Fake Sceptic Awards for 2015

Happy new year, one and all. It's been quite a year, and another hot one. It's also that time of the year when bloggers do a round up of what happened in 2015. This year I've put together some of the most memorable denier moments and present them as awards. Ask me tomorrow and I might put together different instances. There are so many examples from which to choose. Anyway, here goes:

More about the hot weather in North America, and more

In the comments today, under the article about the extreme weather around the world these past few days, there was a claim that "It was warmer in the US in 1955". There was nothing else except a link to two maps of the USA. The top map was labeled 2015 and the bottom map was labeled 1955. The maps were coloured but there was:

• no legend
• no date
• no information that would explain anything about what the charts were meant to represent.

That sort of behaviour is more common on denier blogs than it is here at HotWhopper. Anyway, it prompted me to do some reading and research, and in the process I got diverted a bit into US temperature records, and trends in diurnal temperature range. So this article is a bit of a wander, and a bit long.

How hot was it in 1955 in the USA?

First, though, let's see about the very short and somewhat cryptic comment from HotWhopper reader, Andy Wilkins. He wrote that it was warmer in the US in 1955. But was it? No, it wasn't. At least not if you are looking at mean annual surface temperatures.

Below is a chart showing the annual mean surface temperature for the contiguous USA from 1895 to 2015 (average to November). I've marked the mean temperatures for 1955 and 2015, and this year so far is 1.31 °C hotter than the annual mean temperature in 1955.

Data source: NOAA ClimDiv

Now if Andy had somehow mistaken 1955 for 1954, then the difference between then and now would have still been 0.41 °C . That is it's been 0.41 °C hotter this year so far than it was back in 1954. (Note: The US temps and chart were corrected shortly after posting.)

Extreme December weather

December was not without extreme weather in many parts of the world. This past week has seen floods in South and North America, the UK and Ireland, worsening drought in southern Africa, wildfire in Australia and southern California, and unseasonally warm weather across the USA and Canada.

Worst floods in 50 years in South America

The BBC headline is "Flooding 'worst in 50 years', as 150,000 flee in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay".  Rivers have broken banks after days of heavy rains.

Source: BBC

The worst affected is Paraguay, where more than 90,000 people were forced to leave their homes, many of them poor people living on the banks of the River Paraguay. This underscores the fact that it is the least wealthy who are most vulnerable to weather-related disasters.

Shooting the stars

While you're waiting for HotWhopper to crank up again, here is the link to Bert from Eltham's Large Magellanic Cloud photograph that he shared with HotWhopper for Christmas. Below is a shrunken version, which of course doesn't do the magical sky justice, you need to see the full sized image. It represents an awful lot of careful work (from Bert, not me.)

Below is a small section, full size:

Bert has the following equipment to take images like this one:

• Astrograph is an Officina Stellare RH200 which has a focal length of 600mm and is F3. Clear aperture is 200mm. 
• FLI Atlas Focuser. 
• FLI ten position filter wheel CFW-3-10 with 50mm square filters. 
• Astrodon E series LRGB and HA, NII, SII and OIII 3nm NB filters. Also a continuum filter 5nm. 
• Camera is a FLI PL16803 which has a sensor size 36.8 X 36.8 mm. 
• The FoV of this system is 3.5 X 3.5 degrees. 
• Mount is a Software Bisque PMX. 

Bert's links to his photographs are here.

Season's Greetings to you all

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas, or happy holiday - whatever you are celebrating.

Deniersville: in the spirit of Christmas, the gift that keeps on giving

Over the past few days I've begun but not finished several articles - guiltily enjoying time spent on other worthwhile activities (such as making jam from nectarines fresh from the tree; and roasting coffee beans; and finding pretty jars; and wrapping them up for the family for Christmas). On Monday Sunday I drove to Albury, through weird stormy weather, watching the smoke from a scary bushfire in the next valley over. (I was reminded that the danger from bushfires isn't just the fire itself, sometimes the roads are impassable because of fallen trees. The wind was fierce and wild and the day was another scorcher - 42 °C, 107.6 °F)

In a fit of rationalisation, I figured this is as good a time as any to take a short break. HotWhopper turned 3 earlier this month, and over those 36 months, it has averaged almost one and a half articles a day. That seems like a good target for the next three years.

Credit: John Cook

Denialism doesn't take breaks

If you are missing your daily dose of denial, it marches on relentlessly.

At first, the fake sceptics didn't know how to react to the COP21 agreement in Paris this month. Some tried to argue that the leaders of 195 nations are deluded, along with their advisers, most of the world's media, 97% of climate scientists and almost all professional associations of scientists throughout the world.

Maybe they realised that wouldn't fly because that effort didn't last. It's old news, or maybe they are pretending it didn't happen.

Anthony Watts' #AGU15 poster on US temperature trends

Credit: NOAA

Anthony Watts has a poster at this year's AGU Fall Meeting. He is very proud of the effort he made (his WUWT article is archived here). He is also looking over his shoulder, fearful of a conspiracy to stop him from publishing. Actually, Anthony's main contribution seems to have been organising other people to do the work, which is a talent well worth having.

Anthony has made his poster available for downloading from his own website, though it's not available on the AGU15 website (yet). His press release is on the AGU website. The poster has some gaps that could be important. But first, what does it show.

Watts' US surface station temperature trends (revised)

According to the poster, the researchers took the following steps with US temperature records dating between 1979 and 2008. First they removed all weather stations that had been moved or had had a change in time of observation. They classified the remainder using one (not all) of the criteria set out in Leroy (2010), specifically "proximity to artificial surfaces, buildings, and other such objects with unnatural thermal mass".

Judith Curry plays (nuclear) politics

Judith Curry is of the view that science deniers like herself are the only people permitted to "play politics with science".  On her climate conspiracy blog today she wrote about an article in the Guardian by Naomi Oreskes. Professor Oreskes was writing about the push from some quarters into what she called "wholesale expansion of nuclear power". Her article came after a previous Guardian article by Professors James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley.

How to attend AGU Fall Meeting 2015

With all that's been happening this past few days, I neglected to write about how to attend the AGU Fall Meeting 2015, when you can't be there in person.

The AGU Fall Meeting 2015 runs from Monday 14 December to Friday 18 December inclusive (USA Pacific Time).  Instructions for access are provided below. The details for the scientific program are:

8:00 am to 6:00 pm daily US Pacific Time

4:00 pm to 2:00 am GMT

3:00 am to 1:00 pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (next day)

Moscone Centre

San Francisco, California, USA.

To register for Virtual Options

Go to this website to register or log in: http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2015/virtual-options/

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with a very hot November 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 October included. I'll repeat the explanation with each update and add what seem to be things to watch.

WordPress comments on HotWhopper - two solutions

After hearing several Wordpress users say they had problems commenting here, the problem may lie with WordPress itself, and there are solutions - hopefully.

The problem apparently lies with how WordPress authenticates users. (Update: To clarify - HotWhopper is on Google's Blogger. The ID of people who leave comments can be authenticated by different platforms such as WordPress, TypePad, Google etc. if you comment using those IDs. Or people's ID won't authenticated if comments are posted as "Anonymous" or if you comment using "Name/URL".)

From an article from November last year, it's likely that "WordPress, which in general is using SSL security, has an OpenID server that has not been upgraded" - which causes the problems when commenting as WordPress.

Read on for two possible solutions.

The Paris Agreement has been adopted by COP21

It's agreed. On Saturday 12 December at 7:31 pm (Paris time), 195 nations adopted a new, universal Paris agreement. A momentous step signalling a commitment to end the use of fossil fuels.

Watch the moment when the new, universal #ParisAgreement was adopted at #COP21 pic.twitter.com/b3F6p0KBWi

— UN Climate Action (@UNFCCC) December 12, 2015

COP21 update - highlights of the final draft agreement

In case you missed the live streaming of the final draft COP21 agreement, here are some of the key points. These are taken from the stirring speeches from the COP21 President H.E. Mr. Laurent Fabius, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the President of France François Hollande.

Some highlights from the final draft agreement

Some of the main elements of the final draft agreement are:

• Keep well below 2C, and aim for no more than 1.5C
• Legally binding - a universal legal agreement
• Differentiated, depending on the circumstances and capacity of each nation
• Updated / stocktake every five years
• Includes an increased role for adaptation to climate change
• Cooperation on loss and damage - $1 billion a year at the base level to be be reviewed by 2025 (I think)
• Caters for: island states re sea level, Africa re development, South America re forest protection
• Also addressing food security, public health, poverty and peace.

This week governments try for a sane response while some in the climate world went a little bit mad

Today is the day when COP21 is hoping to finalise the climate change agreement. The meeting was extended by a day, with many people remaining hopeful that a meaningful agreement will be reached. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put out a press release saying that while there were still some important issues to be resolved, there has been considerable progress.

The latest draft can be downloaded here. As at the time of writing, it's Draft 2. (You can compare it with Draft 1 to see the progress in negotiations. Where the brackets have been removed it signifies agreement was reached on that point.)

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UPDATE: I've just seen that the final text has been agreed. I'll let you know as soon as it's available - or you can keep an eye on the UN website. There's a press conference scheduled for 11:30 am CET today - Saturday (Europe time).

Sou 2:23 pm AEDT 12 December 2015

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This week there was real silliness from deniers and from people campaigning to stop climate change.

Wild weather report - early December

Do you know one explanation for science deniers not "believing" that weather extremes are getting more extreme more often? It's because they only read climate conspiracy blogs, like WUWT. Despite Anthony Watts claiming to be a meteorologist (unqualified) - that is, someone who used to announce the weather on television - he doesn't like to report unusual weather. Some of his readers might wake up to the fact that he's a charlatan, a fake, a fraud.

For example, in the last few days there were at least 245 people who were killed as a result of unseasonal torrential rains in Chennai, India. You can read about that disastrous weather event at the Times of India, which reported that:

The deluge destroyed crucial road and rail links, shutdown the airport, snapped power and telecom lines and left lakhs [hundreds of thousands} of people stranded. 

Then there's northern England and Scotland that was drenched and battered by record-setting Storm Desmond. You can read about that at the BBC. There are also some photos on Quartz, just in case you thought it was a fuss over nothing. It isn't. The BBC reports that thousands of homes were flooded, one person died, and power is slowly being restored to thousands. As quoted on Quartz:

Storm Desmond dropped a total of 262.6 mm (10.3 inches) of rain in Cumbria county, in northwest England, from Friday through Sunday. Floods minister Rory Stewart told the BBC that Desmond had “broken all the UK rainfall records.”

There's also wild weather in the Pacific north west. Not as bad as the flooding rains in the UK, but the storm has caused power outages affecting 18,000 homes in Washington state.

While down here in Australia not long ago, there were deadly bushfires. The fire in South Australia's mid-north was burning at a rate of 580 acres a minute. One woman described it as ""It was like a fireball, 90 kilometres an hour." If you can't imagine a fire burning that quickly, then just make sure you aren't in the bush on a catastrophic fire danger day. To make matters worse, the communications systems failed the volunteer firefighters. Two people died in those fires, and at least 87 homes were destroyed or severely damaged. One man was watching his property burn from 3,000 km away (from Darwin) via a feed from cameras he'd installed. He saved his home by activating sprinklers via his mobile phone. The ABC has mapped what happened where in the fires in South Australia's mid north. The agricultural land could take years to recover.

Denier weirdness: Heartland Institute deniers don't want their disinformation questioned

You know how deniers are always going on about free speech. What they mean is that sometimes when they protest climate science they get rebuffed with sciency facts. I've already commented on the fact that Mark Steyn, that champion of "free speech" (or his version of it) doesn't allow comments on his blog. Now it seems that the Heartland Institute has decided that their public denier fest is not going to be public after all - although I'm guessing they will still be streaming the event to anyone who won't be bored senseless by it. (The only people who'll like it will be the already senseless.)

Kyla Mandel from DeSmogBlog reported on Twitter that the Heartland Institute has just kicked out one third of the women who rolled up to attend their denier fest at COP21, which has just begun - that is, Kyla Mandel, I'm guessing:

The formerly open to the public Heartland climate denial conference just cut number of women present by a third pic.twitter.com/8uUZzRDcyu

— Kyla Mandel (@kylamandel) December 7, 2015

COP21 Week 2 - and open thread

The COP21 meeting in Paris continues this week and is due to conclude on Friday 11 December. There is a draft agreement on the table now, which runs to 46 pages including Annexes. There is also an addendum. The main document has the following at the start of the draft agreement:

El Niño in the Lower Troposphere - watch this space

Some people wonder when El Niño will show up in the lower troposphere. It takes some months before the temperature of the lower troposphere peaks - up to three months later than the peak in surface temperatures. That means that it will still be a couple of months before the El Niño shows up strongly in lower troposphere temperatures.

Roy Spencer has posted an update of UAH lower troposphere temperature. Here is an update of the chart from a few weeks ago, with November 2015 included. This version is 6.04 beta which is slightly different to previous beta versions in the detail. The shaded area covers the general period of an El Niño - from around April in year 1 to March in year 2. The lower troposphere temperature doesn't normally peak till the end of the El Niño:

Fig 1 | Lower troposphere temperature anomaly - global. Data source: UAH

What a treat for Judith Curry - supping with the morally depraved

Judith Curry is going to be testifying to a Senate Committee next week, along with some other climate science deniers and at least one scientist defamer. The others testifying are from the rogues gallery of science disinformers. The GOP could only find two people who are employed as climate scientists, Judith Curry and John Christy. So they reached into the science denier bag and fished out two disinformers for hire: Will Happer, and Mark Steyn.

Why do the Republicans bother with this crude pantomime? Why not just hang a sign around their necks saying "we want the world to burn"?

Schoolboy sniggers at COP21 and conspiracy theories from WUWT deniers

While the leaders of the free and less free world have gathered in Paris to address the biggest problem the world is facing, there is nothing but schoolboy sniggers from deniers. You may remember sneering, sniggering lads or lasses in your class when you were at high school. The underachievers of low self-esteem who thought a leer, a forced swagger and a dab of Clearasil might get them the admiration they sought. These types were either ignored or scorned by the rest of the class, just as the world's leaders are ignoring the abysmal efforts by disinformers and deniers to make the world hotter instead of containing global warming.

Is this what you want, Matt Ridley?

It's not just deniers who have sunk to a new low. Scientific American has too. The magazine made something of a mockery of a collection of in-depth articles about climate change by including an article from science disinformer Matt Ridley. I'm told Matt's article is only in the online edition, not the print edition, but it shouldn't have been in either. Matt claimed (despite all evidence that already we are seeing extreme weather disasters from global warming) that "Climate Change Will Not Be Dangerous for a Long Time".

The misleading headline is really bad and something I'd never expected to see at the once admired magazine. Matt Ridley's article is full of the sort of nonsense you'd expect to read on climate conspiracy blogs. It starts with:

The climate change debate has been polarized into a simple dichotomy. Either global warming is “real, man-made and dangerous,” as Pres. Barack Obama thinks, or it’s a “hoax,” as Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe thinks. But there is a third possibility: that it is real, man-made and not dangerous, at least not for a long time.

COP21 begins in Paris - links to get you up to speed

COP21 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is getting underway at Le Bourget conference centre just outside Paris. It will be a huge gathering of world leaders and delegates from all around the world. The meeting runs from 30 November to 11 December.

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UPDATE: I've just seen that the final text draft has been agreed prepared. I'll let you know as soon as it's available - or you can keep an eye on the UN website. There's a press conference scheduled for 11:30 am CET today - Saturday (Europe time).

Sou 2:30 pm AEDT 12 December 2015

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The purpose

COP meetings aren't scientific meetings, they are about action to mitigate climate change through intergovernmental agreement. The aim of COP21 has been described as "to achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C".  The "legally binding" is probably not going to be achieved, because the agreement has to be accepted by all parties and there are some who won't be able to accept the legally binding part. The agreement won't be sufficient to guarantee "below 2°C", but will be an important pre-requisite.

The meeting

To keep up to date with drafts etc, here is a link to the main UNFCCC COP21 website and the provisional agenda and overview schedule. There is also an information hub, and live webcasts (I don't know if they will be open to a general audience or not).

Background and commentary

Below are links to some of what is being written about it. It's not exhaustive by any means. I mainly picked articles that provide information about what COP21 is about and what is to be achieved, hopefully.

• The Conversation has a big spread with lots of articles focusing on different aspects.
• From the UK Independent: Paris climate change talks: What the different groups attending expect from these crucial meetings
• Biwa Kwan at SBS (Australia) provides an overview: Paris Climate Meeting: What you need to know about COP21
• Climate scientist Simon Donner writes about the Seven Key Issues To Be Addressed At The Paris Climate Summit
• Matt McGrath of the BBC - COP21: Beginner's guide to the UN Paris climate summit
• The Guardian has a feature spread with lots of articles
• Australia's ABC is notable for it's lack of focus on COP21 apart from a couple of articles in the Drum opinion section and news items about marches and arrests - maybe there is more to come
• Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary General - What I expect from the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris
• Brandon Miller, CNN - 5 things you need to know about COP21

UNFCCC Pledges, websites and reports

There is a special UNFCCC website, which has a the report "Climate Action Now", plus the pledges from each country. It's one of those highly irritating fancy websites designed for touch tablets, where you have to guess a lot, click a lot, scroll a lot, and get mini-bits of information in return - but it mightn't be the information you are looking for. I recommend this link for the Climate Action Now Summary for Policymakers report - although if you're on a notebook or desktop computer, you'll find the website almost as irritating. There's also a web page with a press release, which is easier to read.

It would be great if you can add other interesting links in the comments below.

Eric Worrall's WUWT: Stop educating children

On Anthony Watts' Eric Worrall's blog WUWT**, he is complaining that Australian children are being prepared to face climate change (archived here, cached here).  Eric calls climate education "green indoctrination". If you didn't know, Eric is not in favour of natural resource conservation or science education. I deduce from his article that Eric is not in favour of education at all. I'm guessing, but I'd say that like many people at WUWT he thinks that children should not learn how to learn, instead they should be taught how to read, write and do sums. And that's about all. (Oh, teaching children to be Islamaphobic would go down well with Eric, too.)

Anthony Watts sinks to another vile low: Jim Jones' suicide cult and climate science

With only a couple of days to go until the Paris COP21 talks begin, science deniers are falling apart. Yesterday I wrote how Judith Curry stooped to tabloid writer David Rose as a pulpit for her brand of "no mitigation" advocacy and disinformation. (She is so anxious that her message is falling on deaf ears that she put out a plea to "Be sure to link to the article" and commented "I hope that as a result of this article, i will get a few more twitter followers and followers of Climate Etc.".)

Today Anthony Watts did a Heartland Institute. He posted an article at his blog, WUWT, likening people who accept climate science to Jim Jones and his suicide cult. His latest article proclaims (archived here):

Similarities to Jim Jones and the Cult of Climate Change

"...The apocalypse of an alleged climate change shares many of Jones’ cult-like qualities."

[Update: See the update below relating to plagiarism in the WUWT article.]

Turned not tossed - Judith Curry denier martyr with David Rose

Tabloid writer David Rose has written another puff piece on Judith Curry. Judith used to be a scientist who dabbled in climate stuff, until she gave it away to write a blog for science deniers. David Rose was never what you'd call a journalist. He's a hack writer for a tabloid in the UK. His article this time didn't even make the grade for the Mail. This time he was relegated to a magazine called The Spectator, which if you're like me and have never heard of it, is described in Wikipedia as "a weekly British conservative magazine. It was first published on 6 July 1828,[2] making it the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language." For a few years Nigel Lawson was editor. Nigel now heads up the denier lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which, as its name suggests, agitates for more global warming. So science denial articles in The Spectator shouldn't surprise anyone.

RealClimate.org is up and running again

This is just to let you know that realclimate.org is back up and running. It might take a few hours to propagate everywhere. If you have trouble reaching the main site, you can access the back-up website here.

I did have the back-up site in the blog roll for a short spell. I've now changed it back again, but it may take a while to detect. Meanwhile, you can still click on the link which seems to be currently right at the bottom of the blogroll. [I'm leaving it off the blogroll until the links are directed back to the main site.]

Congrats to Gavin Schmidt and co. I really thought it would take quite a bit longer to sort out. They fixed the problem in record time - though they still have to update the links. (You may find yourself going back and from from the main website to the backup website when you click on links.)

Denier weirdness: Judith Curry will not be renewing her subscription

There's been no doubt for quite a long time that Judith Curry has discarded any pretense of being a scientist. Today she made it official, declaring:

The APS Statement on Climate Change is now officially posted [link], minor changes from the draft.  I will not be renewing my membership to the APS.

The American Physical Society released it's revised statement on climate change just over a week ago. It's not terribly strong, but it could have been even weaker given the attempts by science denying members to water it down.

Blistering letter from House Committee member to Lamar Smith about his baseless smear campaign against NOAA scientists

You may have read about US Congressman Lamar Smith's ongoing vindictive harassment and smear campaign against scientists at NOAA. You might have also read about his latest allegations of "whistleblowers". If you are wondering if there is anything behind this, other than a deranged attack on science, scientists and the NOAA, then wonder no more.

There is not.

To prove this point, just read the letter to Lamar Smith from Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a member of the committee of which Lamar Smith is chair - the Committee on Space, Science and Technology.

I'll quote some segments damning the unconscionable actions of this vindictive, out-of-control, grandstanding US congressman, Lamar Smith. The bolding and some paragraph breaks are mine.

Lesson 1,126½ in how to be a science disinformer, featuring Bob Tisdale

In this lesson about how to be a climate disinformer, I refer to a recent article by Bob Tisdale (archived here, cached here). In fact I refer to umpteen articles by Bob Tisdale, because his articles are often copies and pastes of his previous articles, with slight updates.

You can also watch a video with Tom Peterson, who gives The Story of Climate Data. This article is worth it for that alone. Dr Peterson is President of the World Meteorological Organization's Commission for Climatology, and recently retired from NOAA.

The purpose of the lesson, and hiding the closing of the gap

The purpose of the deception is to "prove" that all models are useless by hiding the closing of the gap.

Before you start, it's important to see what the observations actually show. Below is a chart of HadCRUT4, plotted with the multi-model mean of CMIP5. The 95% probability is for all uncertainties for HadCRUT observations - measurement and sampling, bias and coverage uncertainties. The uncertainties relating to the multi-model mean of CMIP5 are not plotted. As always, click on the chart to enlarge it.

Fig 1 | Global mean surface temperature observations and multi-model mean.
Data sources: UK Met Office Hadley Centre and KNMI Climate Explorer (CMIP5)

As you can see, with 2015 year to date (to September 2015), the observations are now approaching the CMIP5 multi-model mean. This closing of the gap must be hidden from WUWT deniers at all costs. And it's not hard to do so if you follow the steps in the lesson.

Tim Ball tells fibs about past climates at Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog WUWT

Tim Ball is an uber conspiracy theorist and the author of the first chapter in the greenhouse gas denying book about slaying sky dragons. One might suspect that he pens articles for Anthony Watts so he (Tim) can build up a defense of insanity in his defamation lawsuits. He's quoted Hitler and Osama bin Laden to support his conspiracy nuttery. He thinks that Tom Wigley is angling to be the Leader of the World. He's nuts.

Nevertheless he has a nutter fan club in Anthony Watts and his conspiracy theorising acolytes.

The Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age

Today he's started an article with the following:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 Report claimed that neither the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) nor the Little Ice Age (LIA) occurred. 

I didn't need to check to know that he telling fibs. To save you the trouble let me quote from the 2013 AR5 WG1 report from the IPCC. The medieval warm period is referred to in the IPCC report as the Medieval Climate Anomaly. The report doesn't just mention it 27 times, it states its duration, from 950 to 1250. The Little Ice Age is mentioned 43 times in the document, and its duration is given from 1450 to 1850. Therefore Tim is lying when he claims that the IPCC "claimed that neither the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) nor the Little Ice Age (LIA) occurred". Quelle surprise - not. Lying and deception is pretty well mandatory on denier blogs like WUWT. Below are some of the 70 instances:

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with a very hot October 2015

Wow! I knew that the Japan Meteorological Agency showed a big jump in October, and I expect GISS was doing some double and triple checking of the GISS data. October is the hottest October on record by a country mile. A whopping 1.04 °C above the 1951-1980 mean. This is the first time any month has an anomaly greater than 1 °C above the 1951-1980 mean (h/t Joe Stepansky).

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 October included. I'll repeat the explanation with each update and add what seem to be things to watch.

Denier weirdness: Bob Tisdale on weather and climate

In case anyone was in any doubt that Bob Tisdale knows nothing about weather or climate, read the words he published on Anthony Watts' climate conspiracy blog today (archived here, latest here, cached here). Bob wrote about the WMO definition of climate:

On their Frequently Asked Questions webpage, the World Meteorological Organization asks and answers:

What is Climate?
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the “average weather,” or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.

Will the real Richard Tol please stand up?

At the Carbon Brief, there's a full transcript of an interview of Richard Tol by Roger Harrabin of the BBC. Readers of HotWhopper won't recognise him. The Richard Tol who was interviewed by Roger Harrabin is a completely different man to the person who has behaved in an unhinged obsessive manner when he has visited HotWhopper in the past (see below). He is quite a different person to the man who for more than two years has been obsessed with fatigued abstracts, date stamps and 97 per cents, trying to find flaws in the research study by Cook et al, and failing.

Adverse effects of climate change are about to outweigh any benefits

The newly emerged Richard Tol says things like adverse affects of climate change will very soon outweigh any benefits of warming (within months, not years):

• According to my latest calculations, it’s sort of around 1.1 degrees of warming relative to pre-industrial, so that’s … referring to the boundary between net positive benefits from warming, and negatives, which means we are at the boundary.

Laid bare: the sociopathology of climate science denial

Within minutes of the terrorist killings in Paris last night, there was a WUWT blog article, plus numerous tweets and retweets. Anthony Watts milked the horror of the terrorist attacks in Paris for all he could get out of it (archived here and here). Several hours later he added a French flag and the word "solidarité" to his blog header (archived here), perhaps in an attempt to soften his crass opportunism, or perhaps make more mileage.

This episode demonstrates again what Anthony and his followers at wattsupwiththat.com (WUWT) are really like underneath their charade of climate science denial. It's not the first time Anthony Watts has shown he has no class and is incapable of empathy. In the past he has seized on a disastrous tragedy, Haiyan, and used it as an opportunity for another attack on science. And if you decide to read the WUWT comments, you'll see that denial goes hand in hand with the bigotry of some deniers.

Shame on them.

Update: Dr Roy Spencer PhD tops the efforts of Anthony Watts and most of the deniers at WUWT. See the comments below for details, or read what he wrote on his Facebook page.

Sou 11:15 am 15 November 2015

[Note: Out of respect for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris, and their families, and all of France, I postponed the publication of this article for a few hours. If you do comment, I know you'll remember that this blog is viewed by people from around the world, and will respect those who've been touched by the horrific events in Paris.]

Denier whines of censorship: Why won't they let me say the Earth is flat?

Anthony Watts has really, really, really got his nose out of joint. What caused his nose to become disjointed was a UK newspaper, The Independent. It has modernised its website and poor little Anthony can no longer find a minor article from March 2000 - more than 15 years ago.

It's a conspiracy, he moans. It's all a plot to hide bad headlines. He wrote (archived here, cached here):

In light of what happened yesterday with The Independent apparently disappearing a famous climate prediction blunder article while leaving an article critical of its use intact, this opinion piece by Joe Wallach seemed pertinent -Anthony

Sheesh. He doesn't mind hiding his own inconvenient articles, does he? Try to find this one at WUWT: "An interesting issue with ice core data". Here's the link:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/03/an-interesting-issue-with-ice-core-data/

What? It's disappeared? Along with all the 83 comments? Okay then, here's the archived version: http://www.webcitation.org/6H83F9g4X

Credit: XKCD

A rare and exciting event at WUWT

A rare and exciting event has occurred at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He can't find one of what he calls his failed climate predictions. The rarity isn't that he couldn't find it, it's that he actually looked for the source! As you know, in deniersville, a climate prediction can fail as long as it hasn't happened yet. It doesn't have to be a near time prediction, it could be a prediction for the years well into the future. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a prediction to be a failed prediction. In deniersville, if a newspaper reporter (or occasionally a scientist) says anything about the future, and even if they don't, it can be added to one of those silly denier lists that float around cyberspace.

I don't know why Anthony Watts is so upset. He doesn't usually bother linking to original sources when he posts a list of so-called "failed predictions" that he filches from some denier website or other. In deniers' minds it doesn't matter if there never was a prediction in the first place. or if there was it doesn't matter who made it.

I once tried to source some of the supposed "predictions" he posted back in 2014, but mostly all I found was a copy of his denier list, not an original source for the quote. In other words, most of the so-called predictions are probably just made up out of thin air. At best, some might be quote-mined from newspaper articles. Very few are scientific predictions. Only eight of the 107 so-called "predictions" had a live link to any source, none of which was a "failed prediction"!

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.

Eric Worrall and WUWT with telltale techniques - No. 3: Impossible expectations No: 2 Logical Fallacy

The third of five telltale techniques of climate science denial is that of setting impossible expectations. The second is logical fallacies. Today Anthony Watts has put up another article by Eric Worrall (archived here). His article has both featured, and more. This article is about a special report of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS): Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective.

The report itself, like the ones about extreme events in 2011, 2012 and 2013, describes a number of extreme weather events from around the world in the context of human-caused climate change. There's a short explanation on the contents web page, my paras, dot points and emphasis:

Some history that led to Judith Curry hunkering down in the NOAA conspiracy theorists' bunker

The last couple of days has seen ex-scientist Judith Curry hunkering down in the conspiracy theorists' bunker. She is suggesting that the scientists at NOAA are "biasing and spinning climate science to support a political agenda".

If that's what they were doing (it isn't, as climate researcher Peter Thorne explains), they were not doing it at all well. For one thing, they've published papers describing their work in considerable detail, and the data is freely available (here and here and here) for anyone to check. Judith has no expertise in putting together surface temperature records (if you can't tell from reading her articles), so she wouldn't know what to do with the NOAA data any more than Lamar Smith does. (Judith dropped off the Berkeley Earth project team at an early stage, without making any substantive contribution.)

She does know how to insinuate and spread nasty smear campaigns, however. Over the years she's honed that art to a reasonable, if patently transparent, level.

Anthony Watts opens mouth, places foot firmly - in the weakening Walker Circulation

As if one foot in mouth wasn't enough for the day, Anthony Watts does it again (archived here, cached here). Maybe he wanted to give both his clodhoppers a turn. Whatever - he posted one of his "claim" articles, which was about a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters. The paper, by Katinka Bellomo and Amy C. Clement from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, was describing evidence of the expected slowdown in the Walker Circulation. Beneath his "claim" headline Anthony wrote:

From the UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE and the “correlation is not causation department” comes this paper that suggests GHG’s decrease the Walker Circulation. Only one problem. They don’t give a clear cut mechanism, only tenuous linkage. I suspect Willis will have a thing or two to say about this paper.

Only one problem, the scientists did give a clear cut mechanism. (Actually, they referred to more than one mechanism, although they emphasised the one proposed by Isaac Held and Brian Soden.) As the authors explained right at the very beginning of their paper:

More snow won't stop the West Antarctic ice sheet from collapsing

Anthony Watts reappears in a frenzy of excitement (archived here and cached here). He's discovered a press release about a new paper by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey Expedition, but didn't take the time to read it or the paper. Because of that, he's made a complete ass of himself as he almost always does whenever he writes something on his blog. (Which is probably why he appears so rarely these days. He can't hack the guffaws from onlookers.)

Anthony's headline is wrong. It reads: "Yet another study shows Antarctica gaining ice mass – snowfall accumulation ‘highest we have seen in the last 300 years’". Then, that blogger who rejects out of hand almost every scientific paper he comes across, bemoans the fact that an article at Media Matters tells how a scientist, Jay Zwally, knew that deniers would twist his recent paper.

OCO-2 baffles deniers at WUWT and prompts more conspiracy theories

The OCO-2 project at NASA has a video showing the changes in atmospheric CO2 over a year or so, as measured by the OCO-2 satellite, which was launched last year. NASA put out a press release a few days ago:

"We can already clearly see patterns of seasonal change and variations in carbon dioxide around the globe," said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-2 deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Far more subtle features are expected to emerge over time."...

...Through most of OCO-2's first year in space, the mission team was busy calibrating its science instrument, learning how to process its massive amount of data, and delivering data products to NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, for distribution to the world’s science community.

Scientists are comparing OCO-2 data to ground-based measurements to validate the satellite data and tie it to internationally accepted standards for accuracy and precision. 

CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas. Notice the legend - it spans just 15 parts per million by volume, from 390 to 405 ppmv. And I don't think the colours hit the extremes at any point during the year (you can check for yourself). It gets drawn down into plants on land and in the ocean and then released again as the seasons change.

Is this all there is before COP21? Crowd-sourcing the list of climate science deniers from 2009

There's a denier conference being organised for Paris, calling itself the Paris Climate Challenge. I think it's being organised by the Heartland Institute, but whoever is organising it is rather coy, and doesn't say. Going by the speakers, it could just be the political party, the UKIP. On the other hand, if it's the same as the Heartland Institute effort, then it hasn't decided on the name yet - is it Pandemonium in Paris or is it the Paris Climate Challenge?

Anyway, the one that's being promoted at WUWT (archived here and waybacked here) doesn't have much going for it. About all it's got is a plea for some speakers and a letter written six years ago, back in 2009. The 2009 letter is signed by people who are described as "climate experts", but most can make no such claim. Two of those signatories are listed as deceased: Ernst G Beck and Zbigniew Jaworowski. There may be more.

If you're thinking of signing up to fill one of what will undoubtedly be many empty chairs, you will be entertained by a sad and motley lot of ratbags:

• Stuart Agnew - a right wing politican from the UK (UKIP) - see comment
• Piers Corbyn - who manages to sell weather forecasts 
• Philip Foster -possible organiser - a retired vicar and continuing science denier, and director of the company that is listed as accepting donations for the effort, and who may be associated with the UKIP also (he goes to their conferences)
• Roger Helmer - another nutty politician from the UKIP
• Tom Harris - who says that climate science is a hoax, and gets his paleo-climate from the Old Testament 
• Murry Salby - who was sacked from Macquarie University and resurfaces every now and then to show how he can't do CO2 arithmetic
• Donna Laframboise - who writes books about dustbins 
• Viscount Monckton - aka the potty peer, who goes in for childish bluster
• Patrick Moore - who trades on his past time with Greenpeace while denying science 
• Nils-Axel Mörner - who twists charts to deny rising seas 
• Cliff Ollier - another denier for hire
• Ian Plimer - of iron sun fame, who's published (written? who knows) books denying climate science. He's all but disappeared from the scene after his disgrace at the hands of George Monbiot on the ABC with Australia's Tony Jones.
• Roger Tattersall - another organiser - aka Tallbloke, a denier blogger who once tried to get elected - another one associated with the UKIP. For a while he was thought too silly for WUWT, but has since been taken back into the fold. He registered the website for the Paris Climate Challenge (h/t Anonymous in the comments) - see this comment and this comment.

Crowd-sourcing details of deniers

Below is the list of people from the 2009 letter published on the 2015 "Paris Climate Challenge" website, for want of anything more recent. As I said, the list claims the following as "climate experts" but most have no expertise in climate science. They may be "expert" in science denial - a lot of them are associated with denier lobby groups.

I've linked quite a few of them. If anyone is willing to lend a hand, and pick out some and provide links to show their background, whether they are still in the land of the living, main denial "achievements" etc, that would be great. Even if it's only one or two people you look up - every bit will help. It can then be a ready reference for the future. If you do, can you list the number in the list, and their name and I'll add the links.

There are some websites that list science deniers and their background, including desmogblog, the Denier List, and SourceWatch. Links to in-depth articles are also helpful.

Cherry picking polls: global warming is real and we're causing it

There's a new article by Eric Worrall at WUWT - archived here, cached here. (Anthony seems to opted out of his blog again and left it as a notice board for the riff raff.) He's written about a poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The report of the poll is called: American attitudes toward the Pope following his visit to the United States. What it indicated was that 16% of Americans think that global warming isn't happening, and 67% know that global warming is real.

But that's not what Eric wrote about.

Bob Tisdale's illusion and conspiracy theories: A Book Review

Bob Tisdale's illusion is that global warming is caused by magic, or blobs, or El Niño. Anything but human activity. He's announced at WUWT that he has written a new book (archived here). He's called it "On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control Part 1". It's very long, running to 733 pages. You'll have to wade through 82 pages before you get to the first page of the first chapter. There are three chapters plus the 82 pages of introductory material.

Bob relies on the hard work done by climate scientists for much of his book, he picks bits he likes but ignores or rejects the bits he doesn't like. That is, he rejects all the science that confirms human-caused warming. For the most part, he doesn't understand the data he uses. Certainly he doesn't understand climate models. For the other much of his book, he relies on conspiracy theories dreamt up by him or other science deniers. What his book boils down to is:

• Climate scientists are right, except when their science demonstrates that humans are causing global warming, and except when he can provide an alternative notion, usually involving a gigantic conspiracy of incredible proportions, or no alternative at all
• Bob learnt lots about ENSO from Dr Kevin Trenberth, but doesn't believe him where it matters
• According to Bob, the cause of global warming is hotter oceans (i.e. warming is caused by warming), or a magical bounce from the Little Ice Age with no cause, or the sun heating up the ocean (even though the sun's output has decreased a bit lately), or anything except human activity
• Climate models are wrong - based on Bob not understanding the first thing about them
• The IPCC is [insert conspiracy theory here] - based on Bob's denialist imagination.

Extreme weather: Cyclone Chapala drowns the Yemen desert

The rare cyclone in the Arabian sea, Chapala, is now causing the massive forecast rainfall on land.  Al Jazeera reports that three people were killed on the island of Socotra, and more than 100 homes destroyed. The BBC reports that ten years' rain may fall in parts of that very arid region, and states:

"The sea water level has risen by 9m (29ft) and has destroyed the Mukalla seafront," resident Mohammed Ba Zuhair told the Reuters news agency.

Below are some videos from Sara al aidarous on Twitter, which I can't verify, but I understand from Emirates 24/7 are of Al Mukalla, a city of about 300,000 people on the coast of Yemen:

#المكلا حي أكتوبر #تشابالا_حضرموت_المهرة_شبوه pic.twitter.com/9lyDuIy5CA

— ُSara al aidarous⭐ (@SoS0i0s) November 3, 2015

Antarctic ice - growing or shrinking? NASA vs Princeton and Leeds etc

There's a new paper out about Antarctic ice, from H. Jay Zwally and colleagues at NASA. They report that over the period from 2003 to 2008, there was a net increase in ice over all Antarctica of 82±25 Gt/year. This paper looks to be based on a conference paper at a SCAR workshop back in July 2012 (though that doesn't explain why there wasn't data from the past six years in the final published paper).

These findings are different to the results of work reported earlier this year from two scientists at Princeton, Christopher Harig and Frederik J. Simons. The Princeton team found that over the period January 2003 to 2014, there was a loss of ice overall. the overall mass loss from Antarctica since January 2003 at 92 ±10 Gt/yr.

It's also different from the results reported in a paper by Malcolm McMillan and colleagues last year. They estimated the current mass loss over all Antarctica at 159 ± 48 Gt/year. ".

So one group of scientists find that ice has been on balance increasing, while others find that ice has been on balance decreasing.

Dull Palates: WUWT deniers are not connoisseurs of wine

While flailing about for some science to deny, Anthony Watts has put up another article by Eric Worrall (archived here). Eric copied and pasted an excerpt from an article about wine. If Eric thinks that climate change isn't affecting wine production, he's wrong. Just as science deniers don't have a clue about science, neither do they have a clue about wine.

The article was from Reuters, and it was about winemakers and wine grape growers adapting to climate change. Although it had a positive slant, everyone who knows anything about wine knows that climate change is going to change the type and taste of wine.

The article did put a positive spin on the situation, saying that grapes are adaptable. That may be so, but if a winemaker wants a particular wine, they'll be getting the grapes from different places in the future, if they can. Here's the bit that Eric Worrall copied:

More extreme weather shows up the irrelevance of deniers at WUWT

Say a prayer everyone in south Texas. This is an overpass of Interstate 35 in New Braunfels. #TexasFlood https://t.co/QL6AaXpyQF

— Fort Worth Police OA (@FWPOA) October 31, 2015

Over 10 inches of rain S/SW #austinweather #TexasFlood pic.twitter.com/Ae2RHGP5kl

— Rebecca Stevenson (@Rebecca_Weather) October 31, 2015

This past month (and year) has highlighted the irrelevance of science denying blogs like WUWT. Just this past week, the following have and still are being reported in the media:

• Hurricane Patricia - the most intense cyclone ever recorded in the western hemisphere
• Record almost unbelievable rainfall pelting down on Texas causing record flood levels in places, deaths, and sending someone 20 feet up a "nice little tree"
• A rare Category 4 Cyclone Chapala in the Arabian Sea
• The hottest October day ever recorded anywhere at 48.4 °C, , in South Africa
• A record hottest October in Australia
• A rare heavy hailstorm in Chinchilla, Queensland
• Record rain reaching as far as London, Ontario in the wake of Hurricane Patricia. [Note: the rain was heavy, but turns out it wasn't a record for October, let alone for the year, as Cam explained in the comments - Sou 2 November 2015]

This is the same month that saw:

• The most cyclones above Cat 3 ever recorded in the northern hemisphere in a year
• The hottest temperature in Indonesia in 2006 was equaled
• The most southerly major hurricane ever observed in the Eastern Pacific, Olaf
• Typhoon Koppu causing massive flooding  and at least 41 deaths in the Philippines
• Hurricane Joaquin, which emerged in late September, fueled by very hot seas
• Record heat across southern California and up in Newfoundland
• Catastrophic 1,000 year flooding in South Carolina - have these records already been broken in Texas?
• Huge flash floods in the Riviera, claiming 20 lives

And that was just a sample from this October. September has more than its share of extreme weather, too, in this soon-to-be record-breaking hottest year on record.

Denier Desperation: To Russia with WUWT Love

Now that Stephen Harper has gone from the scene, and Australia's Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott has been dethroned, science deniers don't have too many leaders left (oops - I mean right, right?) who they can adore. They briefly flirted with China, but deniers didn't know the name of the leaders there. In any case, China is, if not panicking, at least very aware that climate change is not going to be kind to them. Particularly when something like 50,500,000 people in China could be at risk of flooding from sea level rise if CO2 emissions continue on their current trajectory. And President Xi Jinping of China has made a joint pledge with President Obama of the USA on climate change.

Free marketers find cosying up to China uncomfortable for all sorts of reasons. Not only would China still be described as sort of communist, even though it's started to embrace capitalism, China is blamed for taking all the jobs from hard-working Americans. And there's still a lot of resentment against China for bailing out the USA in the global financial crisis.

Deniers can now breathe a sigh of relief. They've found a new hero - it's Vladimir Putin from Russia (archived here). Now Russia feels probably a tad more comfortable than China. It's no longer as communist as it once was. Now it can probably be best described as a totalitarian rough house.  This is not a bad fit for right wing authoritarians. They've got a leader they can follow, while at the same time, they would relish the anarchic side of Russian society.

The ozone hole grew bigger this year

If you were a first-time visitor to WUWT, you'd never believe that Anthony Watts had been posting articles about climate and ozone for going on eight years. You'd think he was completely ignorant of all things science. And you'd be correct.

This false-color image shows ozone concentrations above Antarctica on Oct. 2, 2015. Credits: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Today he's got an article about the ozone hole (cached here). It's a mite disturbing, especially for those of us who live in southern Australia. The ozone hole over Antarctica grew to be the fourth largest ever. That's because of the colder stratosphere. Stratosphere cooling arises from greenhouse warming, so as I understand it, this is partly because of our CO2 emissions.

Anthony Watts tells more fibs about NOAA

There's a US congressman who's out of control when it comes to things environmental and climate. His name is Lamar Smith. Not satisfied with data, he wants NOAA to provide him with emails and stuff. The general consensus is that Lamar Smith isn't capable of assessing data. He can't tell one number from the rest. And he's a conspiracy nutter of the type that Peter Sinclair found when he and greenmanbucket installed a hidden camera to record the Science Committee:

Lamar Smith has been vindictively harassing scientists for some time now, in a clear abuse of power. Weirdly, the US legislators have made him, an anti-science advocate, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Smith gets lots of money from oil and gas companies, and from that perspective some would argue he's only doing what he's paid to do. But that would be wrong. He gets paid to represent the American people, not the oil and gas sector. His job is to do what is right for Americans, not to line his campaign chest with donations from lobby groups.

Anyway, he's been on a wild rampage trying to stop climate science from progressing. He's another one who can't wait for the world to burn. As Ars Technica reports, he's also falsely and maliciously accused scientists of "altering data".

Reminds me of James Inhofe, who wanted to send climate scientists to gaol because he didn't like what the research was showing.