Denier weirdness @wattsupwiththat - The US housing bubble collapse proves climate science is a hoax?

Anthony Watts has posted yet another "climate hoax" conspiracy theory on his blog wattsupwiththat.com (archived here). This one is not at all developed. It is by someone called "Victor Grauer" complaining that his false accusation of fraud by climate scientists was relegated to the bore hole by the climate scientists at realclimate.org.

Victor revamped and reposted his theory where it would be likely to get a better reception. And where better to post something rejected by leading scientists, than the world's leading climate conspiracy and disinformation blog, WUWT?

His argument boils down to this:

• There was a collapse of the US housing market this century
• Bernie Madoff conned his investors
• Therefore climate science is a hoax.

Logic fail!

Eric Worrall wants the New York Times to "balance" facts with conspiracy theories

I've said before how difficult life is these days for climate science deniers and disinformers. They can't seem to win a trick with the weather against them and the science not supporting them. They don't like being ignored.

Eric Worrall is complaining today about a New York Times call for a climate change editor (archived here). Eric wants the job spec to include giving weight to pseudo-science and conspiracy theories, instead of focusing on the realities of climate change.

Anthony Watts, cosmic rays, Hockey Schtick and Dan Pangburn

Deniers are having a really hard time at the moment. With climate change getting more and more obvious, Anthony Watts is referring to nutty and nuttier to keep his fans' attention. Today he started off okay, but ended up referring to a denier called Dan Pangburn via one of Anthony's "anonymous cowards" who goes by the name of the Hockey Schtick.

The newly published paper that Anthony was writing about to start with was by J. Svensmark, M. B. Enghoff, N. J. Shaviv, and H. Svensmark. The last author is the scientist from Denmark who is much beloved by fake sceptics for his cosmic ray hypothesis. (The second last author is an "it's the sun" proponent and global warming denier.) In the new paper, the authors report some work where they say they have found that cloud cover decreases in response to Forbush decrease events.

Calling for volunteers for a small project

If anyone is willing to help with a small project of mine, please send an email to sou at hotwhopper dot com (you know how to parse that). It will require a few minutes of your time over the next week or so, and could be fun. No climate knowledge or any particular skills in anything is required, though it might be a small advantage to know something of climate change or the climate blogosphere.

I'm on the road at the moment, but will get back as soon as I can to all of you who email.

PS I should add I'm looking for as many people as possible, not just one person. So don't be shy :)

Time to look at the Arctic sea ice 2016

There has been some unusual weather in the Arctic again and it's even captured the attention of deniers. Arctic ice watcher, Neven, has been keeping a close eye on arctic cyclones and their impact, aided by other people who have built up some knowledge in the subject. They are wondering if these sort of events will happen more often than they used to. Earlier this year, in early spring, Arctic sea ice was at record low levels for that time of the year. It's not kept this place however it is still very low, being currently the third lowest on record for the time of year, just above 2007.

Anthony Watts is a blogging climate conspiracy theorist who tries to downplay climate change. He has built up a reputation in the dim corners of the internet for promoting "climate hoax" conspiracy theories and "ice age cometh" articles. Yes, even this year, during the hottest decade on record, and what will probably be the third in a row hottest year on record, and after ten "hottest months" on record, and the hottest ever month on record. As the world heats up relentlessly, deniers are looking crazier and crazier.

Denier Don Easterbrook and his 30 year periods

There's another silly article by someone called Andy May at WUWT, claiming that because the slope of a temperature chart went up in the early twentieth century, and has been going up again and again and again, CO2 can't be causing global warming. Andy May wrote:

It is very hard to claim that mostly natural forces caused the warming from 1910 to 1945 and mostly man-made forces caused the similar warming from 1975 to 2009. The simplest explanation, given the data before us, is that the natural forces were the same in the two periods. That being said and accepting that man does have some influence on climate today with his CO2 and methane emissions, it seems more likely that our influence is in the 22% to 25% range. “More than half” is not credible to this observer.

No, it's not hard to claim that at all.

Andy's committed a logical fallacy of personal incredulity. The temperature goes up when there's a positive forcing or when a negative forcing disappears. The forcings can be different yet still have the same effect. In the early 20th century the negative forcing from volcanic activity disappeared, and the solar forcing got a bit stronger. In the second half of the twentieth century it was virtually all human forcing, primarily CO2.

NOAA's Climate Explorer fools climate quack Bob Tisdale at WUWT

Bob Tisdale has just discovered a terrific new NOAA web tool that is designed to help communities in the USA adapt to climate change (archived here). Naturally enough, Bob doesn't bother to find out the first thing about the tool or the data that underpins it. Instead he all but accuses NOAA of fraud and fakery in his usual "climate hoax" conspiratorial manner.

Climate Explorer - for the USA

First lets look at what the collaborative effort (NOAA plus more) is offering planners and communities in the USA. It's called The Climate Explorer. You can choose a city and see what may happen to your temperature and rainfall over time, under different scenarios. There are two scenarios: high emissions and low emissions. If you choose Chico, Butte County, California, you'll see the following options, each having more options:

• temperature
• precipitation
• other:- heating degree days and cooling degree days.

SciAm article gets climate science deniers to shout denial about their denial...

Over at WUWT Eric Worrall has posted his take on an article in Scientific American (archived here). The article is by Margaret Hetherman, and she's written about climate change. Her article is about how we are reacting and coping with it, wondering how future generations will regard us, and speculates about why deniers think climate change is a hoax.

Eric wrote above a slab of copy and paste:

Scientific American thinks we are all so worried about climate change, our minds have snapped – that we’ve all turned to “climate denial” as a coping mechanism.

I read the article and there was no talk of snapping minds, or melting brains.

Hottest July on record - global surface temperature with year to date

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for July was 0.84 °C, which is 0.1 °C higher than the previous hottest July in 2011.

Because July is the hottest month of the year, I've seen it reported as the hottest month ever in recorded history!

The average for the seven months to the end of July is 1.06 °C, which is 0.25 °C higher than any previous January to July period. The previous highest was last year, which with the latest data had an anomaly of 0.81 °C.

There are now ten in a row of "hottest months" from October 2015 to July 2016 (that is, hottest October, hottest November etc). If we could look back over the entire Holocene, it's probably more than 7,000 years since there was a similar run of hottest months on record, that is, not since the Holocene climatic optimum (it's probably hotter now than it was back then).

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to July each year. The 12 months to July 2016 averaged 1.02 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and was 0.21 °C hotter than the 12 months to July 2015:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to July each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Wannabe pseudo-scientist Anthony Watts makes a flawed assessment of coastal research

A rather ordinary pseudo-scientist (prominent in climate science denying circles) claims that the observations taken by a team of scientists at Delaware Bay must be in error. Anthony Watts, whose sole qualification in science is that he owns a "climate hoax" conspiracy blog (wattsupwiththat.com), claims (wrongly of course) that a paper published in Nature's Scientific Reports is fundamentally flawed (archived here).

Xiaolong Geng and Michel Boufadel,
researchers at NJIT's Center for
Natural Resources Development,
examine salinity gradients
on the Delaware Bay shore. Source: NJIT

The authors of the new paper are Xiaolong Geng, Michel C. Boufadel & Nancy L. Jackson from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (engineering and chemistry departments). They were studying subsurface water and salinity in the section of a Delaware Bay sandy beach between the low and high tide marks, known as the inter-tidal zone.

In this zone, water is trapped between the grains of sediment. This water, known as pore water, has its source from a combination of sea water washed in by the tide and groundwater. Because of the diluting effect of groundwater, it would be expected that the salinity levels of this pore water would be lower than sea water if the only mechanism operating were mixing of the water. That's not what the scientists found.

Sea level to accelerate more quickly prompts sea level rise denial at WUWT

There's a new paper out that has been picked up by Anthony Watts. Of course he doesn't like it because it's about one of his pet peeves - rising seas. There are few things he is more afraid of, judging by the frantic attempts he's made over the years to deny that seas will rise as the ice melts.

I don't have time to do the paper justice, so I'll point you to the paper and an article by John Abraham at the Guardian. The paper is by John Fasullo, R. S. Nerem & B. Hamlington and is in Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports. The gist of it is that the volcano, Pinatubo, suppressed sea level rise, and it could be about to jump back up again in the next ten years.

The thing I noticed at WUWT is that Anthony Watts will go to great efforts to hide the data. He put up a wonky chart that Willis Eschenbach drew a few years ago. His chart stops some time in 2010 - right before that big dip in sea level when all the water was shifted from the oceans to Australia, South America and Asia.

Open thread with new climate reports

If you want to talk about anything, I'm pretty well tied up for the next few days - so please add anything you want in the comments.

One thing you might have missed is the BAMS special climate supplement "2015 State of the Climate" has been released. You can get it here.

The report confirmed that 2015 surpassed 2014 as the warmest year since at least the mid-to-late 19th century. The record heat resulted from the combined influence of long-term global warming and one of the strongest El Niño events the globe has experienced since at least 1950. Most indicators of climate change continued to reflect trends consistent with a warming planet. Several markers, such as land and ocean temperatures, sea levels, and greenhouse gases, broke records set just one year prior. 

Another thing is there's a new report from the Climate Council focusing on rural Australia, which you can read here.

Our new report reveals that climate change is likely to worsen the systemic disadvantages suffered by rural and regional communities, and further widen the gap between rural and urban areas.

The 'On the Frontline: Climate Change & Rural Communities' report finds the increase in extreme weather events is disproportionately affecting those in rural areas, with serious social, health and economic impacts.

Rio Olympic ceremony has a strong warning about climate change

As PG remarked in the comments, deniers have been oddly quiet about the opening ceremony in Rio de Janeiro. I'm not sure how popular the Olympic Games are in the USA. Still, I'm surprised that I haven't seen a WUWT conspiracy theorist link the opening ceremony to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, given their fear of the natural environment and their opposition to humans living in harmony with nature.

Troposphere temperatures for July 2016

The troposphere temperatures are out for July 2016. The lower troposphere is recorded in UAH v6 beta 5 and RSS TLT v3.3. This report also covers RSS TTT for the troposphere (without the "lower"). This report follows pretty much the same format as previous monthly updates. It's my fault that it's a bit later than usual. (I was away most of last week.)

In all records, the July global anomaly was a bit higher than it was in June but lower than earlier this year as El Niño is now over. In the lower troposphere (UAH beta v6.05) last month is the second hottest July on record, lower than it was in 1998. For RSS TTT (troposphere), last month was the hottest July on record.

Troposphere temperature (RSS TTT v4) chart

First here is RSS TTT with the latest dataset, version 4. TTT seems to be measure more of the troposphere than TLT (that is, it has a greater vertical profile) with less of the stratosphere than the mid-troposphere data (TMT). It shows a higher rate of warming than RSS v3.3 and higher than UAH. Hover the cursor (arrow) over the plots to see the data points, trend etc.

The chart below is the average of the 12 months to July, from August 1979 to July 1980, through to August 2015 to July 2016.

Figure 1 | Troposphere temperature for 12 months to July (TTT). Anomaly is from the 1979-1998 mean. Data source: RSS

A weak "climate hoax" conspiracy theory from Tim Ball at WUWT

There's not much happening at WUWT these days. The latest is just another "climate hoax" article from uber-conspiracy theorist Timothy Ball, one of Anthony Watts' pets (archived here). Anthony posted the article as "climate news".  It contains no news and nothing new. It's an article empty of a point except that greenhouse effect denier Tim Ball says that climate science is a hoax.

Tim mentions Maurice Strong again, but not his role as President of an oil company. Instead he suggests that the World Meteorological Organisation should play no role on the climate stage. Tim wrote:

Why, despite all the evidence of failure of corrupted science, and failed predictions does the global warming/climate change agenda continue? The answer is simple and the result of Maurice Strong’s organizational skills in setting up the entire process. When he set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) he did it through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

There is no evidence of "failure of corrupted science" and Tim doesn't even bother to make up stuff to try to show there is. He's a lazy conspiracy theorist. The IPCC was jointly established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988, and endorsed by the UN General Assembly. Tim doesn't say what organisations would have been more suitable.

A red sky in the morning...is a denier's warning

If you are looking for something to bore you senseless for two days, you can trot along to Conway Hall in London to what is being marketed as "New Dawn of Truth" (see Christopher Monckton's WUWT article archived here). The title alone should be enough to put any sane person off. (Think sandwich boards in Hyde Park's Speakers' Corner.) However if the title isn't enough, take a look at the promo image which, as you'll guess, was produced by Christopher himself using materials filched from elsewhere.

Anthony Watts: Loopy and out of the loop. It's been noticed.

Tom Karl has retired from NOAA after more than 40 years of dedicated service. At HotWhopper, let's wish him well in his retirement and thank him for his valuable contribution, helping everyone understand better how we are changing climates around the world.

I woke up to see an article by Anthony Watts at WUWT (archived here). That's still a rare occurrence. It wasn't so much an article by Anthony as a misleading headline on top of a copied and pasted press release, with Anthony Watts' conspiracy theorising added underneath. At around the same time I got some messages from people who noticed that Anthony is very much out of the science loop.

The press release was to let people know that Tom Karl of NOAA has retired. Anthony's headline was "resigned", probably so that his obedient fans would make up some conspiracy theory about nefarious goings on. Or it could just be another example of Anthony Watts' ignorance. (So far most of his dim deniers have just stuck with Anthony's own conspiracy theory.)

Anatomy of Tim Ball's conspiratorial pseudo-science at WUWT

I'm perpetually puzzled by Anthony Watts who at time shows signs that he yearns for respectability, giving voice to Tim Ball, who is by any benchmark an utter nutter loon and conspiracy freak.

Tim Ball in almost every article shows he hasn't left the 1970s. Today he's barely entered it. In the manner of religious fundamentalists, Tim doesn't accept any scientific knowledge that was developed after 1970, and he doesn't accept most science that was developed before then either. He makes up his own from fragments of books written by people he took a fancy to up until he was in his early 30s. (Tim was born in November 1938. Any science done after 1970 doesn't exist in Tim's mind, and most done before 1970 is wrong - in Tim's mind.) Like Peter Pan Tim didn't grow up. He exists in a dark fantasy of his own creation where ogres roam. Tim's ogres include Maurice Strong, an oil industrialist who was Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in the early 1970s, and was the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. If there is one type of person that Tim can't abide (apart from Jews and scientists), it is anyone who thinks it's important to protect our natural world. The list of ogres who roam Tim's nightmares is too long to list here but it includes climate scientists Tom Wigley, Michael Mann, and Andrew Weaver. Tim's heroes include Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.