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?

First of all, here is a chart of the type you'll usually see here at HotWhopper:

Data source: GISS NASA

Next, below are some charts that should please deniers and conspiracy theorists at WUWT. Given HotWhopper readers are more familiar with science than the readers at WUWT, this can also serve as a lesson. Instead of Fahrenheit, I've plotted this in Kelvin. Zero degrees Celsius and 32 degrees Fahrenheit is 273.15 Kelvin. I've also plotted the instrumental record since 1880 from GISTemp, and the temperature changes over the entire Holocene and a bit beyond, using the data from Marcott13.

This first chart is just using the data described (GISTemp to November 2015 and Marcott13 going back more than 11,300 years. Nothing to worry about, right?

How about adding in some ice ages - with two lines showing the temperature if the ice age was only five degrees lower than the average temperature from 1951 to 1980, and a line if it got really, really cold - ten degrees lower.

Who's afraid of a big ice age now? You can hardly see the difference.

Now let's see what happens if we keep adding CO2 and heat up the planet another seven degrees on average over what the global mean surface temperature is now:

 Well, who's afraid of an itty bitty bit of warming? Not deniers at WUWT, that's for sure. And who can blame them when a retired chemist and physicist with a Ph.D. from Columbia University tells them not to worry.

Do you want to see the chart above on a different scale. (Deniers may excuse themselves from HotWhopper at this point. I don't want any hysterics.)

For the finale, this is the same data as the second chart above. No ice ages and no future warming. Just what's happened so far in the Holocene. The green bit on the left is the instrumental record. It's already well above the rest of the chart.

C R Dickson waffled on about blood cells and microbes and how people aren't the least bit worried by them because they are so tiny.  At least it looks as if that was the point he was making. (Who's afraid of a little bug like Clostridium botulinum? Who cares if you lose a few red blood cells? They are too small to worry about, surely.) He then wrote:

Fortunately, people normally do not use a magnified version of the world to proceed with their daily lives. That’s why no one drives down a highway guided by a microscope magnifying the road’s surface. 

You know that logical fallacies are one of the telltale signs of a science denier, don't you. One doesn't need a magnifying glass to be concerned about the warming world. Dr Dickson goes on to make all the warming seem miniscule, although it's clear from the first and last chart above that it's far from miniscule.

As a bonus, here is a chart showing how miniscule is the world's tallest building. You've got to wonder why anyone even bothers to remark on it, let alone mention it in Wikipedia. Or you would if you read WUWT. I bet WUWT-ers poo-poo it.