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.

Local catastrophes don't count

Do millions of people at risk of major floods in his own home country not count? From Reuters:

As of Thursday morning, some 9.3 million people nationwide were in areas with flood warnings. That was down from 12.1 million on Wednesday and 17.7 million on Tuesday.

At least 28 people [now 31 people] have died in the U.S. Midwest since the weekend in the rare winter floods, mostly from driving into flooded areas after storms dropped up to 12 inches (30 cm) of rain, officials said. Flooding in the Midwest usually comes in the spring as snowmelt swells rivers.

While the mid-west USA is suffering the umpteenth 1000 year flood in the last twenty years, and the UK and Ireland are staggering under multiple floods in succession just this year (and years prior), and the eastern USA and western Europe had a record-breaking warm lead-up to winter - Anthony Watts is berating Al Gore for saying, quite truthfully, back in 2006 that the world needed to work out a plan to address global warming within ten years.

The world has agreed on action to reduce greenhouse gases

And the world does have a plan - or at least some promises. Anthony Watts and his fellow deniers did nothing but moan at the agreement reached at COP21 in Paris just a short while ago, and now he's trying to argue that nothing of the sort happened.

Now despite the fact that last year the global emissions may have stalled or even fallen, Anthony continues his pretence that no action has been taken. He can't admit that his reactionary activism to increase carbon emissions is failing. He can't admit that in his own country, the USA, all the lobbying by his pro-smog mates has not stopped the USA from limiting growth in emissions, and they may have even fallen by 1% this year.

Without the dedication of people like Al Gore, it's doubtful that this turnaround would have started.

From an article at SBS in December:

Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change policy at University College London, said: "The trend of rapid global emissions growth has been broken: this keeps 2 degrees C in play....There could hardly be better news to help the Paris conference in its final days."

The UEA and Global Carbon Project said their projection for 2015 is based on available energy consumption data in China and the United States, as well as forecast economic growth for the rest of the world.

"The projected decline (in emissions) is largely down to China's decreased coal use, driven by its economic adjustment," Le Quéré added.

China's emissions have been called into question lately due to difficulties in interpreting its data.

China was still the world's biggest emitter last year, releasing 9.7 billion tonnes of CO2 but its emissions growth is expected to decline in 2015 by 3.9 percent after rising by 1.2 percent last year and 6.7 percent a year for the previous decade, the report said.

Globally, it is unlikely that emissions have peaked for good because many growing economies still rely on coal for energy generation and emissions reductions in some industrialised countries are still very modest, the study said.

In case anyone still thinks "it's natural", this is the abstract from a paper by Gerrit Hansen and Dáithí Stone in Nature Climate Change last month:

Impacts of recent regional changes in climate on natural and human systems are documented across the globe, yet studies explicitly linking these observations to anthropogenic forcing of the climate are scarce. Here we provide a systematic assessment of the role of anthropogenic climate change for the range of impacts of regional climate trends reported in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. We find that almost two-thirds of the impacts related to atmospheric and ocean temperature can be confidently attributed to anthropogenic forcing. In contrast, evidence connecting changes in precipitation and their respective impacts to human influence is still weak. Moreover, anthropogenic climate change has been a major influence for approximately three-quarters of the impacts observed on continental scales. Hence the effects of anthropogenic emissions can now be discerned not only globally, but also at more regional and local scales for a variety of natural and human systems.

Dimwitted Anthony Watts vs Al Gore - and the winner is Al Gore

This is what Anthony was ridiculing, an article at CBSNews (read the whole article, including page 2):

Americans have been hearing it for decades, wavering between belief and skepticism that it all may just be a natural part of Earth’s cyclical warming and cooling phases.

And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said.

He sees the situation as “a true planetary emergency.”

“If you accept the truth of that, then nothing else really matters that much,” Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have to organize quickly to come up with a coherent and really strong response, and that’s what I’m devoting myself to.”

Anthony, oblivious to all that has happened, in callous disregard of the disastrous floods pouring down the USA right now, oblivious to the actions that have already been taken to mitigate global warming, and the recent international agreement to take much stronger action - wrote:

Well, the 10 years are about up, by now, warming should have reached “planetary emergency levels” 

Is Anthony Watts really as stupid as he seems or is it for show?

Is Anthony Watts really that stupid or is it just that he knows his readers are that stupid when it comes to climate change. Did he really expect that the world would have collapsed in a heap within ten years? That's not what Mr Gore was suggesting. What he was saying was that drastic measures need to be taken within the next ten years, not that the world would fall apart immediately. The action to reduce emissions has to have started well before the really big effects are felt. For example, the melting of West Antarctica may already be unstoppable, but it will take some time before the melt raises seas by a metre or more. That might not happen for a few decades yet. Okay - so we're probably too late to stop that "planetary emergency", but we may be able to slow it down. Other planetary emergencies will no doubt happen in the next few decades - but if we had kept on increasing emissions at the same rate, they would have happened sooner and the effects would have been worse than they will now be.

Yes, Anthony probably is that stupid. He did a Tisdale and wrote:

Of course, proponents of climatic catastrophe will look at that and say “Gore was right!” …except there is this small niggling problem, a fairly large El Niño in 2015, which has nothing to do with CO2 induced warming as Gore claimed ten years ago. Note the spike in 2007, in the nine years since, that hasn’t been matched.

The real point here is to note that, no matter whether you are looking at the satellite record or the surface temperature record, is that the temperature hasn’t risen dramatically in the last 10 years, and the dramatic spikes we see in the surface and satellite temperature records correspond to a natural event that’s been going on for millennia; El Niño.

Let's see shall we? Tell us Anthony, why is the global mean temperature this year so much hotter than in the year of the super-El Nino of 1998? And pray tell, if global warming has been caused by El Nino for millennia, why haven't the oceans boiled dry and why isn't all the land nothing but bare scorched earth?

And what was that about temperatures rising dramatically? Let's not just look at the last ten years - what about the last 30 years? Is 0.175 °C not fast enough for you? Sheesh!

From the WUWT comments

The question about Anthony's readers being stupid about climate change is answered in the comments - of which there are many. (It's a resounding "yes", in case you were in doubt.) Many of the comments were one-liners of the "algoreisfat" type. There were very few comments from anyone who could pass for sane (I only read one or two, out of the 244 archived, though admittedly I gave up after reading about 80 comments.)

Apropos the last article, Jude is more scared of things that won't happen than things that are certain to happen (see also here).

January 2, 2016 at 12:05 pm
Am far more concerned about a small asteroid hitting the earth than the world temp going up 1 degree over the next 80 years per Gore and the media’s global warming scam.

And a zany conspiracy theory, which could be a common if false denier meme, who knows. Joinamerica

January 2, 2016 at 1:05 pm
Mr. Gore has made about a BILLION dollars from his cap & trade scam. (And many millions from selling his television network to Al Jazeera.)

David L. Hagen is nuts, there's no two ways around it:

January 2, 2016 at 8:30 am
Could “anthropogenic global warming” have compensated for/prevented “most” of the global cooling for the last 18 years 9 months?
Can we then have hope that we might be able to reverse the projected increasing rate of cooling towards the next glaciation? I am more concerned over the damage of a 1000 ft thick glacier grinding back through Canada into the USA than 1 ft higher sea level. 

ferdberple is just as nuts, posting a chart of ice ages and proclaiming:

January 2, 2016 at 10:57 am
Look at NOAA own data below. High CO2 causes temperatures to FALL, not rise. 

BruddahNui might be just mocking everyone, or she/he could be for real:

January 2, 2016 at 12:35 pm
No. AGW is a failed God. CO2 doe’s nothing to slow an ice age mini are full. CO2 doe’s not warm the planet as witnessed by ice core samples and more going back millions of years.

The inspiring, literary "thoughts" keep coming one after another, This from Gloateus Maximus:

January 2, 2016 at 8:33 am
Mother Nature has bitch slapped the blubbery fool masher mercilessly. 

Brad Michael Tankersley says something irrelevant and inane about weather forecasting for reasons known only to himself:

January 2, 2016 at 9:07 am
Bullshi*. It’s an out and out FRAUD and shear arrogance of anyone living to try and predict weather. Perfect example is Al Bore. Sad thing is the younger generations are purposely dumbed down so much, they believe all this crap. Someday, the truth will unfold and all the fraudsters and hacksters hopefully will get the same punishment the Saudis have recently dished out to the terrorists………………

Drifter used to be a daily barn cleaner. He couldn't even hold that job down, and no wonder:

January 2, 2016 at 9:51 am
Warmer Huh? All they have to dois continue to use the FAKE warming reports they already have. This whole thing is take down the USA, make al gore richer and impoverish (enslave) the rest of us.I haven’t seen this much balderdash since I cleaned out the daily barns. 

Sandy Underpants did make some effort to inject a bit of reason into the madness, though he still misunderstood what Al Gore was saying:

January 2, 2016 at 9:11 am
Gore is saying that the 10 year window to act and make changes closes at the end of 2015. There have been many environmentally conscious changes in the past 10 years made by governments across the world in an effort to lower CO2 output and make cleaner burning emissions. The lack of absolute catastrophe may be the result of the fact that changes have been made.

David would have none of it though, and smartly redirected the discussion back to lunacy:

January 2, 2016 at 10:22 am
Keep believing that if it makes you feel better. Global warming is nothing more than a hoax to get money from the masses.

The rabid mob was quite delighted to have someone to flame as well as Al Gore. I've skipped over a few - here's a thought from Don Perry:

January 2, 2016 at 12:55 pm
Sandy ( or is it Alice?)– What rabbit hole have you got your head pushed down?

And Avogadro joined in with

January 2, 2016 at 1:45 pm
If you did not have sand in your underpamts, you could think rationally. There is much wrong with your post, but I will not do you the favor of explaining; the world needs good examples of bad examples 

I don't know if hunter thinks it's getting colder, or if he's talking about the oceans warming the air

January 2, 2016 at 9:14 am
El Nino seems to be an event that is actually removing heat from the Earth system.

Bruce Cobb put up a mislabeled chart of temperature on the top of an ice sheet in central Greenland, which ended in 1854, mistakenly thinking that the global mean surface temperature is in the minus 30s - Celsius! and said:

January 2, 2016 at 10:12 am
Cooling is something to be concerned about, not the slight beneficial warming we’ve experienced. And cooling is very possible in the coming decades. The long-term trend the past 10,000 years is downward. 

You've got to wonder why Anthony boasts about his weird conspiracy theorising fans. Well, given his article he's no better than they are. He deserves them.

BTW there are lots more where these thoughts came from - I didn't even get 1/3 of the way through before I stopped reading. It was as though Anthony's "algoreisfat" article unleashed a pent up tornado of complete insanity - madness. My brain is tough from denier watching, and it would survive the experience of reading more of the comments, however there are much more interesting things I could be using it for...

Credit: XKCD

References and further reading

Hansen, Gerrit, and Dáithí Stone. "Assessing the observed impact of anthropogenic climate change." Nature Climate Change (2015). doi:10.1038/nclimate2896

CO2 emissions 'to stall, even decline' in 2015 - article from Reuters at SBS

2006: Al Gore Does Sundance - article by David Germain at CBSNews