Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Denier weirdness: No pennies have dropped for Bob Tisdale at WUWT

Some deniers at WUWT seem to think that Bob Tisdale has a wonderful intellect. If he does he hides it very well. I've already written about his conspiracy theorising fantasies from his new "book". Well, he's at it again at WUWT.

He wrote a very silly article (archived here), full of meaningless charts. He was, I think, making the point that it can get warm in the day and cool at night in Central England. And in that part of the world, it's warmer in summer than it is in winter, surprise, surprise. Does he think that nobody knew that? Where I live it doesn't usually get quite as cold but it can get a lot hotter, so I'd say we experience seasonal and diurnal differences in temperature that might not be that different, just shifted up a bit on the chart.

The point Bob was trying to make is so puerile that I'm wondering if I've got it wrong. Maybe he was trying to write about some other great breakthrough. If he was he didn't explain it well.


Have you noticed a change in the weather?


Or maybe he was just trying to argue that because it can get hot in summer and cold in winter then global warming won't be difficult. If that was his argument then he knows zilch about climate. Now that's no surprise either. No-one at WUWT knows anything worth knowing about climate. That's not what Anthony Watts' blog is for. He maintains his blog for disinformation not information.

It turns out that yes, that's what Bob was wanting to say, since he wrote:
As I wrote earlier, because the daily and seasonal variations in temperature where we live are so great, it’s very unlikely that we would be able to sense that global surface temperatures have warmed. We have to be told.  
But he didn't need to put up his silly charts, he could have just said that where he lives he hasn't noticed anything unusual with the weather. Maybe he never leaves his air-conditioned basement to see what's happening. Or he could have said that just because one region is getting hotter, it doesn't mean the whole world is getting hotter. That's why there are teams of people monitoring what is happening so that we can get an overall picture at the global level.

Data source: GISS NASA

I can tell you that some people such as me (and my 94 year old mother), have noticed that weather in recent years is unlike any experienced in our lifetime. We've had worse droughts, hotter heat waves, worse fires and more extensive flooding here. Australia is a land of extreme weather - and the extremes are getting more extreme. That doesn't mean that everywhere has been different.  And it doesn't mean that where weather is different there aren't people who haven't noticed. Lots of people spend almost all their time indoors, for example. Some people just don't notice what's going on around them.



Anomalies, trends and averages are too much for Bob Tisdale - he's amazed


Enough of that. At the end his silly article, Bob demonstrated even more clearly that he doesn't understand science or English. He wrote a heading in big bold capital letters:
ACCORDING TO A WELL-KNOWN AND WELL-RESPECTED CLIMATE SCIENTIST, “…NO PARTICULAR ABSOLUTE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE PROVIDES A RISK TO SOCIETY…”
Yes, that's right. Bob is quoting Dr Gavin Schmidt. That's just Bob's headline. He elaborated that he found what Dr Schmidt said was amazing to him (not to anyone else - Bob's a bit slow at the best of times). He wrote:
Every now and then, during the discussion of a global warming-related topic, a climate scientist—a member of the consensus—will make an amazing statement…or two.  Examples can be found in a blog post by Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies.  Dr. Schmidt wrote the following in his December 2014 blog post Absolute temperatures and relative anomalies, at RealClimate. (Blog post archived here.)  Dr. Schmidt was attempting to downplay the fact that there is a large range (about 3 deg C or about 5.4 deg F) in the absolute global surface temperatures produced by the climate models stored in the CMIP5 archive, which is roughly 3 times the warming we’ve experienced since pre-industrial times.  
You can read for yourself whether Gavin Schmidt was "trying to downplay" or whether he was just explaining in words that most nine-year-olds would understand (but not Bob Tisdale), that it's change in temperature that's important, not absolute. And if you look at the chart there is nothing like a 3 °C degree difference at any time. Bob's telling more fibs. The most is just over 1 °C, and that's unusual.

IPCC figure showing both anomalies as a function of time (left) and the absolute temperature in each model for the baseline (right) - Source: IPCC via realclimate.org

Bob continued:
Dr. Schmidt states, where GMT is global mean temperature (my boldface and my brackets):
Most scientific discussions implicitly assume that these differences [in modeled absolute global surface temperatures] aren’t important i.e. the changes in temperature are robust to errors in the base GMT value, which is true, and perhaps more importantly, are focussed on the change of temperature anyway, since that is what impacts will be tied to. To be clear, no particular absolute global temperature provides a risk to society, it is the change in temperature compared to what we’ve been used to that matters.
Yes, that's right. What is it that so amazes Bob, you might well ask. Let's see. Bob says:
See, I told you. That paragraph includes two memorable statements.
First: “…it is the change in temperature compared to what we’ve been used to that matters”.

Well, we’re “used to” wide variations in surface temperature every day, and “used to” even greater changes each year.
Bob's making a common mistake for deniers. He thinks that because the day and night temperature can vary by 20 °C or more, that he won't notice heat waves that shift from being hottest days around 43 °C to hottest days around 53C. I can tell you he'll sure as hell notice the difference if he goes outside. When we got a cool change after an extended heat wave a couple of years back, the temperature dropped from 47 °C to 38 °C - and we certainly noticed. A temperature we'd normally be complaining about felt like heaven by comparison with what we'd been enduring. (The average maximum temperature in February used to be 29 °C here.)

The next thing that amazed Bob seems to have been that he doesn't understand anomalies or averages, which is odd for someone who's been spouting pseudo-science for a number of years now. He wrote, quoting Gavin Schmidt again:
Second: “To be clear, no particular absolute global temperature provides a risk to society…

I would hazard a guess that many of you are now wondering why politicians around the globe are concerned about global warming. If the absolute global mean temperature today provides no “risk to society”, and if an absolute global mean temperature that’s 2.0 to 4.0 deg C (3.6 to 7.2 deg F) higher than today provides no “risk to society”, then what’s all the hubbub about?  Based on Dr. Schmidt’s statement, should the priority then be adaptation to weather and rising sea levels, not reductions in greenhouse gas emissions?
Is he really that thick do you think, or is he putting on an act because he thinks his readers are thick as two planks? It's not that he didn't read the article. He even quotes Gavin Schmidt earlier saying how it is the change that is important. More so, it's the rate of change or the trend. Where we live we've had extreme temperatures in the mid to high 40s for days on end already. Imagine what the extremes will be like if the average for the entire surface of the planet rises by another 3 or 4 °C. What will happen? Will we get regular heat waves in the fifties, maybe even the high fifties? Scientists have estimated that as soon as 2050, summers like the Angry Summer of 2013 will be the norm, not the exception. The exceptions will be much, much hotter. I probably won't be around to see that, but my nieces and great-nieces and nephews will. And their children.


From the WUWT comments


Dimwitted deniers at WUWT are impressed by Bob Tisdale's drivel. I wonder does Anthony Watts ever bemoan the fact that his "guest authors" and fan club members have a average IQ of around 60? I suppose he could use an artificial baseline of 30, then claim that his readers have an IQ of 30 above the baseline.

Tom Halla
November 9, 2015 at 2:26 am
Excellent primer on the subject.

Warren Latham
November 9, 2015 at 2:34 am
Excellent post by Bob Tisdale.
“Global Warming” is a CON. The entire basis of the CON is carbon-dioxide.
Carbon-dioxide is not a pollutant, it never was.
The “globe” is not warming.
Thanks again to Bob Tisdale: an excellent post.

Javier piped up and pointed out one of the fallacies in Bob's article:
November 9, 2015 at 3:49 am
Bob Tisdale: “First: “…it is the change in temperature compared to what we’ve been used to that matters”.
Well, we’re “used to” wide variations in surface temperature every day, and “used to” even greater changes each year.
Comparing changes in average temperature to seasonal variation is an apples to oranges comparison. While many mid-latitude locations experiment variations in summer to winter averages of 20-30°C, the average temperature change from glacial to interglacial has been calculated to be of around 5°C by experts. Clearly changes in global average temperature have a lot more drastic effect that changes of regional seasonal temperatures.
I guess everybody understands the difference between being in winter versus being in a glacial period. One cooling lasts a few months and the other lasts many millennia. The effect cannot be the same.

Since Bob Tisdale says he agrees that comparing seasonal variation to ice ages and interglacials is a meaningless comparison, then what was the point of his article? He claims that was the point - but the point Bob made is meaningless, as Javier again pointed out. (So pointily, eh?)
November 9, 2015 at 4:46 am
After quoting me about our being used to wide variations in surface temperatures every day and every year, Javier says: “Comparing changes in average temperature to seasonal variation is an apples to oranges comparison…”
Of course it’s “an apples to oranges comparison”. That’s the point. 

All of which proves the point that Bob Tisdale's unable to understand the simplest arithmetic and climate stuff.

emsnews  thinks that some un-named "their" ideal climate is the Little Ice Age.  Not so. He or she is wrong. Most scientists will tell you that we should be aiming for around 350 ppmv of carbon dioxide, quite a bit warmer than the Little Ice Age when CO2 was around 280 ppm, and there were a lot more volcanic aerosols. This would probably result in an average surface temperature of the late twentieth century, once it settled down.
November 9, 2015 at 5:32 am
Their ‘ideal climate’ is the Little Ice Age.
East coast US cities and many cities in Europe and Asia were founded DURING the Little Ice Age. Since then, the oceans have risen but no where near to Minoan Warm Age levels. This idiotic idea we should be very cold again has gripped many people who think change of any sort is evil.
The problem lies in previous city building. At no time in history have shorelines been ‘stable’ they change not just daily with tides but over geological time.
By the way, due to everyone using wooden ships to get around and do business, building right on top of the water was highly valued which is why low lying easily flooded cities were built in the first place! With the expectations that very cold conditions were normal.

References and further reading


Absolute temperatures and relative anomalies - article by Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.org

Bob Tisdale's illusion and conspiracy theories: A Book Review - HotWhopper article about Bob Tisdale's new "book", October 2015

(Not) looking forward to hotter and drier... - HotWhopper article about projections for climate change in Australia, March 2014

44 comments:

  1. "... then claim that his readers have an IQ of 30 above the baseline."

    No particular absolute global IQ provides a risk to society,

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  2. Anecdotally, I (and my 86 year old mother) have noticed that things are not as they were; as my mother puts it, "We don't seem to get seasons any more". Just now it's windy and wet, as it should be in November in these parts, but warm in a way it really shouldn't be.

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  3. From the Warren Latham comment:
    The “globe” is not warming.

    I wonder why he felt it necessary to put quotation marks around 'globe.' Another flat-earther?

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  4. Off topic, I missed this by Matt Ridley:

    https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/06/climate-wars-done-science/

    As far as I am able to discern, the guy is either an idiot or is quite at ease with telling gargantuan lies.

    And I note that the two alternatives are not mutually eclusive.

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    1. He ran a massively failed bank, I would say "at ease with telling gargantuan lies".

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    2. It's a thoroughly offensive piece of puffery. Pseudo-erudition, misrepresentation, slander, lies and hyperbole, all in Ridley's brass-necked and self-important style.

      "For much of my life I have been a science writer..." oh, the travails, the responsibility!

      "It’s analogous to the way art critics write about art, but with a difference: we “science critics” rarely criticise. If we think a scientific paper is dumb, we just ignore it."

      So it's not really analogous at all.

      Sheesh...

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  5. Pseudonymous self-declared authority quote-mines a scientist. How unexpected.

    Trust 'Bob' to go there... and it's heartening to see his urge to instruct the WUWT flock is irrepressible. Another tedious, overlong tract full of chum by WUWT's most arrogant pretender..

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    1. Hard to know if Bob's dense or dishonest. Probably both. I don't think he's too bright, and he's shown himself to be patently dishonest putting up charts intended to deceive WUWT's arithmetic-challenged..

      http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2013/05/more-tisdale-tricksdont-worry.html

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    2. Bob's an aggressive ideologue,and very determined. He loves the idea of expertise, the appearance of studiousness...his efforts betray an envy of genuine researchers. When the facts won't co-operate, he'll take the approach of padding every post until one groans at the redundant effort. That impresses the Watties.

      Anyone else knows he's a fraud of course, his maths is rudimentary, his belief that all GW can be accounted for through ENSO isolates him.

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    3. Maybe they could pay him to present a poster at AGU like uncle Tony... I fully expect the odd question about the OAS to be asked.

      R the Anon.

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    4. It's the difference in expertise between nuclear physicists with advanced post-graduate degrees who plan and conduct experiments to find the Higgs boson, and the chaps down at the pub who have "actually studied the matter"

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    5. "Hard to know if Bob's dense or dishonest. Probably both."

      Yes.
      Anyone struck by the typical type of climaterevisionist? The lobby sought out a very specific character for that, or rather two character types.
      1. Outright thugs with a sociopathological streak, e.g. Bob 'Drivel' Tisdale, Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, Steve McIntyre;
      2. Some lukewarmers with a very charming glib character, ours in Holland has vast succes (but VAST) - Marcel 'The Weasle' Crok. A country having one of those is absolutely damned.

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  6. Sou asks rhetorically, have I noticed a change in the weather?

    One of the local hay balers, a dour fellow in his 70s and as conservative as they come, confirmed what I've been observing - people are starting to cut their hay two months earlier this year because the winter was so warm that the grass grew much sooner into spring than usual. But it's also been dry, with only a quarter of the October average rainfall, so the heading stalks are much much shorter than usual, to the point that they're too short to bale successfully, and many are wrapping the hay for silage. There's a critical statewide shortage of hay already, just when there should be a glut, and the El Niño seems to haven't even finished tying its shoe laces yet. I am very concerned about how we're going to feed the horses, it's that dire. I truly hope that our green drought doesn't become a brown one, because with the extraordinary way the pins have all lined up there will be a rapid decent into trouble if it does.

    And one of my Dutch relatives tells me that amongst other things there are 20-something species of butterfly flitting around the Netherlands at the moment, when there should be six. I haven't been able to confirm this yet (cRR?) but if true this sort of ecosystem disruption is profoundly troubling in an evolutionary timeframe, with the attendant disruptions of ecological services that will accompany.

    And we're still on the lower slopes of the sigmoid curve. I don't think people truly grok how things fall apart once this sort of climatic behemoth gets a bit more momentum. Essentially every degree of warming will presage another order of magnitude of ecological damage.

    And the Paris talkfest is aiming for a (woeful) 2 C limit with a current minimum trabjectory plateauing at near 3 C...

    Grab hold of the nearest railings people. The future is going to be ugly.

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    1. Bernard, the 20 species flying around as opposed to a normal six to ten: true. It's something for Jeff Harvey cept he's on a well earned holiday now.

      First ten days of November averaged record 'hot', almost a degree difference to same periode 2005 (counting back to 1900).

      Those with young children should become aware where they live and anticipate on where they can go. Is my advise. Prepare for leaving Holland (because WAIS), California (Instant Desertification Zone) etc.

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    2. So after a year of very average weather, the first 10 days of November are more than 1 degree above average (because of mild southerly winds)

      Scary, indeed. Definitely time to leave the country

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    3. Nice try, Anon, deliberate misreading, isn 't it.

      So after a year of exceptionally boring virtually always warmer than climate weather (and, e.g., a new nationwide July record, and some more stuff like the record low Rhine at the moment), that November record (from 2005) was busted by a degree. The record, Anon.

      You can guess what I think of your intellect as can be observed what you think of mine. I guess.

      This country is Holland and the WAIS will end it by the end of this century. You are welcome here.

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    4. We have to remember that our Anon friend is living on Planet Denial. It's a comforting place with absolutely no rise in global mean temperatures, no record breaking temperatures, no record breaking droughts, no record breaking floods, no northwards movement of flora and fauna and no mass die offs of anything that can't move fast enough.

      And even the black smog from burning fossil fuels that denialites love does absolutely no harm at all. Indeed, on Planet Denial, fossil fuel industry executives are all philanthropists whose only aim is to make sure every single denialite is happy and well fed, clothed, and housed.

      What a happy place it is.

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    5. That is a place full of very uncomfortable suprises.

      What I always remember is that climate revisionists are thugs, but saying this seems to come over a bit harsh still for kind of the opposite comfort zone, that of the researchers and affiliates. The worlds are still parallel & disjunct.

      So I decided to call dementia instead. It seems to be friendlier, however my position is j'accuse! No innocence on planet denial, their naive slaves exempted - sometimes.

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    6. NL - another date record min temp.
      Number of November days TMax >= 15° C was 22 over the entire 20th century, the November with most of them (1955) had 4.
      November 2015 has now 10 such days and this century already totals 30.

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    7. Hey there now! It's an article of faith--if not reality--on Planet Denial that the only "climate revisionists" are the scientists who study, er, create hoaxes about in order to install an ultra-liberal new world order, the climate.

      Tony et. al. are passionate defenders of truth, justice, and the corporate way. Certainly not "thugs"!

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    8. And we're a buncha trolls dunningkrugering all :)

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    9. November here now has 11 'such days'. And counting!

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    10. The UK government already has legally binding commitments The 2008 Climate Change Act established the world’s first legally binding climate change target.

      But that hasn't stopped the Tories dismantling renewable energy schemes set up by the Labour government. So much so that now UK doesn't have right policies to meet renewable energy target, admits Amber Rudd

      So it is a bit hard to figure out who exactly is legally bound.

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    11. "So it is a bit hard to figure out who exactly is legally bound."
      The corpocracy/plutocracy is not.
      All victims are.

      F#ck Paris. It's hopeless.

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    12. Do we know each other well enough yet to be talking commitments and legally bound? :]

      CRR, It's really more like a narcokleptocracy here thanks to the Bush crime family.
      The victims are always the loser.

      Left/right been virtually two sides of the same coin ever since.

      But Keystone is dead and the Obama economy is off and running. Despite what the GOP obstructionists and shut down artists say. The price tag for the Keystone has doubled. That puts it into the price range of what a refinery used to cost. They could have built a refinery years ago and been done with it. Oh wait, they had the financial details worked out to do just that before the Bush crash shut everything down.

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  7. "All I have done is to defend the scientific evidence whatever it takes, without a predetermined position and without any agenda." Javier

    For that he was steamrolled in an infantile way by Richard S Courtney and DB Stealey.

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  8. To follow up on Bernard's "Sou asks rhetorically, have I noticed a change in the weather?"

    I live in a small city and we have a 2-3km channel between us and a large island. Forty or forty-five years ago it was normal once the ice was well frozen[1] to drive back and forth as it was more convenient than the ferry.

    Recently, no one takes anything heavier than an iceboat out there and a least one winter in the last 5-6 years we had open water all winter. Nah, I'm not seeing any change.

    The level of innumeracy in Tisdale and the readers is impressive. None except Janvier seem to understand what changing the mean GMT implies.

    1. Typically frozen to perhaps 2 feet ( 60 cm) deep, though 1 foot (30 cm) would do I suppose.

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  9. While true in terms of the point he was trying to make, Dr. Schmidt's comment may not be totally true. Jeremy S. Pal & Elfatih A. B. Eltahir suggest, in "Future temperature in southwest Asia projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability " (http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2833.html), there may be an absolute global temperature we should stop short of.

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    1. Indeed. There was also a paper by Steve Sherwood and Matthew Huber from 2009/10, where they calculated the wet-bulb temperature limit of human tolerance. They estimated:

      ..it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 °C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed.

      http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~stevensherwood/PNAS-2010-Sherwood-0913352107.pdf

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    2. The Sherwood and Huber paper looked at mean annual maxima, and therefore can be regarded as likely to be conservative.

      At scales of decades and longer their stated maxima would be exceeded, and the long-term impact of such extreme extremes would be significant. Over generations they would result in profound changes to both human populations and to non-humans species, even if they were otherwise able to struggle on with the annual wet-bulb maximum.

      I'd be most curious to see S&H repeated using the next three orders of magnitude of time intervals as their units. That's where some of the serious ecophysiological implications for homeotherms are...

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    3. It will not take much in high humidity climates to make them unliveable.

      From the Guardian a nice chart of temperature vs humidity for humans.

      http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2015_11/web_heat-chart.png

      Note at 100% RH you die at anything above about 35C. If your core temperature cannot be maintained you will die in a matter of hours even if fit and young. Us oldies and infirm will go sooner.

      This is already happening in parts of the Middle East and other places.

      Bert

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    4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    5. That's a useful graph to emphasise, Bert, and one that I haven't seen for a while.

      One thing to note is that it needn't reach 100% humidity for entirely possible temperatures to still make some regions unlivable, if those sub-saturated humid regions simultaneously experience temperatures in the higher 30s.

      This, together with my point that Sherwood and Huber considered annual maxima, and not maxima on decadal and longer scales, should have some policy makers very worried indeed.

      But for the denialati it's just all just fun and games - and will continue to be until it ends in tears...

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  10. Off-Topic, New WUWT poster nails it:

    I’m new to WUWT, but I’m starting to see a pattern in some posts.

    1) Post on a topic in a way that seems “fair and balanced”, and often DOES include much true and valuable information.
    2) Slip in some distractions, distortions, and obfuscations early on, like the tired old “not 97%” argument that has been debunked to the point of it being dust in the wind. (I don’t even recognize the “10,257” survey, and I’m pretty familiar with the whole train of argument. Got a link so we can refresh our memories? it’s now 99.99%, by the way) This was also evident in the biased “shadow organization” opening, where the object seemed to be to stir up the troops.
    3) Since many WUWT-er’s seem incapable of understanding the science involved but DO respond in a Pavlovian way to the BS, we are then off and running.
    4) People like terran and Mike Bromley start spewing irrelevant and nonsensical opinions and soon the thread is inundated with a Gish Gallop of rants about everything a certain segment of the population is angry about. Although at a far higher level of intelligence, it’s the same thing Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Faux News do—-reinforce and enable certain types of thinking. In the case of WUWT, which purports to be a “science” site, it’s rather shameful to be engaging in such psychological manipulation..
    5) Whatever intelligent discussion may have taken place without the “priming” is now buried, and the motivated reasoners and cognitively dissonant are reinforced in their BELIEFS rather than educated about truth.

    Goebbels would be envious.

    How long before he gets banned?

    Answer: placed on perma-moderation one hour later. Heh.

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    1. As you say, nails it.

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    2. If he or she sticks around, I'll give better than even money that they get dox'd (have their anonymity stripped away). Watts is a slimy bastard.

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  11. It seems more than likely the impact of El-Nino upon South East Australia is much more than an academic matter. After an abnormally cold winter in Melbourne (compared to the last 20 years or so, reminiscent of the winters I experienced as a child ) we have just had an extraordinarily hot October.


    The average for Melbourne for October (raw data) of 24.3 degrees was at about the same as the long term December average (24.2 degrees) . The average is about 4.6 standard deviations above the mean (using raw data from 1855 onwards ). Looking up the ’one sided’ Z values , the probability of this occurring by chance is 0.00022 % (i.e. we would expect this to occur every 450,000 months or 37,500 years.) without any warming.

    Before you can even utter the words UHIE , if you compare it to the average for the last 15 years for Melbourne it falls back to about 3.7 standard deviations which corresponds to a probability of 0.01% or once every 10,000 months (800 years). On that note the figures for the averages for the raw data for Mount Gambier, Cape Otway, East Sale, Wilson’s prom and Gabo Island were also at around 3.5 to 3.7 standard deviations above the average and were at about the December or January averages.

    Having had a quick look at other sites in Australia for October there seems to be a similar pattern where summer has appeared to arrive 2 months early. The only exceptions seem to be the northern tropics.

    All this assumes the temperatures are normally distributed so I will check for higher order moments such as the skew and kurtosis to see how much they play a part but I doubt if this will greatly moderate the conclusions.

    As a back of the envelope calculation comparing the area of the land mass of the earth with the area of the southern half of Australia , this kind of extraordinary event should occur, at any region on earth with the equivalent area of southern Australia, only once every 20 years.

    Needless to say the November temperatures are in the process of regressing towards the mean, as expected.

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    1. I'm curious to see the global temperature data for October. I'm presuming that they'll be released in the next few days.

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    2. October will be somewhere between 0.3 to 0.4 C warmer than September due to El Nino! Bert

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    3. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/11/uah-v6-0-global-temperature-update-for-october-2015-0-43-deg-c/

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    4. Following the remainder like 1997-98 even this graph should get broken next year.

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  12. Evening, all! (Or is it morning in Australia now? Whatever.)
    USA-ian here. Apologies for the digression, but I have to explain how I found this site. I sit next to a guy at work who LOOOOVES himself a good conspiracy. To him, global warming is perhaps the biggest one of all. When I try to talk him down from whatever ledge he's managed to find himself on today, he'll throw some random fact at me. Today's random fact? (I'm paraphrasing here): "Did you know that NOAA admitted that they screwed up the data from a temperature station in Hawaii? It's been giving them bad data for YEARS and they only just now realized that it was screwing up!" As I normally do, I asked for a citation of where this came from. The usual answer: "Some website."
    I'll leave aside his lack of research skills. I did some basic Google research and it quickly lead me to YOUR FAVORITE WEBSITE, WUWT. Now, I know a little bit of WUWT from the Potholer54 Youtube channel. But it wasn't until I started to research this whopper that I truly understood just how flambaked, crazy-insane that website is. I found the specific post that my colleague read. Essentially, NOAA reviewed its data (good scientific practice), found that one station was elevated slightly, investigated, and realized that that ONE station was screwed up. All of this to me says that NOAA is doing its job. What does WUWT make of it? "THEY'RE INCOMPETENT! WE'RE ON TO THEM!" WUWT followed this up with a second post instructing his minions to harangue various NOAA employees to "fix this egregious error". It actually only took me a few more minutes on the NOAA site to find the data for the station in question, and see that NOAA had already removed the data from the dates in question. Whether WUWT was responsible (and NOAA just didn't want to deal with that level of idiocy), I don't know.
    Frankly, this is the first time I've seriously dived into this mess. I don't see how you people have enough water for all of the showers you have to take dealing with this slime.

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    1. Garystar - all credits should go to our host!

      I think, and Sou will correct me if I am wrong, that Sou is able to do the consistent debunking and wade through all the nonsense because she also considers it an incentive to learn more/something new. No one knows everything, but you do know it is very, very likely that WUWT either got it wrong, or significantly overinflates an issue. And so you delve into the actual science, learn something new, et voilà: yet another debunking is born and more knowledge has been gained.

      Of course, Sou also seems to have a keen interest in human behavior, and the 'crazy' is often more 'interesting' than the sane...

      Delete

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