Just plain evil: Anthony Watts and PopTech sink to a new low

I'm not surprised that the despicable denier, PopTech would sink this low, but I must admit that I'm surprised at Anthony Watts, despite all the slime that has come from him over the years. They are both effectively arguing that no descendant of any of the tens of millions of people conscripted to the German armed forces early last century, no matter where they live now, and no matter what their or their forebears' personal beliefs or politics are or were, has any credibility when it comes to climate science. Why? Because they or their ancestors "fought for the Nazis".

It is probably the most abhorrent use of Godwin's Law you can imagine.

Note: See the upshot below in the update.

Jim Steele's "yellow journalism" at WUWT, and coastal erosion

Jim Steele is one of those science deniers who can't get his stuff published anywhere except climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT and in his own vanity-published denier book. Today, he wrote an article (archived here) about the collapse of cliffs in his home town Pacifica, in California. Jim could have just written a straight piece about what is contributing to coastal erosion and it might have been an informative article. However, as is usual for Jim Steele, he spoilt his article and further reduced his credibility by using it as a platform to tout his climate science denial. His article was a good example of the techniques of climate science denial. It was peppered with disinformation, twisting and misprepresenting others.

Jim Steele's yellow "journalism"

Jim's article seems to have been little more than a pretext so he could once again imply that climate science is a hoax. He accused two leading science journalists of being "yellow journalists". (Yellow journalism is where facts take a back seat to sensationalism.) Jim  wrote:

Desperate deniers Part 9: Patrick J Michael's pathetic, unconvincing WSJ report could have come from WUWT

Pat Michaels has written an article for his employer, the Cato Institute and Rupert Murdoch dutifully published it in the Wall St Journal. I was given a copy and thought you might like to see what he wrote. In my view he didn't earn his pay packet with this one. His article and arguments are pathetic. It's barely above the conspiratorial disinformation you read at WUWT.

Pat does have a bigger vocabulary and a better grasp of the English language than does Anthony Watts. And he does agree the world is warming. Maybe. But it's nothing to worry about.  His article must still be a big disappointment. The arguments are weak, wrong, unoriginal and boring, especially for someone who claims to have some scientific expertise. I'd give him the sack if I was running the Cato Institute. Wouldn't you? :)

Don't forget, Pat's had several months to figure out how to deny the hottest year on record after the hottest year on record. It's not as if he had no warning. Plus he's got a sidekick to bounce ideas off or tell what to do. Yet he couldn't come up with anything but the sort of wishy-washy Gish gallop you'll read any day on any old third-rate denier blog. This is what he should have been preparing for over the past 12 months:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature 1880 to 2015. Data source: GISS NASA

Let me tell you some of what is in his article and you can tell me what you think of it.

Desperate Deniers Part 8: Conman Anthony Watts goes for broke at WUWT

Anthony Watts is getting reckless again. No, not restless, but reckless. He's making a stand as a hard core wanna-be professional science disinformer who has become unhinged in his desperate denial.

Poor Anthony will never make it as a professional climate disinformer. The elite of the disinformation world see him as a useful idiot at best, but don't use him much these days. That's putting people like Pat Michaels in the "elite disinformer" category, with organisations like the George C Marshall Institute. They are followed by freelancers such as Marc Morano (I think he's landed a paid gig, but I class him as a freelancer), who'll say anything he's paid to say at double speed while wearing a cheesy grin. Then there are the "science" hacks for the GOP - Judith Curry, followed a long way behind (and dropping) by the unChristian duo from Alabama. Then there are all the faded jaded right wing lobby groups stacked with old white conservative men, getting older and probably fewer year by year. The pseudo-religious anti-environment groups don't count for much, but they do manage to wheedle funds from various vested interests. Way down the bottom of the disinformation totem pole are the climate conspiracy bloggers, Anthony Watts, Jo "Nova" and her rocket scientist from Luna Park and a straggle raggle taggle of other wanna-bes. Some of them are managing to stay a few inches ahead of "Steve Goddard"/Tony Heller and the twit, Tom Nelson.

Today Anthony Watts has a second article about something that former US Vice President, Al Gore may or may not have said back in 2006 (archived here). Anthony was delighted to see his previous version of the same thing all over various dumb blogs. He thinks he's on a winner but I'd guess he's despondent that it didn't hit the mainstream media. (In your dreams, Anthony.) He didn't write this all by himself (he rarely does). He says he pinched it from a blog on some financial website and added some embellishments of his own.

What could go wrong?

It's the snow not the cold, Eric Worrall

Eric Worrall takes over the reins of WUWT when Anthony is away, which has been a lot lately. Today he's shown that he doesn't understand the first thing about climate change. He wrote a short article with the headline: "If it is Hot, it is Climate, if it is Cold, its Climate".

What he's talking about is the stormy weather that hit the USA in the past few days, with crippling dumps of snow. As I speculated earlier, this was most probably fueled by the anomalously warm sea as seen in this image from NOAA. :

Anthony Watts gets into a dither with global weather

From some comments here at HW I discovered that there was a strange exchange at WUWT the other day. I say it was strange, because Anthony said he disagreed with a person while at the same time saying he agreed with him  - on the exact same point. Although it was strange, it was not uncommon as far as Anthony Watts is concerned. He doesn't understand what he reads, and doesn't seem to understand what he writes. He also demonstrates one of the telltale signs of a denier (and conspiracy theorist) - simultaneously adopting two mutually exclusive positions.

It started with the headline to the article from David Whitehouse (archived here - see Hotwhopper's Desperate Deniers Part 6): "2015 Global Temp, Or How Some Scientists Deliberately Mistook Weather For Climate"

The headline was over a graphic of Bart Simpson writing "climate and weather are not the same", which David Whitehouse and Anthony Watts should take to heart:

Desperate Deniers Part 7: Roy Spencer PhD tells fibs and flips and flops

Roy Spencer is a rather nasty little man who has said some horrible things about his fellow scientists as well as leaders of nations all over the world. He has made vile racist posts, called fellow scientists "nazis" and wished that the people attending COP21 were shot at by terrorists.

Roy is an "intelligent design" believer who doesn't "believe in" evolution. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) he doesn't espouse Christian ethics or teaching or moral code. Instead he belongs to a pseudo-religious cult called the Cornwall Alliance, which believes that it's every man's (probably not woman's) right if not duty to pillage and plunder the planet. His particular cult expects their god will clean up the mess afterwards. His god is not all powerful, however. His powers  (Roy's particular god is undoubtedly of the male gender) don't extend to cleaning up economic messes, as Victor Venema has pointed out.

I don't bother with Roy's blog very much. It's ugly and uninteresting and mostly wrong. I go there about once a month to pick up the latest satellite data. I was told that Roy had posted a scatty article about the hottest year on record (thanks, D). So I figured I'd include it in the current "Desperate Denier" series, which is devoted to the multiplicity of imaginary reasons deniers and conspiracy theorists are inventing to try to dispute the fact that 2015 really is the hottest year on record.

Desperate Deniers Part 6: David Whitehouse sez it's just a blob and ENSO

Deniers are still trickling in excuses for why they deny the world is warming, trying to dispute or downplay the latest "hottest year" - 2015. Today Anthony Watts put up an article by David Whitehouse of the denier lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, sorry, Forum (it was from the anti-science lobbying arm of the GWPF) (archived here, latest here). David chose to mimic Bob Tisdale and claim it's only got hotter because it got hotter - pointing to hot blobs and hot El Niños.

What he doesn't explain, and what no denier at WUWT has the brains to ask him, are the following:

1. What made the blob and El Niño so hot?
2. How did the blob and El Niño make the entire earth so hot when they've never done it before?
3. What about all the other hot blobs that appeared last year, didn't they make any difference?

How on earth could a blob and El Niño make the entire global mean temperature so high? The fact is that the earth was the hottest it's ever been in the last 150 years at least, and possibly in the entire time since civilisation began.

Desperate Deniers Part 5 - Anthony "surface station" Watts flunks NOAA temperature chart 101

Just when you think that Anthony Watts couldn't make a bigger fool of himself, you find out that he can. This is more properly an update to the previous article, but given the crazy reaction to the hottest year on record, it's worth a separate article. In that article I groaned at Anthony saying it couldn't be the hottest year ever globally because in the USA it was "only" the third hottest year ever.

I should know by now that with Anthony Watts you have to check every little thing. Thanks to Mark in the comments, I've discovered that Anthony "surface station" Watts can't even read a temperature anomaly chart.  Harbouring all sorts of paranoid conspiracy theories, he wrote:

When you look at temperature that isn’t biased by continuous adjustments, such as NOAA’s highly questionable fiddling with sea surface temperature data this year, you find that 2015 was not the hottest record at all according to the U.S> Climate Reference Network data, which is a state of the art system designed to need no “corrections” of any kind. 2015 comes in third for the USA:

Let's not dwell on Anthony not wanting sea surface temperatures to contaminate the US land surface data (come again? Are there ships and buoys on land now?).  Let's look at his evidence...

Desperate Deniers Part 4: Anthony Watts is shame-proof despite all his bloopers about NOAA

I would have missed this example of sad desperation, except that Anthony Watts himself highlighted it in a dumb cartoon. One is almost tempted to pity him, except that the real wonder is that he seems to be unable to feel shame or embarrassment. Any normal person would have deleted the article (archived here) after discovering they'd made so many bloopers, hoping that no-one would notice. Not Anthony. Even after he discovered almost everything he wrote was wrong, he kept on lashing out at all and sundry, flinging empty accusations left right and centre. Yet all the while it was Anthony himself who kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. I think he still doesn't realise that his whole article is nothing but one giant bungled mess from beginning to end.

It started with a dumb tweet from a twit called Tom Nelson

What seems to have happened is that Anthony saw a silly and wrong tweet from a rather dim conspiracy freak who denies under the name "Tom Nelson",  I'm a bit surprised that Anthony fell for it. He ought to know that "Tom Nelson" is a raving ratbag when it comes to anything climate.

It looks to me that Anthony has probably permanently tipped over the edge, and will grab hold of anything, not matter how wrong and stupid, in his effort to stop anyone from taking action to slow the warming. His original headline was:

Failed math: In 1997, NOAA claimed that the Earth was 5.63 degrees warmer than today

After someone pointed out one of his errors in the comments, he changed it to:

Failed Math: In 1997, NOAA claimed that the Earth was 3.83 degrees warmer than today

Both his headlines are way wrong. For one thing, in 1997 NOAA said nothing about what the temperature was today in 2016 - or not on the pages Anthony linked to. NOAA most certainly didn't say in 1997 that 1997 was 5.63 degrees or 3.83 degrees hotter than it was or would be in 2016. I doubt there were too many people employed by NOAA back in 1997 who thought at the time that the planet would cool at all, let alone cool by 5.63 degrees or 3.83 degrees between 1997 and 2016. I strongly doubt that any scientists who collated, analysed and reported global temperature changes would have thought the Earth was about to cool down suddenly.

[At this point, if you are going to read on, I suggest getting yourself a mug of hot coffee or a glass of wine or whatever you usually sup on at this hour, and settle down. Careful with it, though. You don't want coffee (or wine) splurted all over your keyboard.]

More wild weather for the USA

A couple of days ago I mentioned the big storm that was threatening the east of the USA. At the time, most weather forecasters were giving a cautious warning, saying it was a bit soon to know for sure when and whether it would hit. However Bob Henson wrote at wunderground.com: "computer models were in remarkable agreement late Tuesday". Today he wrote:

Everything from tornadoes to paralyzing ice to blizzard conditions will be unfolding over the next several days as a massive storm system, dubbed Winter Storm Jonas by the Weather Channel, takes shape over the eastern half of the United States. Computer models have doggedly pointed to this scenario for the better part of a week, and the model consensus on the big picture continues to be unusually strong. The crosshairs for the heaviest urban snow appear to be on the Washington, D.C., area; more than two feet are possible there and nearby. Blizzard warnings were in effect Thursday afternoon in and near the Washington, D.C., area. The crystal ball is cloudier on where the storm’s north edge will end up--and that location is crucial, since it could be near New York City.

Desperate Deniers Part 3: Rud Istvan mixes up GISTemp data versions

This is Part 3 of the Desperate Denier series, following the announcement that 2015 smashed the record for the hottest year. A numerically-challenged disinformer called Rud Istvan is blaming the hot planet on Dr Thomas Karl  from NOAA and Dr Gavin Schmidt from NASA (archived here).

Deniers have been swiping at NOAA ever since it updated its data set to include a heap more weather station records over land, and switched to an updated version of sea surface temperatures. Thing is, in Part 1 of this series, I showed how the trend for the NOAA data set is virtually identical to that of three other main datasets. In fact if you look at the trend since 1971, which was the last time there was a change in the trend, NOAA has the second lowest trend.

Desperate Deniers Part 2: David Middleton fakes satellite data "Just for grins"

This is the second article in the Desperate Deniers series and is about David Middleton's deception. In the first article, I posted charts of the global mean surface temperature from four different sources: the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, GISS NASA (USA), NOAA (USA) and Berkeley Earth (USA). Below is the chart that probably explains best why climate science deniers are so desperate:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature from four datasets. The 2015 line is the average of the 2015 temperature from all four sources. Data sources: GISS NASA, UK Met Office, NOAA, Berkeley Earth.

Desperate Deniers Part 1: Stephen Hodgart from University of Surrey and HadCRUT4

Deniers can't figure out how best to protest that 2015 was the hottest year on record, which came straight after 2014, the previous hottest year on record. They need to get together and work up a decent strategy, because 2016 could be yet another hottest year on record, given the currrent El Nino on top of global warming.

This article is part 1 of a series on the desperation of deniers now that there have been two "hottest" years in a row. At WUWT they are very reluctant to let go of the meme "it's not warming". One wonders how much longer they'll keep it up, given that 2016 is likely to another very hot year, and might even turn out as hot or hotter than last year.

I publish in Nature, sez Bartleby @wattsupwiththat...Oh yeah? Pull the other one!

You know how deniers at WUWT like to make out they know it all? Well, here's a comment you'll appreciate. It's from a pseudo-scientist who calls themselves Bartleby, who was protesting a Letter in Nature Climate Change. He or she wrote that the article was a mere letter, not a refereed article (or so Bartleby thinks)!

January 20, 2016 at 5:47 pm (my emphasis)
That was my first criticism Gary, but then I noticed the article was published in Nature.

I publish in Nature. Members of my family also publish there. I have to express strong disappointment with Nature’s editorial staff. In their defense, I’ll make note of the fact this was a “letter” rather than a refereed article. I suppose that should carry some weight, but I’ve also noticed an editorial bias towards publishing absurd psuedo-scientific flapdoodle like this.

Personally? I’m disgusted and will never submit a paper to Nature again.

Bartleby has clearly never even looked at the table of contents in a Nature journal, much less submitted a manuscript.

PS There's nothing wrong with not knowing that to have a Letter published in Nature is something that many budding scientists hope they can achieve once in their career. It's his woeful attempt to bignote himself with the illiterati by pretending familiarity with a journal he's never looked at, that makes Bartleby the fool.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with a scorching hot December 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 December included, so it's the final for the 2015 year. The explanation has been included with each update together with what seem to be things to watch. The next article will be in April (to March) or May.

The main article for the 2015 year can be found here.

2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Dr Thomas Karl, Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA have just given a press conference to to announce the annual average global temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

You will not be surprised to know that 2015 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2014 by a huge 0.13 °C. It was 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial. It is now 106 years since there was a "coldest year on record". (Gavin Schmidt said that 2015 would have broken the record even without the El Niño, though presumably by not as much.)

Anyone who tries to tell you it hasn't warmed since 1996, or 1997, or 1998, is dead wrong. See for yourself:

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature. Anomaly from the 1881-1910 mean. Data source: GISS NASA.

The average global temperature in 2015 was:

• 0.13 °C hotter than in 2014
• 1.33 °C hotter than the coldest year in the record (1909)
• 0,24 °C hotter than the average for 1998
• 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial (ballpark)

Note about the ballpark: I took the pre-industrial benchmark to be 0.3 °C cooler than 1900, from this recent article by Professor Michael Mann in Huffington Post.

Anthony Watts is stumped by snowballs, volcanoes, CO2 and cap carbonates

Now "it's volcanoes", according to Anthony Watts!

Anthony Watts is a dim and rather rough gruff bloke who runs a climate conspiracy blog called wattsupwiththat, better known as WUWT or WTFUWWUWT. He claims he accepts the greenhouse effect, but only a little bit, and only as long as he doesn't have to pay taxes. He has a strong aversion to climate science, and falsely accuses climate scientists of fraud, and when they so rightly object he accuses them of "sliming" him.

Anthony's deepest fear is that an asteroid is about to come down from the heavens and smite him, which is rather unlikely. He promotes and encourages a lot of conspiracy theories, ranging from the scientists are committing fraud through to Pope Francis is a KGB sleeper agent, to it's a plot of evil green nazi communist fascist types who want to rule the world to the simple "physics of the past two hundred years is a hoax". He's posted various "theories" for global warming on his blog, when he admits that it is warming, ranging from "it's Russian steampipes" through to "OMG it's insects". Unsurprisingly, his blog has made a small contribution to the advancement of cognitive science.

Today Anthony has decided (archive here, latest here) it must be underwater volcanoes, not CO₂, that "were the driver" behind the snowball Earth.

It's unacceptable: Forty two years after Kellog and Schneider with Tim Ball at WUWT

Way back in 1974, William Kellog and Stephen Schneider wrote these closing words to an article they had published in Science:

While it is essential to work out international mechanisms to guarantee that any new knowledge of our climate system will have only constructive uses, the price in human suffering of continued ignorance of the causes of climate change may already have become unacceptably high. 

In that paper there was a photo of a glacier in France, which the authors compared with an engraving of the same glacier from about 100 years earlier, which was on the front cover of that December 1974 issue of Science. Below are the two images. You can guess which one is the earlier one. I added an arrow to the 1970s photo showing how far the glacier retreated:

Top: Engraving of the Argentierre Glacier (French Alps) made about 1850-1860 showing its front still close to the plain and the village. See page 1163. [From Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, Copyright © and published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971. Translated by Barbara Bary] Bottom: Photograph of the town of Argentierre in the French Alps, taken in the mid-1960's. Source: Science 27 December 1974

Anthony Watts heroically defends cool satellites

Not long ago I wrote about how the satellite lower troposphere data diverged from the surface temperature trends some time earlier this century. I put it around 2006, just going by the charts. Tamino took a different approach and compared satellite data with that from thermometers on balloons (which I missed at the time, I'm embarrassed to say). It used to be just RSS that was the outlier, now with the latest UAH beta, both are.

There have been recent papers on the subject as well (see below), but so far the satellite researchers have not identified what is the cause (or not to my knowledge, yet).

This is not cool

Now Yale Climate Connections has posted a YouTube video by Peter Sinclair of Climate Crocks, called as part of the "This is Not Cool" series. (H/t metzomagic)

David Middleton is hot and bothered by the spurt and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation

As you know, Anthony Watts (quite wisely) mostly uses guests to write freeby articles for his blog. He gets into too much trouble when he tries to write something all by himself. Anthony doesn't need to determine whether his guests write nonsense or not. His good friend Wondering Willis Eschenbach gave him an "out" writing: "So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job..." Yes, even his close allies think Anthony's incapable of distinguishing pseudo-scientific waffle from science.

Today Anthony's posted another article by David Middleton. This time David is waffling on about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is measured by an index. As Kevin Trenberth explained it in a recent Perspective article in Science (my paras):

Ice age deferred stymies David Middleton at WUWT

Anthony Watts has posted another ice age article at WUWT (archived here, cached here). This time, instread of it being an "ice age cometh" article, it's an "ice age isn't coming" article. The WUWT article is by David Middleton, who is one of Anthony's pet deniers. He was writing about a new paper in Nature about how we've deferred one and may possibly defer two major glaciations. We're certainly going to perceptibly affect the climate for more than 100,000 years ahead.

It's been known for some time that we've deferred major glaciations

The fact we've deferred at least one glaciation won't be news to anyone who's familiar with previous work on the subject. The fact we may have deferred two might well be news, although mathematician and astronomer Sir Robert Ball predicted it would take 200,000 years way back in 1906:

Anthony Watts can't get enough conspiracy theories at WUWT

There's another article protesting the moon-landing paper - the initial reaction to which spawned a wealth of material for further research. Some right wing journalist in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote some nonsense about the paper that he either didn't read or didn't understand. It brought out some beaut conspiracy theories from Anthony Watts' conspiratorial "believers" (archived here).

Honestly, you'd think Anthony had learnt his lesson many times over by now. Every time he protests that academic research into conspiracy theories and climate science denial are linked, he brings out a heap more conspiracy theories from his clan. It's not just motivated rejection of climate science, WUWT has motivated rejection of cognitive science. (Perhaps Anthony just wanted his readers to post their conspiracy theories under an "on topic" article.)

From C.R. Dickson: A retired chemist's view of global warming

There's a retired chemist and physicist called C.R. Dickson who has a Ph.D. from Columbia University and who has graced WUWT with an article (archived here, cached here). He wants to put global warming into perspective. What he did was post some charts using the Fahrenheit scale. (Has he ever used SI units when he did science, I wonder? Maybe he knows that most of Anthony Watts' audience is from the USA.)

He expanded the axis so that his charts were merely a flat line. This is a trick sometimes used by the dumber deniers at WUWT, like Smokey aka DBStealey aka dbs aka D Boehm. They do this when they want to seem very uneducated. Or maybe they think they are being clever, who knows.

Anyway, since deniers prefer flat line charts to ones that show just how much it's warmed in the last few decades I figured I'd show some more. It's about time I wrote an article that science deniers could relate to, don't you think?

Telegraphing climate facts is unhelpful to Eric Worrall at WUWT

In the land of deniosaurs, facts are most unhelpful, don't you know. As you might have gathered if you've read any denier blogs like WUWT, anyone who talks about the science of climate change is at best an "alarmist", if not full of "hate" (one of Anthony Watts' favourite words when describing climate hawks).

Today Eric Worrall decides that it's "alarmist" to lay out the facts (archived here). I'm thinking he probably doesn't know the difference between "alarmist" and "alarming". Or maybe he does and he just doesn't want to face the facts. Eric is an odd little chap who's been a science denier for some time. Maybe forever - I wouldn't know. Certainly since he started commenting on climate blogs.

Anyway, Eric thinks it's "alarmist" of Myles Allen to state the obvious (at the Telegraph):

"Normal weather is actually a bit of a thing of the past."

"Here in Oxford we maintain the world’s longest daily weather record, we just beat the previous record by a whopping two and a half degrees and that record was set back in 1852."

The surface compared with the lower troposphere and the Daily Mail's big blooper

Click to enlarge

Another Fail at the Daily Mail, this time with an article by Ryan O'Hare (archived here). The Daily Mail is a tabloid in the UK. Today it's trying to push a denier meme that everyone got it wrong and that 2015 isn't the hottest year on record.

The Daily Mail is wrong as usual. 2015 was the hottest year on record - and by a large margin. I figure the problem the Daily Mail has is that it wants us to think that we all live up in the sky.

As ATTP tweeted:

To solve global warming, everyone must move to the lower troposphere! https://t.co/Lw3H9JR9ue via @MailOnline

— There's Physics (@theresphysics) January 7, 2016

Well - this is not the first and it won't be the last that someone confuses the measures of satellites and surface temperature. Thing is. the Daily Mail is going to have a lot of egg on its face in a few days, when the reports from NASA and NOAA are in, and a bit later when the report from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre is in. (Does a newspaper have a face?)

A curiosity with the lower troposphere record

The other thing is that I have a suspicion there's something not quite right with the satellite records. Look I could be very wrong. I'm not an expert by any means. However it seems to me that there's a break between the satellite and surface record starting some time around 2006. Look at the charts below and tell me what you think. If you've a mathematical and statistical bent, maybe you can tell me if I'm just suffering eye-ball-itis or if there could be something to it.

Some good news from WUWT - climate change is getting more airplay

We've had years of WUWT drought about the Californian drought, with very few articles at WUWT. Now that the drought is being alleviated by El Niño rain and snow Anthony Watts has written two articles in three days about the weather in California (see here). The good news is that Anthony tells us that "some pundits" are "declaring all of this as being driven by “climate change” and claiming that “severe weather is getting worse due to climate change”." I take that to mean that some people in the media are now talking about climate change when extreme weather is being discussed.

Unfortunately Anthony didn't give any examples, so I don't know if he was making that up or if he did find people on television or the radio or on the internet talking about climate change. That means I also don't know what anyone said. Given that Anthony decided to not give any examples, it's more likely that climate change was mentioned in the context of, um, climate change than that people were saying that climate change causes El Niño storms in California.

Whatever, it could be that people are talking about climate change more - and that would be a good thing. It would help offset the ramp up in science disinformation campaigns of the past few years, reported by Constantine Boussalis and Travis G. Coan in the journal Global Climate Change. Graham Readfearn has written about that study at the Guardian.

Only 8% of Americans think climate change is "natural" but you wouldn't know it from the WUWT headline!**

Science deniers at WUWT are complaining that a lot of Americans know more about climate change than WUWT conspiracy theorists know. It turns out that a lot of Americans still don't know much of anything at all about climate change, but the majority do know something. That's according to a poll reported by WUWT (and probably some other climate conspiracy blogs), as well as various media outlets. The poll was conducted by Monmouth University. Anthony Watts has a guest article by David Middleton. The headline reads:

Poll: 73% of Americans reject so-called AGW consensus (but you wouldn’t know it from the headline)

Now what that shows is that David Middleton, unusually for a science denier, understands that since around the middle of last century, the scientific consensus is that probably all the warming we've had is because of human activity.  What has shocked him is that the media reports it differently. He's appalled at a headline that reads:

Poll: 70 percent believe in climate change

So am I, but for different reasons. From where I sit (in Australia) it should read: "Poll: 70 per cent believe in climate change" or better yet: "61% in the USA know that humans are contributing to climate change".

Central England temperature - no ice age in sight

There are a few denier bloggers who like to use the temperature record of Central England to argue that an ice age is coming, or at least to claim, contrary to all evidence, that it's cooling down. That's fallen out of favour lately, probably because the record maintained by the UK Met Office doesn't support their wishes or fears. Tamino has recently written about this record in considerable detail. I was also alerted to an exchange on Twitter started by Andrew Neil, who is with the BBC, Spectator and various other media going by his Twitter tagline. He might excel in some areas, but his research skills are not so hot when it comes to weather and climate. He tweeted:

Despite very warm December, I understand annual Central England Temperature ended up pretty close to the long-term average. Is that correct?

— Andrew Neil (@afneil) January 4, 2016

No, Andrew, it's not correct. Given the different responses Andrew Neil got, I thought I'd put up a couple of charts so you can spread them around among the people who deny what's been happening in the middle of that small but important island in the North Atlantic. Since Andrew asked about the long term average, I've plotted it against the twentieth century mean.

Three hottest evers in succession for lower troposphere

The UAH data is out for the lower troposphere for December. For three months in a row, the lower troposphere has had the hottest months - the hottest October, the hottest November and the hottest December in the record (since 1979). September 2015 was the sixth hottest on record, the warmest being 1998.

Below is the ENSO chart showing the UAH lower troposphere temperatures (air temperature via satellite) for the El Niño years of 1997/98, 2009/10 and 2015/16 (to date). As with RSS, the temperature in the lower troposphere for December went up, unlike in 2009/10 when it dipped.

Denier weirdness: It hasn't warmed since 2017!

Remember how Bob Tisdale thought that Mark Boslough's bet was foolish? Well he finally twigged what the bet was about, and was even more aghast that anyone would be expected to bet. He realised just how laughable it would be to bet that the world would cool, which is an unusual attitude for a hard-core science denier like Bob Tisdale. His chart showed just how much it's been warming, which is a most unusual thing for anyone at WUWT to do.

Bob Tisdale knows it's been getting mighty hot. Source: WUWT

Perhaps in part because Bob showed just how hot it's been getting, some of the WUWT deniers seem to accept it. They aren't giving up though. The new denier chant of "it hasn't warmed since 2017" has already begun at WUWT, two years early. The following comments were seen under another article by Bob Tisdale (in which he shoved the latest global temperatures down to the level of those in 1997/98 to compare ENSO events):

Greenland really has been melting, can someone tell Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts has decided once again that he, ex-weather announcer, knows all about ice in Greenland, and the real experts "don't know nuffin'". His headline (archived here) is: "Failed claim right out of the gate: Climate change altering Greenland ice sheet & accelerating sea level rise". And he took it upon himself, the ahem Greenland pseudo-scientist at WUWT, to continue:

From the “why worry, the 99.7% of the ice is still there” department and York University comes this climate claim that has to do with a natural event in 2012, and just doesn’t hold up as being driven by “climate change”. More details on that below.

If 20% of the ice in Greenland melted, there'd be a rise in sea level of about 1.2 metres or 4 feet. But leaving his "why worry" aside, Anthony was protesting a new paper in Nature Climate Change by Horst Machguth and a large team of scientists. The paper was related to the widescale melt of the surface, such as happened in 2012. It's also to do with the overall warming of Greenland and surface melting in general, particularly the implications for melt runoff and sea level rise.

The latest Arctic report card shows that last year (2015), more than half of the ice sheet had a surface melt, which was the most widespread melt since 2012, and was "above the 1981-2010 average on 54.3% of days (50 of 92 days)".

It's not just a random surface melt that ices up again quickly, either. Greenland is losing ice mass, as the chart below (from the same report) shows:

Fig 1. | Cumulative change in the total mass (in Gigatonnes, Gt) of the Greenland Ice Sheet between April 2002 and April 2015 estimated from GRACE measurements. Each symbol is an individual month and the orange asterisks denote April values for reference. Source: Arctic Report Card

El Nino, the California drought and Sierra Nevada Snow

Yesterday Anthony Watts wrote one of his rare articles about the drought in his home state of California (archived here). His headline read: "Drought buster? Up to 10 feet of snow this week for California’s Sierra Nevada". Under the headline he wrote (my emphasis):

Here is some good news for drought-stricken California; the latest forecast model output from WeatherBell suggests that the Sierra Nevada snow-pack will get a fresh dump of up to 10 feet of snow. 

He posted the chart below, with a scale up to 48 inches from the look of it, not 120 inches (though the scale doesn't indicate units). Up the top it states "Maximum 147.6 in". (Click to enlarge it).

Source: WUWT

His prediction of ten feet of snow this week struck me as rather a lot in just a few days. Not knowing how quickly snow can build up in the region I did some research. "This should hit the headlines", I thought to myself. However the only news I could find on the Sierra Nevada snowpack were about how up to "2 feet of fresh snow are expected to fall this week in the Sierra Nevada's highest points" (Associated Press in the Sacramento Bee - 3 January 2015). That's eight feet short of Anthony's ten feet prediction.

Anthony Watts does an "algoreisfat", making it too easy...

Anthony Watts makes it far too easy to mock his blog and his band of science deniers. He's just posted an article (archived here) that he wrote all by his little self (for a change). It's an "algoreisfat" type of article. Seriously?

He's saying that there've been no catastrophes. Of course Anthony has ignored all the incredible extreme weather of the past few months and weeks - not a mention in any article on his blog. In this particular article he didn't mention that 2015 was a record hot year by a wide margin (he played it down and blamed it on El Nino), after the record hot year in 2014, and the likelihood of 2016 breaking the record again, or getting close to doing so. He completely forgot about Sandy, Haiyan, Yasi, Pam, Katrina etc and the Big Wet, and the disastrous Californian drought. I don't know if he even knew about the recent tornados in Texas, or the heat wave in India last year, and doesn't seem to have heard about the deadly European heat waves, or massive floods over the past few years.

Bob Tisdale won't take on Mark Boslough's bet

Bob Tisdale has another "it's getting hotter because it's getting hotter" article at WUWT (archived here, latest here). Does he not realise how silly his articles are? As you know, the rapid rise in global mean surface temperature, particularly since the middle of last century, is because of the increase in greenhouse gases:

Fig 1| Global mean surface temperature - anomaly from 1881 to 1910 average.
Data source: NASA GISS

Bob Tisdale, a pseudo-scientist who uses WUWT to sell his "books", thinks this is natural, and has nothing to do with carbon emissions. He blames it all on blobs and El Niños.

Look at all the blog hits - that means I must be right!

Anthony Watts has made one of his rare appearances on his blog to report his blog stats for 2015 (archived here). They are impressive, although as he pointed out, slightly worse than last year. I doubt that his claim of being the #1 climate related blog in the world is true. There are other climate-related blogs like those of Jeff Masters and his colleagues at Weather Underground, Joe Romm at Think Progress, which I'd guess have a lot more visits than WUWT does. And if you judge #1 by quality rather than number of visitors, WUWT would rank well below zero on a scale of one to ten, way, way below quality climate blogs like realclimate.org and well below skepticalscience.com and any of the blogs listed in HotWhopper's blogroll.

Botched white and grey matter with Eric Worrall at WUWT

It's quiet on the denier front, so while waiting for the next climate conspiracy theory and logical fallacy, you can read about two more articles from Eric Worrall at WUWT. The first was how he is a bit wary of putting computers in people's brains (archived here, latest here). The second was about how some fossil-fuel-funded organisation in the USA is anti-environment (what's new?) (archived here).

Beyond crowd-sourcing

Eric got his notion about putting computers in people's brains from either misreading or extending an idea he got from the Daily Mail.  (He didn't dig any deeper.) His headline was:"Claim: Machine Human Hybrids will Solve Climate Change" under which Eric wrote:

The Daily Mail has claimed that the super intelligence of a new race of cybernetic enhanced humans will be able to solve wicked problems such as Climate Change.

Except that isn't what was written in the Daily Mail, or not if you interpret Eric's "cybernetic enhanced humans" like this. For all his IT expertise, Eric didn't understand what he copied and pasted. The first two lines of his copy and paste were:

‘Superintellingence’ of AI and humans working together could solve climate change and end wars, researchers claim

AI and humans working together - not "cybernetic enhanced humans" or "Machine human hybrids" - or not in the sense that Eric figured.

WUWT blogger Eric Worrall flits from Montreal to Pakistan to tout his science denial

Climate science deniers are a funny lot. From my reading of climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT, most of them don't know what they are rejecting. Nor do they care. What drives some of them seems to be a desire to show they are cleverer than the experts. But like many people who aim to look smart, they don't fool anyone who really is smart. Sarcasm only works if it's grounded in fact. When you use sarcasm but base it on a logical fallacy it tends to reflect badly on you, not on the person you are mocking.

Take Eric Worrall for example. He's the person who Anthony Watts has put in charge of WUWT while Anthony's off doing I don't know what. At least that's what it looks like.

Eric has posted two articles in succession at WUWT. He seems to think they show that "climate alarmists don't know nuffin'".