week to help us stay independent and continue to fight the rising tide of misinformation. 

Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn't take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it's usually a sign those views are politically motivated. 

But with your support we will continue to fight back and reach millions of Australians with information that is based on the best science available. 

Thank you 

Tim Flannery

P.S We're already busy responding to misinformation in the media. We just called out The Australian for deliberately misinterpreting the science and the Prime Ministers Business Advisor Maurice Newman for getting his facts wrong. 

I've also previously written about Maurice Newman's wrong facts, such as here and here and here. And on several occasions about misleading articles in the Australian.

I've also been told about an article in the Guardian on the topic of Bjorn Lomborg's new creation (h/t Bert).

My reaction is the same as Tim Flannery's. One of the very first things the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott did was to abolish the Climate Commission. Australians were outraged, and within only a few days Australian people donated $500,000 dollars to create the Climate Council. And soon doubled it. It must vie with the biggest responses of any appeal for donations.

Now Tony Abbott is reportedly funding a "denier" (as defined by rationalwiki) at around the same annual cost of the then Climate Commission. (I'll need to check the numbers.)

I don't have time to write any more about this. Feel free to express your opinions in the comments.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp

There was some discussion on a previous thread about how much the earth may warm this year. I know it's a bit soon, but figured it might be interesting to see how things are faring.

If I remember, I'll post an update to the chart below each month, after GISTemp data comes out.

The chart below is a progressive year to date average for all years from 1995 to the present. What that means is for January each year, it just shows the anomaly for January. For February it shows the average of January and February for each year. For March, its the average of the monthly anomaly from January to March.

If you look at December, each year shows the annual average temperature for the full year. For November, each year has the average for the year up to November, not including December.  (I've made it extra large because of all the fine detail.)

Data Source: NASA GISS

2015 is ahead of the pack so far, though it only goes up to March. The years to watch are 2014, 2010 and 2005. I've plotted them with slightly thicker lines so they stand out more easily.

The coldest year of the lot was 1996, which still ended up more than 0.3°C above the 1950 to 1981 average. Incidentally, the potty peer, Christopher Monckton keeps saying that "it hasn't warmed since 1996" - the drongo. He's got his temperature charts upside down :)

Related updates 

• YTD includng April 
• YTD including May

How to add the author, time and comments link to the top of your Google blog - with a difference

This is an article, by request, about how to add the author, time of article and links to comments - to the top of your blog article. This is for Google blogs and bloggers only. Be aware that fiddling with a blog template can make it unusable, if you aren't careful. Make these or any changes to your blog at your own risk.

A DuKE of deniosaurs at WUWT say: Bring on the Cretaceous!

What is the collective noun for dinosaurs? Is it a pack, or a mob, or a herd? If you're thinking of the deniosaurs at WUWT - go with a DuKE (think Dunning and Kruger)!

Today there's another article at WUWT (archived here), claiming we'll be fine if the temperature rises by umpteen degrees in a matter of decades, because .... dinosaurs. While I agree that the plebs at WUWT are dinosaurs, I don't agree that humans would easily adapt to a shift to a Cretaceous world in less than a blink or a wink in geological time.

I wrote about this some time ago, when Anthony Watts wrote a similar article. (No need to repeat what I wrote back then.) Today it's the turn of Eric "eugenics" Worrall. He really is a dinosaur, isn't he.

Eric's disputing the likelihood that an economic collapse will prevent the world from reaching six degrees or more. He was writing about a piece by Till Bruckner in Huffington Post exploring the implications described in a World Bank book on climate.

El Niño on Alert: at least 70% chance in 2015

From the Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The chances of El Niño occurring in 2015 have increased. Ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific continue to be warmer than average, trade winds remain weaker than average, and all models surveyed suggest further ocean warming will occur. As a result, the ENSO Tracker has been raised to El Niño ALERT, indicating at least a 70% chance of El Niño occurring this year.

Tropical Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures are now just shy of El Niño levels. Large areas of warmer-than-average water below the surface are likely to keep these waters warm for some time. This increases the odds of atmospheric factors coming into play, and hence further warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean.

All international climate models monitored by the Bureau indicate that El Niño thresholds will be reached or exceeded by June. However, the accuracy of model outlooks during the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) transition period is lower than for outlooks made at other times of the year.

Read the full report: BoM 14 April 2015 - the pdf is here for reference. (I've updated the sidebar.)

Related from HotWhopper

• Gobbling up or Spitting Out Bob Tisdale's ENSO Leftovers at WUWT - The article is more about ENSO than Bob Tisdale - really :)
• Tropical cyclones and ENSO
• BoM maintains an El Niño alert - with a good little video from BoM.

How to go about going against mainstream science - a lesson (about the Anthropocene) for climate sceptics

An article by Bill Ruddiman, a legend in the field of paleoclimatology, has just been posted at realclimate.org. I recommend it be read by:

1. climate science deniers who wrongly think that controversial ideas can't get published
2. budding geniuses, who have had a brainwave that's going to turn science on its head
3. anyone who wants to dispute the claims of 1 above
4. everyone who enjoys reading an article written by a scientist :)

Here's a teaser:

This story began late in 2003 when I introduced a new idea (the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’) that went completely against a prevailing climatic paradigm of the time. I claimed that detectable human influences on Earth’s surface and its climate began thousands of years ago because of agriculture. 

Read the full article at realclimate.org.

When did the Anthropocene really begin?

Then go and read this article at MotherJones:

Scientists Are Arguing About When, Exactly, Humans Started to Rule the Planet

Then, if you want still more and can get hold of it, read this new perspective article in Science: Defining the epoch we live in. It's all about how humans started affecting the planet from the time we started hunting and burning, and caused the extinction of many species. And how we started affecting climate when agriculture began. The authors argue that the Anthropocene didn't start in the modern era - it started with us, millenia ago.

Here's a figure from the article - click to enlarge it:

What's in a name? The industrial era has been a time of greatly accelerated environmental changes (1, 2), but it was preceded by large and important transformations, including massive large-mammal extinctions in the Americas and major changes associated with the spread of agriculture, including the spread of domesticated crops and livestock (5), land clearance, forest cutting, habitat transformations (6, 9), irrigated rice paddies (7), soil erosion (10, 11), and anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and CH4 to the atmosphere (8). These anthropogenic changes would not be included if the “Anthropocene” is defined by the first atomic bomb test in 1945 (3). Future changes, e.g., in species extinctions and ocean acidification, are projected to be much larger than those already seen, but are difficult to predict.

Source: Ruddiman et al (2015)

Reference

William F. Ruddiman, Erle C. Ellis, Jed O. Kaplan, Dorian Q. Fuller. "Defining the epoch we live in." Science 3 April 2015: Vol. 348 no. 6230 pp. 38-39. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa7297

A small facelift

I've been making a few minor changes to the blog, like the "go to top" arrow on the side and scroll bar down the bottom, and other cosmetic changes. I've still got a couple of things to change on the mobile version, though it should still be working the way it is.

I've tested things as far as I'm able, but if anyone notices any glitches when navigating the site or commenting, please let me know.

CO2 and the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction Events

There is not much happening in deniersville right now. Anthony Watts has another alarmist article by Paul Driessen from the denier lobby group CFACT. It starts off talking about ISIS (I guess WUWT is branching out) and he's trying to link ISIS to both President Obama and climate change - and re the latter, not in the way that most people do.

Judith Curry is asking her denier readers to critique an "essay" she's written. It reads as if it's written hastily for a first term, first year, undergrad Phil101 class. She waffles and meanders from pillar to post in a most unacademic manner, so I don't think she'll get a very good grade. (Her denier fans fawn as usual.)

Given the relative quiet, I figured I'd let you know of two new papers I came across about the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. This was the biggest extinction period in the history of Earth - with different stages, or pulses.

Why 97% is important - Yale US survey on public perceptions of climate change

Fake sceptics, hard core deniers, are pretty well unshiftable in their "belief".

Click here for more of Collin Maessen's excellent videos

As you know, most people who comment at WUWT, for example, already made up their mind well before they heard evidence about climate and what's causing it to change. If they do search for evidence - it's to find "evidence" that they think will support their "belief" - and stop right there. You may recall the confessions of deniers at WUWT (see here and here and here) and at Judith Curry's blog (see here).

But as John Cook said in that short interview, that's not the audience...

Strange results from people in the USA

I'd say at least half the people in the USA still don't have much of a clue about climate change. Yet a majority, in some instances only a very small majority:

• Do understand the global warming is happening (63% agree, 18% disagree)
• Are worried about it (52% agree, 48% disagree)
• Believe it will harm people in the USA (51% agree, 39% disagree)
• Believe it will harm people in developing countries (52% agree, 35% disagree)
• Believe it will harm future generations (61% agree, 26% disagree)

No permafrost bomb - probably

I'm busy working on something at the moment, but saw this article, which might interest some people. It's about a new paper in Nature from a large team from the Permafrost Carbon Network, led by Dr Ted Schuur.

What they figure is that the carbon from permafrost probably won't be released in sudden spurts, it will be more gradual. But that's no reason for complacency, as you'll see.

Below is a press release from the University of Alaska Fairbanks:

The release of greenhouse gases from Arctic and sub-Arctic permafrost may be more gradual and prolonged than previously thought, according to a new scientific synthesis paper published April 9 in the journal Nature.

Scientists say that may allow society more time to adapt to environmental change.

Roy Spencer is comparing himself to Nobel Prize winners!

I just saw this at WUWT, in an article by Roy Spencer (archived here):

Comparing John Christy and me to “scientists who disputed the links between smoking and cancer”, Dana once again demonstrates his dedication to the highest standards of journalism.

Well done, Grauniad.

I prefer to compare us to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who rejected the scientific consensus that peptic ulcers were due to too much stress or spicy food. While they eventually received the Nobel Prize ...

Steve McIntyre's big blooper - mistaking water mass movement for water temperature!

Update: see below for the latest bit of continuing obstinate idiocy from Steve McIntyre, plus another diagram, plus another reference.

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There are undoubtedly a few knowledgeable people chuckling or groaning over an article Steve McIntyre wrote on his blog last week. In case you are, like me, loathe to visit a blog where the author has a tendency to both conspiracy ideation and alleging the work of scientists is a "scam" and their results "fake", these here are the nuts and bolts (as I understand it).

Steve McIntyre mistook water mass movement for temperature (archived here). Or more correctly, he mistook a measure which was used to indicate water mass movement as being used to indicate water temperature.

If you're wondering how anyone, even a climate science denier, could possibly make such a silly mistake, read on.

WUWT Quote of the Day: Smokey On Cherry-Picking

On the topic of atmospheric CO2 and the fact that it's concentration hasn't been as high in at least 800,000 years, one wonders what Smokey has been smoking.

dbstealey  April 4, 2015 at 2:37 pm (extract)

...I’m not sure myself. But I am pretty sure that CO2 has been up to twenty times higher in the past. Selecting a time frame like ‘800,000 years’ reeks of cherry-picking....

Here's what's been happening with atmospheric CO2. Go towards the end of the video to see the levels over the last 800,000 years.

BTW - put your head in a vice before you read the article by Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin.

Related HotWhopper Articles

• Hitting rock bottom at WUWT: OMG it's insects - Ronald D Voisin is ba-a-a-a-ck!
• It's the Sun, An Ice Age Cometh - Wait! OMG - It's the Insects! ... and more farce from WUWT
• Insects and microbes and OCO-2 conspiracy theories at WUWT
• And more...

They really are a bunch of paranoid twits at WUWT!

It's Easter and I'm taking a day off. Couldn't resist writing about the latest denier conspiracy theory, though. (It will make a nice lead in to an article I'm working on.)

Let me start by asking you a question. If there are five explanations for something happening, which do you think your typical climate science denier will choose?

1. the most likely
2. the next most likely
3. the improbable but possible
4. the least likely
5. the one that nobody in their right mind would contemplate
6. 5. above -- and they'd blame it on a climate scientist.

If you picked the sixth (out of five options), you'd get it right.

More conspiracy theories: WUWT's Tim Ball plus Judith Curry

There is nothing much new at WUWT that I can see. The memes are being recycled.

Tim Ball is writing some of his usual nonsense, this time about a Nature paper from 1996, stolen emails and hockey sticks. He hasn't written anything that shows climate science is wrong, but he has repeated his paranoid conspiracy theories. (Every single one of the nine or so investigations, on two continents, relating to stolen emails was a "cover up", in Tim's paranoid mind.)

Judith Curry's "money, politics and consensus" conspiracy theory

Speaking of conspiracy theories, Judith Curry has come up with a beauty (archived here).