Liquid water on Mars

There has been a lot of speculation about what is going to be revealed at a NASA press conference in 15 minutes or so. Nature Geoscience put an embargo till 11:00 am eastern US time. So the news is now out.

There are signs of liquid water on Mars.

The people who'll be there at the press conference provided a clue. They are:

• Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters
• Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters
• Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta
• Mary Beth Wilhelm of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and the Georgia Institute of Technology
• Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) at the University of Arizona in Tucson

Pick the odd one(s) out. Lujendra Oiha co-authored a paper in Science a couple of years ago about water on Mars. (Mary Beth Wilhelm is interested in organic biomarkers.)

Neel V. Patel at Inverse guessed it correctly.

Read about it at the Guardian. Here's a preview:

Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the odds of the planet being home to some form of life.

The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.

You can (maybe) watch the NASA press conference, though I'm having trouble. Probably too many people tuned in (more than 72,800 people are trying to watch it!).

Moaning about the demise of Maurice Newman, Australia's high profile climate conspiracy theorist

On Anthony Watts' climate conspiracy blog WUWT, Eric Worrall is moaning about Maurice Newman (archived here). In another move showing that he does take climate change seriously (albeit within political constraints), Australia's new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, will not be re-appointing Maurice to the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council, which he chaired under Tony Abbott.

Maurice Newman is an uber conspiracy theorist of the Tim Ball kind. I've written about his wacky ideas on a number of occasions. He's not just a denier, he's a hard core conspiracy nutter who thinks, for example, that the sustainability action plan, Agenda 21, is some sort of evil plot. Eric Worrall couldn't be more wrong when he writes:

Releasing outspoken skeptic Maurice Newman from his advisory role seems unlikely to help Turnbull’s credibility on climate issues. 

Contrary to what Eric thinks, it will be a relief to almost everyone. I'd say most especially to the other members of the council. And it will lift the PM's credibility in regard to climate.

Improving the temperature record vs conspiracy theories at WUWT

Over the years, scientists in different parts of the world have worked hard to get a more accurate picture of the change in global surface temperature over time. This is slow painstaking work. Initially it would have meant working with written records, with people trying to decipher handwriting of the tens of thousands of people who wrote down readings of temperature and rainfall, and other weather indicators, from all the weather stations around the world. Over time the data was digitised - another extremely laborious task.

I'm not going to write about all that's been done. It's a mammoth ongoing effort involving people from all around the world. What I'm writing about are the ignorant scoffers. You know the people I mean. The ones who sit at their keyboards all day to snipe at the work done by scientists.

Anthony Watts has put up three articles from one chap who's been looking to see the extent of this careful work, as measured by adjustments to the original data. He's only looked at two data sets. One which is used by NASA and NOAA for global land surface temperatures. The Global Historical Climatology Network Data or GHCN. This was first developed in the early 1990s, with the current version 3 released in 2011. The other is the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), which is the high quality dataset used by NOAA for USA temperatures since 1987.

Different versions of surface temperature reconstructions: science vs WUWT

This article is really just charts of surface temperature reconstructions. The first charts are the real global and hemispherical and continental reconstructions. And down below you'll see Anthony Watts' very odd notions. (He can't decide which "not global" reconstruction he likes best, so this week he's offered two different versions. Neither of which is global, and for one of which he couldn't even get the dates right.)

Doubling down on doozy: Anthony Watts is now denying the Little Ice Age

Professor Michael Mann recently wrote a response to a denier (who'd accused him of fraud), and corrected him, saying that:

Mr. Sauer begins by promoting the falsehood that “temperatures exceeded what we have today at a time (the Medieval period) when today’s industrialization did not exist”. That is so shopworn a myth that it ranks among the top climate change denier talking points (see the response to this myth by the scientist-run website Skeptical Science). The scientific consensus today is that, while some regions of the globe were relatively warm during the Medieval era, the warmth was not nearly as widespread as today. The overall warmth of the globe and northern hemisphere today is substantially greater than during Medieval time. Mr. Sauer might also want to take note that the year 2015 is off to the warmest start ever, 2014 was the warmest full year on record, and took place during the warmest decade on record.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how Anthony Watts used a wonky chart of temperatures on the summit of the ice sheet in central Greenland, arguing that it "proved" that Professor Mann and all the world's paleoclimatologists were wrong and he, science denying conspiracy theorist was right.

In support of his wrong claim that it was globally hotter in medieval times than it is today, Anthony tried to claim:

• the temperature of the ice sheet in Central Greenland in 1855 was a good proxy for global surface temperature of 2015. 
• if it was widely cold more than 11,500 years ago (the Younger Dryas), then it must have got hotter globally 1,000 years ago.

You say "huh? where's the logic in that?" and I say "there's none". Well, Anthony's doubled down, shifting his focus to a mountainous region in Spain (archived here).

It's not just climate scientists who agree we are causing global warming, yet deniers are eternally wishful

Anthony Watts has discovered a new survey that shows that it's not just climate scientists who know that the earth is getting hotter and humans are causing it.  The paper was authored by a team of scientist from the USA: J Stuart Carlton, Rebecca Perry-Hill, Matthew Huber and Linda S Prokopy. The results suggest almost all biophysical research scientists accept climate science, not just climate researchers. Yes, that includes physicists and chemists and astronomers and biologists and geologists and more. The authors said that "scientists across disciplines nearly unanimously believe in anthropogenic climate change, are highly certain that climate change is happening, and find climate science to be trustworthy and credible."

(Note: almost all the charts were plotted by me, based on information in the paper or the appendix. And this is my take on the research.)

Researchers in and out of climate science agree that temperatures have risen and we've caused it

Almost all researchers in the biophysical sciences that is. 93.6% of respondents agreed that temperatures have risen when compared with pre-1800's levels. Of these, 98.2% agreed that 'human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures'.

The chart below gives an indication of how many respondents had at least some knowledge about their world's climate:

A Doozy Denier Don from Anthony Watts: Medieval Warming was 11,500 years ago!

If anyone is under the wrong impression that Anthony Watts knows something about climate science, this will set you straight. He doesn't. You might have thought that he doesn't "believe" a lot of what he posts. It seems he does. Even the silliest nonsense. I used to think that he didn't read anything he posted, but it appears that he does. Only sometimes. But mostly not. And I was wondering the other day when we were going to get another article from him. He writes so rarely these days, leaving it all up to other people that I was beginning to think that he had quit altogether.

Today he's written a short piece (archived here). What he has called a Quote of the Week. It's not a bad quote I suppose, but there's no reason for a denier to pull it out as a quote of the week unless they are a hard core denier.

Now I've said before that when Anthony Watts decides to write something himself, he usually gets things dreadfully wrong. Today is no exception. He's done a doozy. And he's proven that he does read some of what he posts. He must have read some Denier Don Easterbrook. Or maybe this is a homage to Don.

WM Briggs thinks the dinosaurs read thermometers

William M Briggs sez he is "statistician to the stars" and claims to "know good physics from bad".  He's wrong. Today he's got an article on some god (US-style) blog, that looks as if it's a libertarian (US-style) god blog. Long on faith and free speech and short on fact. I guess William thought he needed to get it in front of climate conspiracy theorists too, because he had Anthony Watts post a short bit of it at WUWT. (Or maybe it's just that Anthony is stuck for articles to fill up his daily quota.)

William faces a conundrum

William can't reconcile the so-called "pause" with the hottest years on record. He wrote:

Which is it? Either it’s hotter than ever or it isn’t. If it is, then (it is implied) man-caused global warming has not “paused.” If it isn’t, if man-caused global warming has “paused,” then it is not growing hotter.

Now William might want to go and have a chat with his favourite co-author, the potty peer Christopher Monckton. He'd soon set him crooked. Thing is, global warming hasn't paused. Sixteen of the twenty hottest years on record have occurred from 2000 onward, including this year, 2015. According to NASA, the hottest years on record are, so far, and in order:

Every day is denial day at WUWT, with models

Anthony Watts and his readers are deniers. There's no way around that. AP journalists might try calling them "climate change doubters", but deniers have no doubt. They have complete confidence in their conspiracy theory that climate science is a hoax.

A case in point. Yesterday it was greenhouse effect denial day at the climate conspiracy blog WUWT. Anthony Watts has rejected the greenhouse effect, again, publishing an article by some chap from New Zealand who went to see one of the Thin Ice viewings (archived here).

In the past, Anthony has been known to come out and declare that he doesn't exactly reject the greenhouse effect. It's just that he thinks it suddenly stopped working or something like that. This is happening less and less often, as he lets his blog slip further and further into conspiratorial paranoia.

Anyway, yesterday Anthony didn't bother with any disclaimer that he, blog owner, accepts the greenhouse effect. As climate change kicks in, Anthony knows that he must hang onto whatever visitors he can get. If that means letting go of any semblance of reality, so be it. Page hits matter.

No doubt about it: AP's new euphemism for science denying conspiracy theorists is not politically correct

Seems that AP has succumbed to the poor sensitive little science deniers who call for jail time for climate scientists. It's more than political correctness - it's political correctness gone haywire. Usually it's the extreme right wing ideologues who moan about people who conform to "political correctness" - except when they want a euphemism for their own behaviour. Instead of calling climate science denial denial of climate science, AP wants to pretend that rampant deniers only doubt climate science. Which is nonsense. Deniers don't doubt. They just "know" that all the science of the past 200 years is wrong. Deniers reject science. They prefer to think that for the past 200 years there has been a giant hoax perpetrated on the illiterati (that is, deniers).

From denial to doubt? No, it's still denial

Paul Colford wrote at AP about a change to the AP Style Guide:

Our guidance is to use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science and to avoid the use of skeptics or deniers.

Double Trouble: For Whom the Tol Bells: and What 2014 El Nino is that?

For Whom the Tol Bells

Greg Laden asked on Twitter "is this the end of Tol?  Shall he ask for whom the Bell ...".

It's really hard to resist making bad puns about tolling, isn't it, when you think of Richard Tol (if you've ever heard of him. If you haven't read on.) The remarkable thing is that the bell isn't Toling. Normally as soon as someone mentions Richard Tol's name "somewhere on the internet", up he pops, relishing the attention. Not this time however. Or not so far.

Collin Maessen of Real Skeptic has written a devastating take-down of Richard's latest swipe at the 97% consensus. You'd think he'd have given up by now wouldn't you. But he hasn't. Instead he's broadened out to misrepresenting not just the Cook13 97% study, but most of the other research papers that have gauged the level of scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.

From Shakespeare conspiracies to climate conspiracies

Yesterday I came across an article at WUWT (archived here), which Anthony Watts described as coming from an "educated listener". It was nothing but a very, very long denier screed in the form of a letter to Anthony Brandon, WYPR station manager. WYPR is a radio station in Baltimore, and associated with NPR (National Public Radio, USA). Dr. Roger Stritmatter signed himself as "Professor of Humanities Coppin State University".

I wondered why a professor of humanities thought he knew more about climate than all the specialist researchers who've spent their working lives studying the subject. What made him think he knew so much that had escaped the experts?

Another denier who gets his pseudo-science from climate conspiracy blogs

As it turned out, Roger relied on denier blogs like WUWT and Jo "Force X and the Notch" Nova. So he knew nothing about climate but he did pick up a few conspiracy theories in his travels. He's also an "ice age comether", writing:

...the real risk to the future we want for our children and grandchildren is not warming, but serious, widespread, and potentially disruptive cooling.

Yep, that's what the humanities professor wrote after the hottest decade on record, and the hottest year on record, which is about to be beaten by another hottest year on record, and quite probably yet another hottest year on record in 2016.

The Urban Cool Island Effect stumps deniers at WUWT

There is a new paper with the title: "The urban heat island effect and city contiguity". The authors, Neil Debbage and J. Marshall Shepherd from the University of Georgia analysed the difference between urban areas in the USA and their rural surrounds. I don't have time to go into much detail except to say that, as with other studies, they found that some places have an Urban Cool Island Effect. Not all cities are hotter than their surrounds.

Here's the map from Figure 4 in the paper:

Fig. 4. Map of the annual average UHI intensity (°C) in 2010 for the 50 most populous MSAs in the United States.

Climate things to do - a short round up

This is just to let you know of a few things that you might have missed.

First, Skeptical Science is doing a reader survey. So pop over and let them know what you like best about SkS - here's the link.

Then there's an in-depth article about Exxon at Inside Climate News. It's about how Exxon invested quite heavily in climate research at a time when few people were talking about CO2 and global warming. Before the IPCC was set up. It's a real eye-opener. The authors: Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer, are to be congratulated for their excellent research, as well as a highly readable article.

There's another new paper out disputing the so-called "pause" in global warming. It's about how the so-called "pause" fails a blind test. It has just been published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The authors are Stephan Lewandowsky, James S. Risbey and Naomi Oreskes. The paper can be downloaded here.

Peter Sinclair of ClimateCrocks fame has a wonderful video featuring Stefan Rahmstorf - it's only just over six minutes. It features Stefan's beautiful photography, as well as his passion for climate science. Do go and read the article and watch the video. For the lazy ones, here's the video - but go and compliment Peter, too:

References

SkepticalScience reader survey

Exxon: the road not taken - article by Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer at Inside Climate News

Stephan Lewandowsky, James S. Risbey and Naomi Oreskes. "The “Pause” in Global Warming: Turning a Routine Fluctuation into a Problem for Science" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2015 ; e-View doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00106.1 (open access)

Stefan Rahmstorf – A Scientist’s Mind, and an Artist’s Eye - article and video from Peter Sinclair of ClimateCrocks.com

Denier Cherries: Big changes to come in climate or same old same old?

There's an article on the climate conspiracy blog, WUWT, which illustrates the tunnel vision or selective bias of deniers. It is another example of blatant cherry-picking. Eric Worrall repeated nonsense that he read on a denier website (archived here). He wrote about a recent publication from the UK Met, which has the title:

UK Met: "Changes Underway in the Climate System?"

The misleading headline at WUWT reads:

WUWT: "UK MET: Global warming pause may continue". 

That's right. Compare the two titles. The UK Met booklet is suggesting there may be big changes underway, while the WUWT article is suggesting the Met Office is saying there'll be more of the same.

What denier blogs won't talk about - California fires

One of the most striking signs of climate science denial is what you read on denier blogs during major events. Or rather, what you don't read. Anthony Watts lives in Chico California. In his home state at the moment, all you will read about, and if what we experience in Australia is any indication, all you'll see on television and hear on the radio are reports of the devastating fires. But not on the "most read" climate conspiracy blog in California, WUWT. Not a word.

Visit the website of the LA Times and read the stories, made all the more heartbreaking by the matter of fact manner in which the reports are written.

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

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

Breaking - Malcolm Turnbull ousts Tony Abbott and will become Australia's new Prime Minister

Australia is about to get a new Prime Minister. Malcolm Turnbull has defeated Tony Abbott in a ballot taken by the Liberal Party just now.

This will, I hope, mean a change in Australia's position on climate action. I've been told that Malcolm may have done a "deal" to keep a low profile on climate, but I know he has strong views on the subject. So let's hope that he adopts a leadership stance and doesn't kow tow to the deniers in the party room.

I'll see if I can dig up some of what he's written on the subject. And contrast this with Tony Abbott's stance.

Meantime, while I don't usually blog on politics, this is potentially big news for climate, so I'll make an exception.

You can read more about this news:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-14/liberal-leaderhip-tony-abbott-challenged-by-malcolm-turnbull/6774546

Watch this space!

If you can tolerate talking heads from down under, the ABC NEWS 24 website has removed the geo block for the occasion.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/abcnews24/

UPDATE: Malcolm Turnbull has said that he supports the current government policy on climate change. Julie Bishop, the (continuing) deputy has said that Australia has already announced the targets for Paris and they won't change.

He also said that his government will be a collaborative, consultative government. So it looks as if it will be up to us to persuade the government to change direction.

Added by Sou at 10:55 pm Monday 14 September 2015

Denier weirdness: Very strange WUWT article on President Obama in Alaska

Before I write about the article at WUWT (archived here), here is the weekly address from President Obama, which he made just before his recent visit to Alaska. Susan Gardner has already written about this at Daily Kos.

The President discusses the rapid warming, shoreline erosion, storm surges and even the approval of Shell exploration. There is nothing in his speech that pops out as being "wrong", except for his decision to allow Arctic exploration.

At WUWT, there is a very strange article about Obama's Alaskan visit. It's as if the author doesn't understand what he's written.

Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog and distorted representation at Spiegel Online

Several days after the article appeared in Der Spiegel, Anthony Watts found out about it (archived here). After months of drought, he finally got another mention in mainstream media. In an article by Axel Bojanowski in Der Spiegel - or more correctly, in Spiegel Online. That's as big a deal as getting a mention in one of Rupert Murdoch's papers, like the Australian. Or a mention in the Herald-Sun on the blog of Australia's Andrew Bolt. Der Spiegel has not got an unblemished reputation when it comes to climate science.

WUWT is accused of distorted representation

Still, Anthony thinks he's got reason to celebrate, writing a headline: "German newspaper Spiegel names WUWT the most prominent climate skeptic blog".  He didn't seem to notice that Axel Bojanowski wrote about the distorted representations from denier blogs:

Sogenannte Skeptiker (siehe Grafik) sorgen besonders in den USA mit verzerrten Darstellungen von Forschungsergebnissen dafür, dass Warnungen aus der Klimaforschung als übertrieben gebrandmarkt werden. 

Which Google translated as:

So-called skeptics (see chart) provide particularly in the US with distorted representations of research results that warnings of climate change research are branded as exaggerated.

Faint praise indeed.

Conspiracies, volcanoes, and two thousand years of ocean cooling and warming

Deniers at WUWT are (belatedly) trying to shoot down a paper published in Nature GeoScience last month. It's from authors who are part of the Ocean2k project, the ocean component of the PAGES 2K international consortium. The lead author is Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Anthony Watts was first to protest (archived here). In a bout of denial at WUWT, he claimed that just because there were a lot of volcanic eruptions on earth from somewhere around 1200 AD to 1800 AD, it doesn't mean they caused the observed cooling. He wrote a headline: "The new poster child for ‘correlation is not causation’: industrial revolution ended 1800 years of volcanic induced cooling".

In that one headline he rejected both greenhouse and volcanic forcing. Naturally, he didn't say what he thinks caused the earth to cool over time, or what is causing the current warming. More of the WUWT magic?

The Google Conspiracy - and a Google search engine customised for science deniers

A guest blogger, Ari Halperin, at WUWT has decided to create a new search tool especially for science deniers (archived here).  Ari behaves like a full-blown conspiracy theorist, which is par for the course at WUWT. He has all the right words on his blog "CO2 is plant food" mixed in with some that I haven't seen before.

Musicologists impersonating climate scientists

Ari says that climate scientists are imposters. They aren't really scientists, they are instead "journalists, historians, musicologists, copywriters, and professional activists".

Why Christopher Monckton is getting nervous about global temperature

Christopher Monckton has been showing signs of nervousness in his latest "it hasn't warmed since xyz" article at WUWT (archived here). He has started emphasising statements like this one: "As ever, a warning about the current el Niño. It is becoming ever more likely that the temperature increase that usually accompanies an el Niño will begin to shorten the Pause somewhat, just in time for the Paris climate summit ....". Here are some charts to explain his caution.

What the charts below show are the monthly global temperatures of the lower troposphere (UAH and RSS) and the surface (GISTemp) for the months surrounding the latest strongest El Niños - 1997-1998, 2009-2010 and the year to date 2015. The rectangle on the charts is the period of the El Nino - usually from around April of the first year to March of the second year. I've left the baseline years as reported. It's the shape of the charts that are of interest.

Only at WUWT is acceptance of science "denial"

Tim Ball has another climate conspiracy article at WUWT. This time he defined who has been taken in by the climate hoax. It now include arguably the majority of the world.  That's right. Everyone except extremist right wing ideologues and conspiracy theorists. Tim claims that it includes:

• Pope Francis
• The President of the USA and his Cabinet
• Most world leaders, 
• A majority of the world’s politicians, 
• All environmental groups and their followers, and
• Most with a left political leaning. 

That's a lot of people. How do they keep this climate conspiracy secret? Given how Tim Ball and other extreme right-wingers define "left political leaning", it arguably includes about 80% or more of the 7.3 billion people in the world today.

Which means that by now he should be asking himself if there's a possibility that he is wrong and the rest of the world might be on to something.

The scientific illiterati rise up at WUWT

Illiterati: Definition from the Urban Dictionary

The opposite of the Illuminati, who take pride in their high level of knowledge and learning. An Illiterati takes pride in the fact that they are ignorant and refuse to learn (adjust their paradigm) often to the severe detriment of those around them.

Sometimes science deniers are quite unabashed about their desire to suppress all knowledge and particularly scientific knowledge and education. Anthony Watts has a "guest essay" by Eric Worrall (archived here), in which he claims that:

• Earth and Space Science is only about climate
• Earth and Space Science is "dogma" and "politically convenient pseudoscience".

Hmm. That sums up WUWT rather well, don't you think?

Problems with comments?

Two people now have told me they have had difficulty posting a comment. My apologies - there's not a lot I can do.

One solution has been to be to try a different browser.

Failing that, feel free to send me a comment by email to sou at hotwhopper.com (and let me know that it's a blog comment and the article you're commenting on) and I'll post it for you.

Google is in the middle of making changes, some of which seem to be have been causing a few bugs in the system over the past few days.

On the recurrent fury of unethical bloggers and how Anthony Watts issues a correction

Anthony Watts issues a correction? Surprised? Yes, you should be. Anthony Watts makes too many mistakes and publishes too many more. If he corrected all the wrongs on his blog WUWT would be one long correction. He didn't issue a correction for the following that have appeared on his blog in the past few days:

• We are about to enter an ice age (we're not. 2015 will almost certainly be another hottest year on record. Hotter than the current hottest, 2014.)
• UHI caused last year to be the hottest on record (it didn't)
• Sea levels physically can't rise by a metre this century (they can and quite possibly will.)

Nor did he issue a correction to his article that claimed that global warming is caused by steampipes in Russia, or that it's insects that are causing global warming.

And has Anthony published an apology and correction to his false allegations that NOAA researchers committed fraud - here and here and here? No, not at all.

But today, he's published an article (archived here) that complains that authors have issued a correction to a paper. That's right. Not only does Anthony Watts almost never issue a correction for the errors on his blog that are made multiple times every day - he has posted an article complaining that some authors did issue a correction!

Stretching credulity or the limits of knowledge at WUWT: An ice age cometh

There still isn't much happening in deniersville. The hottest year ever has flummoxed them, leaving them flailing ahead of Paris - so far. Anthony Watts is so stuck for contributions to pin on his blog noticeboard that he's scraping the bottom of the barrel with a very dumb "ice age cometh" article by petroleum geologist Dr. Norman Page (archived here). I wonder if this is the sort of thing that Anthony will publish in the first edition of his OAS journal?

Norman is a science-denying ice age comether from way back who by now should have learnt a few things. He hasn't. What he claims to have done is written an article for an eight year old child. From what he's written, an eight-year-old would run rings around Norman when it comes to climate science.

Norman starts off badly, when he can't even get the name of a well-known publisher of dictionaries right. I mean it's cute, but ...:

Miriam (sic) – Webster defines Epistemology as
“the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity “