Bob Tisdale goes AMO-ing to a big chill - not!

Update: The University of Southampton has issued a clarification. It doesn't address the substantive issues raised here. There's also no mention of 0.5C.

Also see Gerard McCarthy's replies to my query to him via Twitter - here and here and here.

Sou 2 June 2015

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There was a new paper that came out this week in Nature, which had a bit of coverage around the traps. Deniers rather liked it not so much because of what was in the paper itself, but because of what was in the press release.

The paper was by a team from the University of Southampton, led by Dr. Gerard D. McCarthy. The paper was about the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO and ocean heat transport, and related.

The AMO is used to indicate changes in sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic. It is of such long duration that there aren't instrumental records going back far enough to show multiple repeating patterns. It's probably not a regular cycle with a fixed period. Estimates seem to place the latest period at around 70 years (from the beginning of a warm phase in the 1920s to the end of a cool phase in the 1990s - see here). The latest IPCC report had this to say about it (page TS-25):

A number of studies have investigated the effects of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) on global mean surface temperature. While some studies find a significant role for the AMO in driving multi-decadal variability in GMST, the AMO exhibited little trend over the period 1951-2010 on which these assessments are based, and the AMO is assessed with high confidence to have made little contribution to the GMST trend between 1951 and 2010 (considerably less than 0.1°C). {2.4, 9.8.1, 10.3; FAQ 9.1}.

From the above paragraph I take it that the nature of the AMO is not all that well agreed upon - by some at least.

Ice Ages, Witches and Magic from Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and Alan Carlin

I suppose I can understand the fixation that deniers have with religion, given the world view they hold. It goes some way to explaining their inability to distinguish scientific research from witchcraft and sorcery. Those who've had the benefit of any education in science, not so much.

Marc Morano - burning witches

Today Raw Story reported how Marc Morano, a professional disinformer, explained to a rapt audience of science deniers, how policies designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions are like blood sacrifices to the gods. He is reported as saying:

Aztec priests encouraged people to sacrifice blood to the gods to end severe drought...Today we are told we need a fundamental transformation of our lives in order to end bad weather, ...  We are told we need EPA regulations and UN treaties in order to spare us from more hurricanes and floods and droughts and all this bad weather.

Anthony Watts and his ozone hole deniers are out in force (again)

In yet another "claim" headline, Anthony Watts shows yet again how he denies science. Not just climate science but atmospheric chemistry as well. This, mind you, is the same week as he sent his fans to spam Wikipedia denying his denial of science.

This time his headline is about a press release that he copied and pasted, about the ozone layer (archived here). Anthony's denial only comes via his headline: Claim: ‘Severe ozone depletion avoided'. It's not the first time he's denied that ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) react with ozone in the stratosphere, destroying it (see further reading below).

The paper, by Professor Martyn Chipperfield and colleagues, is in Nature Communications. The authors discuss how the ozone hole would have been much worse had the world not agreed (through the Montreal Protocol) to stop releasing ozone-depleting substances. The researchers developed a model to investigate what would have happened if action had not been taken. They describe this as (from the abstract, my dot points and emphasis):

• A deep Arctic ozone hole, with column values <120 DU, would have occurred given meteorological conditions in 2011.
• The Antarctic ozone hole would have grown in size by 40% by 2013, with enhanced loss at subpolar latitudes.
• The decline over northern hemisphere middle latitudes would have continued, more than doubling to ~15% by 2013.

How influential deniers flock to their echo chamber (and stay there)

A new paper in Nature Climate Change discusses from where the elite in the USA get their opinions about climate. Echo chambers are significant. The elite are described in the abstract as "the community of political elites engaged in the contentious issue of climate politics in the United States". The researchers used exponential random graph (ERG) modelling (don't ask me :D) and found that both "the homogeneity of information (the echo) and multi-path information transmission (the chamber) play significant roles in policy communication".

There's a press release at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) of the University of Maryland (where the lead author, Lorien Jasny, resides). It translates the social science speak into everyday language.

WUWT proposes harassment and lawsuits to stop climate research

Matt Manos is going great guns with his conspiratorial thinking over at WUWT (archived here). He comes across as a real nutter, albeit one who can manage to write an entire sentence with proper use of nouns and verbs. Flush with his success at flushing out all his fellow WUWT conspiracy theorists, today he's urging WUWT-ers to spam governments with FOIA requests. Matt wants to get to the bottom of what he thinks is a giant climate conspiracy. He wrote, using the same "sheeple" concept from his last article:

In my previous post, Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists, I introduced the concept of bellwethers and rational ignorance to explain why it’s so hard to convince warmists using empirical evidence. 

Chaotic weather and climate constraints gets Willis Eschenbach wondering

Gavin Schmidt, now Director of GISS, NASA, once wrote:

Weather concerns an initial value problem: Given today's situation, what will tomorrow bring? Weather is chaotic; imperceptible differences in the initial state of the atmosphere lead to radically different conditions in a week or so. Climate is instead a boundary value problem — a statistical description of the mean state and variability of a system, not an individual path through phase space. 

Note the words: A statistical description of the mean state and variability of the system. Every word is important. Climate is more than an average of weather. It also describes the extremes of weather, and the extent to which weather is likely to vary within those extremes.

When modeling climate and changes in the earth system, there are certain constraints, or limits, or boundaries. These constraints can include surface boundaries such as continental configurations, topography, bathymetry (topography of the sea floor), and vegetation distribution. On shorter time scales there are constraints relating to ice sheets, oceans and the atmosphere itself. Defining these constraints or boundaries is what scientists do when designing models of the earth system and climate.

This article is about two concepts - both involving the word "boundary", which need to be distinguished:

1. The boundaries to a given climate (extremes of weather), and
2. Boundary conditions, which are set when developing models of climate or the earth system as a whole. These can be any physical constraints.

Willis Eschenbach wonders about boundary conditions

Willis Eschenbach today is wondering what is meant by the boundary conditions problem for climate (archived here). At WUWT he wrote:

I’ve heard many times that whereas weather prediction is an “initial-value” problem, climate prediction is a “boundary problem”. I’ve often wondered about this, questions like “what is the boundary?”. I woke up today thinking that I didn’t have an adequately clear understanding of the difference between the two types of problems.

Climate denial blog-owner Anthony Watts calls his troops to Wikipedia action

Anthony Watts has sent his troops to rewrite the Wikipedia entry for his blog. wattsupwiththat (archived here). He says he's not allowed to do it himself because of bias. But he thinks his biased fans are allowed to do so I guess. His headline was "The sad tales of the Wikipedia gang war regarding WUWT – ‘creepy and a little scary’". Poor Anthony - the creep is creeped out.

Anthony decided to go to what he calls gang warfare, calling up his gang. He wrote: "As we all know, Wikipedia has one major flaw in it’s design: it allows gang warfare." And Anthony tried to exploit that major flaw. Wikipedia has safeguards against gang warfare, which Anthony probably didn't know about.

The WUWT Wikipedia article opens with the line:

Watts Up With That? (or WUWT) is a blog dedicated to climate change denial[a] created in 2006 by Anthony Watts.[1] 

For a very short time, one of his biased fans managed to change it to: "Wattsupwiththat is a blog dedicated to climate science." (It was reverted back too quickly for me to get a screen shot.)

Killer heat wave in India and even extreme rain and floods in the USA don't get a hearing at WUWT...

Anthony Watts almost never reports extreme weather consistent with climate change, unless it's heavy snow (or hail that Anthony mistook for snow!).

Anthony claims he used to be a meteorologist. He used to tell weather forecasts on television and still does give weather reports on his local radio station AFAIK. Which makes it all the more strange that he rarely reports on extreme weather. So far his almost total lack of reporting on the drought and record temperatures in his home state of California is a wonder.

Record-breaking rains and massive flooding across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana

Here's the latest that you haven't seen at WUWT. It's the wild weather and record-breaking rains in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas.

I started writing this a day or so ago and let it rest for a while. I figured maybe Anthony Watts, ex-meteorologist from the USA, would write something after he'd collected enough you-tube videos and photographs and confirmed all the broken records. There's still no sign of him being aware of the grave situation not far to the east of him.

The Texas drought has finally broken - with a vengeance. Some call it weather whiplash. From extreme dry to extreme rain - with more than 90% of Texas having been declared at risk of flash flooding.

WUWT's "sheeple" conspiracy nuttery - and forecasting God

You might have noticed a comment by Matt Manos the other day. He was about the only person who understood what President Obama was saying, when Eric "eugenics" Worrall wrote his silly article. Matt spoiled it by swerving off into an utter nutter conspiracy.

Matt Manos' "sheeple" conspiracy theory

Well, today Matt's expanded his conspiracy theory (archived here). He's using the "sheeple" argument that's a favourite of crank conspiracy theorists the world over.

The "sheeple" argument goes like this. People don't "believe [insert conspiracy theory of the day here] because they are "sheeple" who are:

• incapable of thinking for themselves
• brainwashed by some unseen, unknown higher power
• in thrall or in fear of authority (variously experts, government officials, common sense)

Matt's article has all the hallmarks of the classic conspiracy theory.

WUWT's unethical use of the most vulnerable, denying them clean energy

One thing few would accuse Anthony Watts (or any science disinformer) of is applying ethics. Today is no exception. Unethical Anthony has a hypocrisy posing as "care" in an article with a headline:"The Ethics of Climate Change" (archived here).

He's using an article by someone called Bob Lyman** to pretend that letting poorer nations sink under rising seas is good for them. Once again he is hosting someone arguing that letting people starve from drought-caused famine, die from heat exhaustion or thirst, or suffocate under heavy smog, will be better than helping them modernise, survive and thrive with lots of clean energy.

Tasteless and ignorant at WUWT: A repugnant combination in denial of rising sea level

Anthony Watts sense of humour would not be shared by most decent people. It might even shock. Today he has copied an ugly cartoon that he said was posted by Rick McKee on Anthony's WUWT Facebook page (archived here). To save you looking, I'll describe it.

The cartoon pictures seven bearded men dressed in gear the colour of the garments worn by Buddhist monks, all wearing a crucifix around their necks. Bearded Christian Buddhists? The men are all kneeling in front of a puddle of water. Behind them is a large figure in black wielding a large knife and wearing a full face mask. That figure is probably meant to signify an ISIS militant. To the right is what I think is meant to be a caricature of President Obama, talking to the kneeling bearded men (I think they are meant to represent journalists brutally beheaded). Underneath is the caption: "I just want you to know I'm throwing the full force of the U.S. military behind stopping the horror of this rising sea level!"

The word "horror" is highlighted in red and underlined.

Anthony thinks this is funny. Seriously. He thinks the brutal murder of journalists in the middle east is cause for mirth and mockery. He put his cartoon under the headline and text:

Friday Funny – the horror of rising sea levels in context

As many know, Mr. Obama made some wild claims about climate at the recent U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement.

For example:

“The world’s glaciers are melting, pouring new water into the ocean.  Over the past century, the world sea level rose by about eight inches.  That was in the last century; by the end of this century, it’s projected to rise another one to four feet.

Denier 101: Quote-Mining. Can you imagine George W Bush as a climate scientist?

How's this for the latest attempt by the denialati? Eric "eugenics" Worrall has picked up on President Obama's mockery of the anti-science among deniers, probably particularly deniers in the Republican Party (archived here). President Obama has been known to say words to the effect that saying you aren't a scientist doesn't give you the right to reject science. Eric quoted the President, or should I say he picked out the words in bold italics below from an article at the Guardian and twisted them to suit his denialist bent:

“Politicians who say they care about military readiness ought to care about this as well,” Obama said of the climate deniers.

Several times Obama lambasted those who refused to endorse the science of climate change.

“They’ll say, ‘You know, I’m not a scientist,’” Obama said. “Well, I’m not either. But the best scientists in the world know that climate change is happening.”

He added: “Our analysts in the intelligence community know climate change is happening. Our military leaders – generals and admirals, active duty and retired – know it’s happening. Our homeland security professionals know it is happening. And our coast guard knows it’s happening.”

It's a classic case of quote-mining, though a particularly poor one. Eric's article was under the headline: Why delegating comprehension of climate science is a bad idea

Judith Curry is unclear: is Jeb Bush too dumb?

The best estimate of the human induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.


The period in question being from 1951 to 2010. You all probably recognise the above statement from the IPCC WG1 report: The human induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over the period. In other words, 100% of the warming from 1951 to 2010 is caused by humans.

Judith Curry is clear that she is unclear about clear science

That was written in 2013. Judith Curry today quoted Jeb Bush and wrote that he "gets it exactly right" (my emphasis):

As he has before, Bush acknowledged “the climate is changing” but stressed that it’s unknown why. “I don’t think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It’s convoluted,” he said at a house party in Bedford, New Hampshire.

...Jeb gets it exactly right. There are two broad hypotheses for recent climate change: human causes and natural causes (with numerous sub-hypotheses contained within).  The climate debate is dominated by the premature carving in stone of a theory that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change. 

What? You don't believe a Professor who is a climate scientist would get it so wrong? Look for yourself.

Recycling Syria at WUWT

This is going to be one of the shortest articles you'll read at HotWhopper. Why? Because it's just letting you know that Anthony Watts has had another memory lapse. He does that quite often - like here and here and here.

Today he's republished an article he posted back in March. I didn't write about it then, but I did write about a similar article from the cult leader E. Calvin Beisner (from the Cornwall Alliance).

The original article is archived here and today's repeat is archived here. The question on everyone's mind is - will anyone notice? (Not so far - which supports the theory that WUWT readers don't bother reading articles. They just use WUWT to post their empty "thoughts".)

Death from cold and heat - it's different

At WUWT today (archived here), Anthony Watts has discovered a new paper in the Lancet from a tip from a denier. The paper is a massive analysis of mortality in many different countries, but states it cannot be considered a global study (it doesn't include Africa or the Middle East for example). The authors analysed mortality in different weather - hot and cold.

From the paper:

The study was based on the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature–health associations, and included more than 74 million deaths from 13 countries 

Greg Laden has already written an excellent article about it, so I won't repeat the points he made. What I will do is put up a couple of charts that will make you think. These are from Figure 1 of the paper. What they show is the different response to cold and hot weather. This first one is about Sydney:

Australian blogger Andrew Bolt: All attitude - no research

Andrew Bolt is a conservative ideologue who blogs for a Victorian newspaper, the Herald-Sun. He has a bit of a following in Australia. He mistakes ignorance for independence and thinks because he knows nothing about a subject, he is entitled to spread disinformation about it.

I don't follow his silliness as a rule, but I saw in the HotWhopper stats that somehow a comment with a link to HotWhopper got through. This is unusual. In my experience (with the occasional exception), comments that dispute what Andrew writes are more often than not disallowed.

Andrew Bolt - climate disinformer

Today Andrew shows up his ignorance, writing on his blog about climate change and global warming:

Secondly, that it’s caused by humankind...
False. No serious scientist, even die-hard warmists, would agree that all climate change is caused by humans.

Notice what he's done? His answer is not related to the modern greenhouse warming. He appears to be arguing that because climate change of the past was not caused by humans, then the current warming climate cannot be caused by humans either. This is a logical fallacy. Just because the last time your house burned to the ground it was caused by a lightning strike, doesn't mean that this time it couldn't have been caused by you leaving hot oil on the stove unattended.

Free speech and freedom of expression: Differences across the Atlantic

You could get giddy trying to keep up with all the contradictions at Anthony Watts' anti-science blog, WUWT. Barely a day after all the WUWT-ers were up in arms that Daily Kos didn't allow a couple of deniers to post a very lengthy, internally inconsistent, denier manifesto under an article, Anthony Watts is proud to say that he doesn't support "free speech" after all. Or perhaps I should say freedom of expression. Not in the UK at any rate.

Ian Wolter's prize-winning artwork of climate science disinformers, Anglia Ruskin University. Photo: it's all over the internet so I don't know

UPDATE: See below. You'll enjoy it :)

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Anthony Watts, the seer, goes time traveling to 2041 and beyond

Talking about forecasting, today Anthony Watts reveals his time machine trip (archived here, latest update). He traveled to 2041, hung about for thirty years to 2070, and found that there weren't as many people affected by heat as scientists predicted back in 2015.

Anthony doesn't give away where he stores his time machine. It must be quite a marvelous thing. Not only did it take him to 2041, but it took him all around the USA so that he could count the number of people living in different places.

Before he headed to the future, Anthony must have enrolled his dog Kenji in the Denial101 MOOC because he started his article, once again, drawing upon the association fallacy. He wrote:

From the National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the Department of “ignored data in favor of modeled simulations” comes this claim from Trenberth’s mountain climate alarm lair. 

Kevin Trenberth is one of the very few climate scientists whose name WUWT deniers recognise. So Anthony added his name to his article, even though Dr Trenberth wasn't an author. He just happened to work at the same university. Anthony was afraid that his rabble might not realise they were meant to reject the science. Which shows how slow Anthony is. His deniers are very well trained. They automatically reject all reputable science no matter who did the research.

Tom Harris, Free Speech and Disinformation

WUWT is in the doldrums still. For want of anything better, Anthony Watts has published a puff piece by someone called Russell Cook, who is moaning about Tom Harris' free speech being "prohibited" at DailyKos (archived here). This is exactly in line with what the DailyKos article stated was a PR strategy of Tom Harris:

The clever ploy in this PR strategy is a claim that climate change deniers are being frightened into silence.

More charts tracking El Niño 2015

A few days ago I wrote about the newly announced El Niño - here and here. I've played with some charts that might be of interest. The ones below show the vertical temperature anomaly sections of the Pacific at the equator, which I've copied from the Bureau of Meteorology charts, and animated. The first one shows the changes from January last year up to May this year. The charts go down to a depth of 400 metres (that's 1,312 feet 4 1⁄32 inches for the metrically-challenged :D).

Source: BoM

About that tropical "hot spot"

A couple of days ago I wrote about the new paper by Steven Sherwood and Nidhi Nishant, which was reporting the release of an updated radiosonde dataset, and findings from an analysis of those data.

Data sources: Scripps and GISS/NASA

One of the things the authors reported was the "tropospheric hot spot" - though they didn't use that term in the paper itself (only the press release). I've never previously thoroughly looked into this myself. I knew about it in general terms, because some deniers point to what they regard as lack of evidence as evidence that global warming isn't happening. Which is really, really weird when you think about it. Or when you look at surface temperature data as in the chart on the right.

Anyway, I decided to go and learn more about this so-called "tropospheric hot spot".

Nine Denier 101 Techniques: Anthony Watts gets into a hot spot in the tropical troposphere

There's a new paper in ERL by Steven C Sherwood and Nidhi Nishant, which reports an updated version of their radiosonde dataset. It is probably going to cause quite a ruckus in the deniosphere. From the paper (my formatting):

Temperature trends in the updated data show three noteworthy features.

• First, tropical warming is equally strong over both the 1959–2012 and 1979–2012 periods, increasing smoothly and almost moist-adiabatically from the surface (where it is roughly 0.14 K/decade) to 300 hPa (where it is about 0.25 K/decade over both periods), a pattern very close to that in climate model predictions. This contradicts suggestions that atmospheric warming has slowed in recent decades or that it has not kept up with that at the surface.
• Second, as shown in previous studies, tropospheric warming does not reach quite as high in the tropics and subtropics as predicted in typical models.
• Third, cooling has slackened in the stratosphere such that linear trends since 1979 are about half as strong as reported earlier for shorter periods.

Wind trends over the period 1979–2012 confirm a strengthening, lifting and poleward shift of both subtropical westerly jets; the Northern one shows more displacement and the southern more intensification, but these details appear sensitive to the time period analysed. There is also a trend toward more easterly winds in the middle and upper troposphere of the deep tropics.

Radiosondes are instruments that are sent aloft in balloons, to take measurements in the atmosphere. (You might have seen Roy Spencer and John Christy combine measures from radiosondes with satellite tropospheric temperatures in their various unscientific attempts to befuddle the US government and readers of blogs.)

Seeps and SCAMS Part III: Richard Betts misunderstands (and misrepresents) a paper

Richard Betts, a UK climate scientist, has written an article about the recent paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and co, which I wrote about in Part I of this series, and referred to in Part II. Well it's not actually about the paper. It's Richard's interpretation of the paper based on his reading of a blog article Stephan wrote about the paper. It could be argued that it is evidence supporting the findings of the paper.

Correction: In the comments, Richard says that he did read the paper before he wrote his article. (I don't know how missed all the things he missed or why he got so much so wrong or why he appeared to write about the blog article and not the paper.) - Sou 6:48 pm Thursday 14 May 2015

I first saw Richard's article at WUWT and was very surprised to see it there. It turns out though, that Richard wrote his article for ATTP's blog. It was only when that rabid anti-Lewandowsky-ite, Barry Woods, asked him that he acquiesced and agreed to it being reposted on Anthony Watts' blog. That's despite the dreadful treatment dished out from WUWT when Richard's last article was published there. Here's the WUWT version - archived. Or better still, you can read it at ATTP's blog.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with April 2015

Last month I posted a chart of the progressive year-to-date global average surface temperature, from GISS. This is the update with April included. I'll repeat the explanation with each update and add what seem to be things to watch.

Worth noting

• April was an average of 0.75°C above the 1951-1980 mean.
• From and including December 2014, every month has been the second hottest in the record for that month, except for March 2015, which was the 3rd hottest March on record.
• Every month this year has been at least 0.75°C above the 1951-1980 mean. 
• The progressive year to date average up to and including April is 0.79°C above the 1951-1980 mean.

Explaining the chart

The chart 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. (As before, I've made it extra large because of all the fine detail.)

Data Source: NASA GISS

2015 is still ahead of the pack so far. 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.  The next time someone tries to tell you that "it hasn't warmed since 1996" then show them this chart :)

Related updates

YTD including March
YTD including May

On Seeps and SCAMS Part II: Pat'n Chip'n David Fake a Debate.

In Part I of On Seeps and SCAMS, I wrote about the new paper on how denialist talking points can influence climate science. A day or so ago, there was an article at WUWT (archived here), by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger (Pat'n Chip), in which they commented on that paper. Their WUWT article had the title: Lewandowsky’s Competing Theories for Source of Bias in Scientific Research. [This is Part II of a three part series. Click for Part I and Part III.]

The title was misleading. Pat'n Chip's WUWT article was more a promo for another article by David E. Wojick and Patrick J. Michaels. Their's is not a scientific paper, it's a CATO article. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to consider the denier lobby group, CATO, to have any relation to science.

What they wrote about could have been an interesting topic I suppose, though it demonstrates a naive view of the world on the part of the authors. They were ostensibly exploring whether or not government funding can bias research. Their paper had the title:

Is the Government Buying Science or Support?

A Framework Analysis of Federal Funding-induced Biases

They claim:

The research question is clear: does biased funding skew research in a preferred direction, one that supports an agency mission, policy or paradigm?

The reason I say it could have been an interesting topic is that research that is primarily funded by government is subject to the vagaries of government priorities. Not in the results, but in what areas research is undertaken.

On Seeps and SCAMS Part I: Lessons for Climate Scientists

There is a new paper in the literature, or soon to be in the literature, about the impact on climate scientists of denialist propaganda campaigns. The paper is easy to read, being virtually free of specialist jargon. It's written from the perspective of psychology and the lead author is Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, currently at Bristol University in the UK. There is a team of co-authors, some of whom who you'll recognise - Naomi Oreskes, James S. Risbey, Ben R. Newell and Michael Smithson. The paper is to be published in the journal Global Environmental Change, rather than a psychology journal. The reason becomes clear when you read the paper. It's explaining how climate scientists can be adversely affected by denier memes, such as "uncertainty" in climate science. [This is Part I of a three part series. Click for Part II and Part III.]

If you thought that dispassionate scientists, when doing scientific research, are immune from denialist propaganda you'd be wrong. It's not just when scientists talk about climate that they can demonstrate they've been influenced by denialists' campaigns. Even their scientific publications can be so influenced.

The Institute of World Politics on unethical conduct, foreign propaganda, deception and covert political influence

Anthony Watts has posted an article on his blog announcing the existence of yet another secret UN organisation (archived here) called the "UN Climate Change Commission". David "funny sunny" Archibald claims this previously unheard of UN entity is "on a path to rule the world ".  (David is a science denier who, like many deniers, is prone to paranoid conspiracy theories of this type.) I'm guessing this UN entity is known only to a select few at the Institute of World Politics. Maybe only to one person - David "funny sunny" Archibald.  The "UN Climate Change Commission" is not listed on the United Nations list of UN Climate Change Organizations and Programs.

The Institute of World Politics

David Archibald promotes himself at WUWT as a Visiting Fellow, Strategic Energy Policy at the Institute of World Politics. He is described on the Institute's website as:

a Perth, Australia-based scientist working in the fields of oil exploration, climate science, energy and geostrategy

Now I don't know much about the Institute of World Politics or its agenda. Here is what I do know. The Institute states on its website that it encourages "a free and open atmosphere to support the search for truth, the heart of the academic enterprise".

OMG! Embarrassing even for WUWT - "Why does the IPCC community use Stefan Boltzmann for gases" - and more gems!

You won't believe the article that Anthony Watts has on his blog. It's worse than hilarious. Here are some gems from some ardent denier called Jean-Pierre Bardinet, who can't keep his story straight (archived here)

The trace-gases cannot “heat the surface“, according to the second principle of thermodynamics which prohibits heat transfer from a cooler body to a warmer body. 

About El Niño

With the Australian Bureau of Meteorology declaring an El Niño, and for anyone who is not familiar with the phenomenon, here is a short version of what happens. I wrote a longer article last year. There are more references down below as well.

About ENSO and El Niño

El Niño is one of the phases of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. There are three distinct phases, plus an in-betweener. These are known as:

• El Niño - the phase where the ocean releases warm air to the surface, usually resulting in an increase in global surface temperature
• La Niña - the phase where the ocean cools the surface, usually resulting in a decrease in global surface temperature - though with climate change it usually means a lesser increase, not a decrease
• Neutral - when there is neither an El Niño or a La Niña
• Modoki - which is a part way El Niño. It doesn't affect as much of the Pacific Ocean, and has different teleconnections (ocean-atmosphere links over a distance). You could think of it as an in-betweener that can't make up its mind whether to turn into a full blown event or not. (Don't tell a climate scientist that I said that - they'd correct me.) 

El Niño in the tropical Pacific

El Niño has arrived in the tropical Pacific...

From the Australian Bureau of Meteorology:

El Niño in the tropical Pacific

Issued on 12 May 2015

The tropical Pacific is in the early stages of El Niño. Based upon model outlooks and current observations, the Bureau's ENSO Tracker has been raised to El Niño status.

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) indicators have shown a steady trend towards El Niño levels since the start of the year. Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean have exceeded El Niño thresholds for the past month, supported by warmer-than-average waters below the surface. Trade winds have remained consistently weaker than average since the start of the year, cloudiness at the Date Line has increased and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) has remained negative for several months. These indicators suggest the tropical Pacific Ocean and atmosphere have started to couple and reinforce each other, indicating El Niño is likely to persist in the coming months.

International climate models surveyed by the Bureau indicate that tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures are likely to remain above El Niño thresholds through the coming southern winter and at least into spring.

WUWT hits a new low - of the mundane denier weird kind

I'd say that WUWT is the inverse of global surface temperature. It's hit a new low of extreme denialism - of the mundane kind. I took a snapshot of the home page as it is now. (The archived page is formatted differently.)

Have a look! Anthony Watts is trying everything he can think of, no matter how silly, to see if something sticks in his deniers' brains.

Has WUWT hit a new low of denialism? (Of the mundane kind.)

Denier weirdness: Plant food and ice ages at WUWT

WUWT is stuck for ideas so is working its way through the denier memes listed at SkepticalScience. That's good, because I have a lot to do and I can let SkS respond. I've written a bit about the two recycled memes current at WUWT, provided a plot to ponder, and linked to SkS explanations.

The last few days WUWT has had:

• CO2 is plant food, and
• An ice age cometh.

Another list of 142 cranks at WUWT

You can tell a person's character from the company they keep. There's a list of 137 people who keep company with Tim Ball and E. Calvin Beisner and Joe Bastardi and Joseph D’Aleo and David Legates at WUWT.

Just in case you ever need to check denier "credentials".

Related, with some overlap

• List of scientists "respected in their field" - only @wattsupwiththat - take on the EPA
• Las Vegas Denier Fest: Awards for best con artists, denial propagandists and plodders for hire
• The Wrong Climate Stuff

More Weedz Pleeze, pleads WUWT - but where is Anthony Watts?

Anthony Watts is having trouble getting anyone to write his blog articles these days. Today he's put up a "CO2 is plant food" article by that fan of mass murderers, the conspiracy theorising Tim Ball (archived here). What CO2 will most probably bring is an abundance of weeds, and floods and droughts and wildfires and intense storms seriously affecting food production.

Thing is, Anthony seems to have all but given up on his blog. These past few weeks he's handed the WUWT keys to Eric "eugenics" Worrall mainly. But Anthony's been pretty well absent for longer than a few weeks.

I noticed some time ago that Anthony had all but stopped contributing to WUWT, so I thought I'd look at the evidence. Below is a run down of what Anthony Watts has written all by himself since the beginning of February. I don't count copies and pastes of press releases or newspaper articles, or copies and pastes from other denier blogs, but am still erring on the side of leniency.

February to May inclusive - only 21 out of 414 articles are "originals" by Anthony Watts, being generous

Out of 414 WUWT articles since the beginning of February, Anthony has only contributed 21 of his own "original" thoughts. And most of those are a very poor effort - and few have anything to do with weather or climate. Here's his contribution since the beginning of February:

Eric Worrall mocks the small island states that will go under

Eric "eugenics" Worrall has taken over Anthony Watts' blog WUWT from the look of things. I say that because he's no longer a "guest", he's now a WUWT fixture. Anyway, Eric doesn't like the Carribean. That's a surprise because he's indicated that he moved to the subtropics, north of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, to get away from the cold UK.

As you know we promote heavily ecotourism, and if action is not taken by the international community to halt greenhouse gas emissions we’re going to have a serious challenge.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, Dominica

Today Eric's decided to mock a meeting of Caribbean leaders, who were preparing their submission for COP21, the UNFCCC meeting to be held in Paris later this year (archived here).

These leaders aren't from places no-one's heard of.  They are from the playground of the rich and famous and their countries are home to the rich as well as the poor. These are islands like the Bahamas, Belize, Barbados, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago; and Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts-Nevis, St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

There's a short report of the meeting by the Inter Press Service News Agency, which Eric didn't link to. He's not interested in such details. As I said, his mockery demonstrates that he couldn't give a damn about small island nations disappearing, as many will in a few short decades.

The Joke's on Bob Tisdale! His papal mockery falls flat in a sea of solar panels in The Vatican, World's Greenest State.

Bob Tisdale had a shot at mocking Pope Francis by putting up a recent photo of him with the Harlem Globetrotters (archived here).

The photo made headlines last week, when Pope Francis was made an honorary globetrotter. He was only the ninth person (and the second Pope) to be so awarded, according to Latino Fox.

This got under Bob's skin - is he a globetrotter fan? He's not a fan of Anthony Watts' religious leader, that's for sure.

Bob wrote:

Stunning Photo Reveals How Vatican Learned to Spin Global Warming
...Will the Vatican be adding solar panels atop the Sistine Chapel and a windmill at the peak of the obelisk in Saint Peter’s square?  They should lead by example.

A little Google would have gone a long way.

2,000 photovoltaic panels on top of Nervi Hall, Vatican. Photo: Reuters

The Vatican has installed panels to power all of its 40,000 households, making it arguably the greenest state in the world. Some are installed on top of the building shown in the photo above - that happened seven years ago in 2008. There is also a solar plant installed on 740 acres near the medieval village of Santa Maria di Galeria.

Note: It looks as if the 40,000 homes / 740 acre solar farm hasn't happened. I don't know if it is still on the drawing board or not. See comment by Lotharsson below.

Sou 21 June 2015

Oh, and Renault gave the previous Pope an electric vehicle.

This isn't the first time Bob Tisdale failed the Google test.

Around the climate blogs: addiction to global mean temperature; and the electricity cost of California's drought

HotWhopper exists to replace deniers' disinformation with science, which means that it's easy to forget there is real work going on out in the world. A couple of items from the Blog Roll are worth reading when you want a break from the conspiracy-theorising nuttery that goes on in the deniosphere.

Addiction to global mean temperature: Isaac Held

First of all, Isaac Held has written about the addiction to global mean temperature and the dangers in considering it in isolation. Isaac Held is a modeler with the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory at Princeton University, although the views expressed are his own, not any official position. He talks about what can happen if you use simple globally averaged box models, without taking account of spatial structure of the response to forcing. His articles are for the advanced climate hawk, usually. But I dare say that most HotWhopper readers wouldn't find this latest article of his difficult.

The energy cost of the Californian drought: Peter Gleick

Moving away from the theoretical to the practical, Peter Gleick has written about the impact of the Californian drought on the cost of its electricity supply. Peter Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland. He reports that California has had to replace cheap hydro electricity with more expensive power from natural gas. (Can you take out drought insurance against higher electricity prices?) Drought has been a big problem for electricity supply in Brazil, too.

Denier quote of the day: Humans are Quite Amazingly Heading to North Korea

This comment was written under a WUWT article that had nothing to do with climate science. It was about a larger than normal solar flare that was observed by sun watchers at NASA (archived here).

kokoda  May 8, 2015 at 8:10 pm
Humans are quite amazing – on the negative side. They will lie or say nothing just to keep their job. Not hard to believe, as humans will kill tens of thousands just with orders from above. Propaganda works well as it is usually aimed to trigger as emotional influence. Indoctrination via the educational system on the young is extremely effective.

If the AGW religion isn’t trashed within a few years, a full generation is going to be inculcated as believers. Then, we will be similar to N. Korea. You can believe this when the gov’t exercises its authority on the Internet and shuts down sites opposing gov’t policies. It is possible.

WUWT's tin foil hat wearers cannot help themselves.

Denier reaction to cancellation of Bjorn Lomborg's post at UWA

There’s nothing “smart” about spending $4 million of taxpayer cash on a highly questionable methodology that by design downgrades climate change.

Graham Readfearn

You may have seen in the comments or news that the University of Western Australia has thought better of its decision to provide a much-needed home for the wandering Bjorn Lomborg. The Vice Chancellor, Paul Johnson, has written a convoluted article explaining his reasons, mixed up with various excuses for appointing him in the first place.

Maurice Newman, the Australian Prime Minister's business adviser and favoured conspiracy nutter

Did you know that our Prime Minister gets his science advice from a science-denying cleric, and his business advice from a "black helicopter"-style conspiracy theorising nutter.

Pope Francis and Jeffrey D. Sachs get the Heartland Institute into a sulk about climate, at WUWT

Jeffrey D. Sachs has written an opinion piece: "Climate Change and the Catholic Church", directed at people in the USA. In a well-written article, he targets the political and other vested interests that are working against any and all action to mitigate climate change.  He frames climate change as both a moral and a scientific issue, which it is. His article starts with:

Pope Francis is calling on the world to take action against global warming, and many conservatives in the United States are up in arms. The pope should stick to morality, they say, and not venture into science. But, as the climate debate unfolds this year, most of humanity will find Francis’s message compelling: we need both science and morality to reduce the risk to our planet.

He goes on to cite research that I've mentioned here briefly, writing:

In a survey of Americans conducted in January 2015, an overwhelming majority of respondents (78%) said that, “if nothing is done to reduce global warming,” the future consequences for the US would be “somewhat serious” or “very serious.” Roughly the same proportion (74%) said that if nothing is done to reduce global warming, future generations would be hurt “a moderate amount,” “a lot,” or “a great deal.” Perhaps most tellingly, 66% said that they would be “more likely” to support a candidate who says that climate change is happening and who calls for a shift to renewable energy, while 12% would be “less likely” to support such a candidate.

The Heartland Institute is in a sulk

At one stage Dr Sachs mentions the Heartland Institute and its funded opposition to addressing the problem of global warming.

CO2 is at 400 ppm and rising - and Bob Tisdale thinks we can reduce it easily!

May 2013 was the first time atmospheric CO2 of 400 ppm had been recorded at Mauna Loa. Now there's a new record. In March this year CO2 was at 400 ppm globally, average for the month. This is what we've done since around 1840:

Data sources: Law Dome from Etheridge(06) and Mauna Loa

As I wrote last time, this has never happened before since humans evolved. It's never happened in at least 800,000 years and probably much longer.

UAH latest beta version shows the lower troposphere has been warming up

I was looking at the latest temperature data for the lower troposphere, from UAH. That is, the latest version (v6.0 beta). Roy Spencer has provided an update at WUWT (archived here).

Did you know that the monthly global average for the lower troposphere has been lower than the average for the period from 1981 to 2010 on only 28 of the 128 months since January 2001? That is, in only 16% of the months this century, has the global monthly mean been less than the 30 year average to 2010. That's right. I'm not talking about an average from the twentieth century or the middle of last century. This is the average from 1981 to 2010. Recent times. And that's assuming he's got his tropospheric temperatures right this time around.

And it's only happened once in the three years since April 2012. And then only by 0.01°C - in May 2013.

A conspiracy by the University of Adelaide against WUWT

By all accounts (that is, one (1) account), one of my alma maters, the University of Adelaide, has "throttled" access to WUWT. There's a whole article about it.

Anthony Watts asks politely:

Can anyone check out this claim of suppressed access?

He posted the text from a reader, who complains that it is taking 10 to 15 minutes to load a WUWT page, and then wrote (my emphasis):

I have had similar emails from time to time, but I’ve never had any interest in following it up since such things can often be flukes. But this time, maybe not, so I’ve decided to ask if users are seeing similar things when they try to access WUWT via government networks and university networks. I’m really interested to find out if anyone at University of Adelaide can corroborate this story. 

Sadly, there is only one reader (out of the tens of thousands of staff and students), who is trying to access WUWT from the University of Adelaide, so the throttling can't be confirmed by anyone else.

This year the Heartland Institute climate science denier fest is in Washington DC

This year the Heartland Institute's Annual Denier Fest is to be held in Washington DC. Going by Anthony Watts' headline, a lot of fake experts and climate misinformers will be presenting (archived here). All are welcome, particularly white men over 75 years of age who reject climate science, haven't been near a University science faculty in fifty years or don't know what a University science faculty is, and think that any and all climate science is a hoax.

What the Heartland Institute won't tell you

The Heartland Institute tells you what you want to hear, if you are a science denier. It won't tell you what is happening to our climates. That would be a step far too far for an extremist right wing lobby group in the USA. Instead, the Heartland Institute promises to feed you lies and half truths, from panels of fake experts, professional disinformers and anti-science bloggers.

Here is some of what the fakers from the Heartland Institute won't tell you:

Jo Nova's Solar Force be With You - if you're a wacko science denier

...solar and volcanic forcings, the two dominant natural contributors of climate change since the pre-industrial time.

I was pointed to Jo Nova's wacky blog today. Jo Nova is the screen name of a born again science denier from Western Australia, who comes up with some of the more outlandish "theories" you'll see about global warming (ie crazy, unscientific nonsense of the wackadoodle variety).

She was waxing sarcastic about the influence of the sun on climate (archived here). Jo was trying to tell her readers that climate scientists ignore the impact of the sun on the earth. So I thought that while WUWT is deep in conspiracy theory land, I'd hit Jo's silliness on the head.

Bob Tisdale trots over to Berkeley Earth to fetch a red herring from China

Bob Tisdale has trotted over to Berkeley Earth to have a look at what is happening to surface temperature in China (archived here). It's odd that he's allowed to do that, because Anthony Watts disowned Berkeley Earth because it failed to show that we are heading for an ice age, or something like that. (Anthony has to pander to the bulk of his readers who deny that global warming is happening.)

Anyway, Anthony gave Bob Tisdale a free pass. He probably thinks that no-one ever reads Bob's articles anyway, and they fill the gaps in his daily quota of blog nonsense.

Bob Tisdale gets enthused about surface temperature in China

Bob set out to prove that China isn't warming any faster (or slower) than the land surface of earth as a whole.  He reckons the media should have fact-checked something that the head of China's Meteorological Administration, Dr Zheng Guoguang, reportedly said to the Study Times, as reported by Reuters. That "the country's rate of warming was higher than the global average".

The moral bankruptcy of deniers: sending the poor into a pit of smoke, pollution and disease

There's a very weird cartoon at WUWT from Josh at WUWT today (archived here). It looks as if he's urging the world to push poor nations into a pit of smoke, pollution and disease. Under a headline: "Turning our backs on the poor? Cartoon by Josh", Yep. Turning their backs on the poor is one thing deniers do well. Josh explains that he wants poor nations to build more and more dirty coal-fired power plants instead of clean renewable energy.

Josh has drawn some chap climbing down into a dark pit, labelled "smoke, pollution and disease", being urged on by deniers, presumably - and saying "thank you" for the privilege of being doomed to an early grave.

I won't post it - but if you want you can see the archived version.

Did I ever say deniers are morally bankrupt?

Anthony Watts puts Roy Spencer and John Christy on notice

Anthony Watts has put Roy Spencer and John Christy on notice (archived here). He has found an article about how some computer programmers have written a fancy paper. The paper is "fancy" in that if you click on links and charts, you're apparently taken to program code and data.

Now providing data and code might be new in the world of computer science but it's been the norm for climate science for years. There's more data than deniers know what to do with. Articles on anti-science blogs like WUWT show that deniers don't have a clue what to do with the data that is available. In fact most of them don't even know that there is a heap of data and code they can play with.

WUWT is utter nutter heaven: David "funny sunny" Archibald sez his ice age is comething

Anti-science activist Anthony Watts can't make up his mind if he's coming or going. Into or out of an ice age, that is. And he wonders why people regard his blog as utter nutter heaven.

Today he's promoting David "funny sunny" Archibald again, with his ice age comething predictions (archived here). He found a spot somewhere in the world where it's been a bit cold lately, and wrote an article with the headline: "A Prediction Coming True?"

David's prediction, you may recall is that an ice age is comething. Here's what he has said will happen by 2020 - a drop of 1.5 degrees from 2005:

Data sources: GISTemp and Archibald (2006)

The chart above also shows what has happened since David's 2006 "prediction" - published in that august journal E&E - ha!. David's prediction is in yellow, the actual is in white. The year before his prediction was the hottest year on record at the time. In the eight years since his "prediction", 2010 then 2014 were the hottest years on record. Is he nuts to claim his prediction is "coming true"? What word would you use to describe his fantasy?

Christopher Monckton's Latest Conspiracy Theory: World Guvmint caused by ENSO

This was sighted at Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog, WUWT, today, from Monckton of Brenchley (my emphasis):

May 4, 2015 at 10:23 am
In response to Aneipris, the problem is timing. The el Nino, if it endures to the end of this year, will shorten the Pause. Then the Paris conference will introduce a world government. Then the la Nina will continue the Pause, but it will be too late. In the current draft treaty, there is no secession clause.

Deniers complain when we point out their conspiracy nuttery. It doesn't stop them getting nuttier by the day.

Rud Istvan goes on a Gish gallop at WUWT

Rud Istvan is a climate science denier who hangs out at various denialist haunts. Today he's got a silly article at the anti-science blog of Anthony Watts at WUWT (archived here). He's trying to sell a dumb book he wrote to the deniers at WUWT. (Just how much did he pay to get his "book" vanity-published and marketed as an ebook!) His article has the word "truth" in the title: "Talking Truth to the Climate Consensus". This is a big red flag, alerting the wary that what follows is likely to be a lie. Particularly as the article is on a blog that is known as a climate disinformation blog.

Rud says that Bjorn Lomborg is a denier because he doesn't promote mitigation of climate change (by reducing CO2 emissions). Bjorn is more in favour of letting the lucky survive - those who can afford to adapt and recover, and letting the rest go to pot. In other words, Bjorn ignores the fact that we all rely on each other. If the USA can afford to recover from floods and fire and drought, it won't be much help when the goods it has got used to can't be produced any because more vulnerable nations sink under rising seas or are caught up in conflict after famine and drought.

Five people died in Queensland floods

The weather in much of eastern Australia has been extreme over the past few weeks. That's only one of the words I can find to describe it. In just the last 24 hours, five people have died as a result. That's in a country where people are not unused to floods.

This is May already. The wet season should be done. In any case, this is south of the tropics. Yet not long after incredible downpours and floods in the Hunter region in NSW, there've been such heavy rains over part of south eastern Queensland that it's taken the lives of five people - in three separate events of cars being washed away by floodwaters.

Please, people - take care out there. Weather can be extremely dangerous.

Central England Temperature has fallen out of favour at WUWT

Some of you might remember how various WUWT-ers were hailing the temperature in Central England (HadCET) as heralding in an ice age. Two years ago a denier at WUWT was claiming that an ice age cometh, and pointed to HadCET - which, as you'll see below, indicated no such thing.  In June that year, David "funny sunny" Archibald made one of his famous failed predictions, that Central England was in for a cold spell. A few months later, a chap called Tony Brown claimed that HadCET showed temperatures were back to those of the 1730s, which was utter nonsense. (That is, they weren't!)

Now that particular temperature record has fallen out of favour. Not even the most ardent denier can deny it's got a lot hotter there in the past few years. I say they can't deny it, but they do, still.

Taking a 68,000 year break from conspiracies, at the poles

WUWT is taking a short intermission from it's normal fare of utter nutter conspiracy theories. Anthony Watts copied and pasted a press release about oceans, the Arctic and Antarctica. He didn't understand what he copied and pasted, confusing the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). His headline read (archived here): "AMO fingered in newly discovered 200 year bipolar disorder lag".

As you can probably guess, it wasn't the AMO that got "fingered", it was ocean circulation. The AMO is more or less just a pattern of sea surface temperature in the north Atlantic - a long way from Antarctica. The AMOC, on the other hand, is where currents overturn in the north Atlantic, off Greenland, effectively pumping water around the world. At least Anthony didn't put the word "claim" in front of his headline this time.

Denier weirdness: Conspiracy theories get odder by the day at WUWT

Anthony Watts has come up with yet another conspiracy theory. It's full of holes, but what do science deniers care, those who can see the holes, that is. In fact it's got so many holes that it vanishes as soon as you touch it - it disintegrates into nothingness. Conspiracy theorists are willing to accept any nonsense. I haven't seen a sillier article or a sillier thread at WUWT in at least a few hours.

If you have a few minutes to waste, read on. Otherwise, wait for me to write about something vaguely sane.