Icy climate fakery from Philip Lloyd in Cape Town, @wattsupwiththat

This time I'm going to keep it short so you can get back to watching the nasty shenanigans of Donald Trump, who seems very keen to start another war. Some chap called Philip Lloyd has written an article for Anthony Watts about temperature trends in Cape Town (archived here). (Anthony must have written the headline because he changed Cape Town to Capetown.)

Never mind about that. The article is by Philip Lloyd, who's been denying science for a long time. He's another engineer. Not the decent sort of engineer. He's the type you'll see in droves at climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT and Judith Curry's place. I've written about his particular brand of denial, e.g. in 2013 and 2015.

Philip was wanting to distract deniers from the hottest year on record by claiming that the historical temperature of Cape Town was fraudulent or something. Temperature data expert, Nick Stokes disabused him of that notion e.g. here and here. (Yes, I'm joking. Nick Stokes disabused any reasonable reader of that notion. However, deniers are not reasonable, and there's no sign that Philip Lloyd was the slightest bit interested in researching the subject.)

Authoritarian Trump followers at WUWT celebrate USA's secession from the world (and reality)

Over the last few days it's become clear that Donald Trump's minders have been unsuccessful in reigning in his megalomania and malignant narcissism. In the one interview since becoming US President, all Trump could talk about was size, and he told multiple lies in doing so. Read the incredible transcript. It was an extraordinary interview. Trump shied away from discussing important matters of state. Instead, as reported in the Washington Post, he was "endlessly obsessed with his popularity".

You've read about people who seriously believe they are Jesus Christ - well that's how Donald Trump behaved. To my mind, he exhibited all the symptoms of grandiosity, delusion and self-obsession. He falsely claimed he would have won the election by "millions" if not for "millions" of fraudulent votes that all went to Hillary Clinton. He falsely claimed that "we had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches". He even went so far as to claim that his much criticised appalling speech in front of the CIA wall of honour drew "the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl".

Donald Trump and his attempts to destroy our planet and societies

Here are some things that Donald Trump is doing to help wreck the environment, the USA, and the world - up to his first four days in office. (This article is an expansion of something I recently wrote at HotWhopper Chat):

1. Nominating science-deniers and corporations (or their proxies) to Cabinet positions (like in charge of the EPA) 
2. Nominating a clueless anti-education person to head up education (keep the plebs ignorant) 
3. Hastening the destruction of the world in general and that of native Americans, by approving the Keystone and Dakota oil pipelines 
4. Silencing (not merely censoring) science and environmental organisations: National Parks, EPA, Department of Agriculture etc.

Sea level rise commitment could already be very high

There's a new paper out in Science this week, which compares the current state of the world with that of the last interglacial period (LIG), when sea levels were much higher than now. The paper is by Jeremy S. Hoffman, Peter U. Clark, Andrew C. Parnell, and Feng He.  Their findings suggest that we could already be committed to around a six to nine metre rise in sea level. (That's about 20 to 30 feet higher for the metric deficient.) From the introduction to the paper:

The last interglaciation [LIG, 129 to 116 thousand years ago (ka)] was one of the warmest periods during the last 800,000 years (1), with an associated sea-level rise of 6 to 9 m above present levels (2). As such, the LIG provides an important target for validating global climate models used for climate-change projections (3, 4), as well as for understanding the sea-level response to a warm climate. 

Divert, Distract, Deny: Cool times ahead - protests dim Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat

Deniers at places like wattsupwiththat.com and elsewhere are every bit as weird and incomprehensible as the people who say they like Donald Trump for his honesty. They'd rather be lied to than have to deal with facts. (I've been distracted by this amazing behaviour from the new White House press secretary, which given the source is a zillion times worse than run-of-the-mill climate conspiracy blogs, which everyone who's sensible knows are only for nutters. One expects politicians to distract and divert, but one does not expect the White House to flat out lie to the American people and the world.)

Time to get away from the utter nutters in the White House and back to the utter nutters on denier blogs. There were the expected protests about the recent surface temperature announcement of yet another Hottest Year on Record - for the third year in a row.

Anthony Watts distracts with US temperature

Anthony Watts wrote an article ridiculing, but not disputing, the fact that last year was yet another hottest year ever in the instrumental record (archived here). It was the classic divert to distract manipulation favoured by science deniers. Anthony was trying to distract his readers from the hottest year on record. His headline was: "@NOAA data demonstrates that 2016 was not the ‘hottest year ever’ in the USA".

2016 is the hottest year on record - three in a row now

A short while ago the data showed that 2016 temperatures for the troposphere (upper air) were the highest on record. Today, we've got results for the surface, from NASA and NOAA.

You will not be surprised to know that 2016 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2015 by 0.12 °C.

That's more than I expected. (2015 beat 2014 by 0.13 °C and that seemed a big jump.)

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Deke Arndt, Chief, Climate Monitoring Branch, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina are currently giving a press conference to announce the annual average global surface temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

Binary thinking: Anthony Watts is unhinged by Californian rain (and Bill Nye and Ben Schneider)

I said a short while ago how surprised I am that wacky science deniers are not getting any less wacky now that climate science deniers are running the show in the USA. I'd have thought they'd take a step closer to reality and relax and bask in their glory. Instead they've continued to attack reality with a vengeance.

It's Anthony Watts turn today (archived here). He thinks that the fact that the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge was three times as likely because of climate change should have meant that it would never again rain in California. He launched a misplaced attack on Bill Nye, under an article with the wrong headline: "With record rainfalls in California, another Nye-Lie bites the dust".

Going by his article, Anthony Watts thinks that if scientists said that the drought in California was exacerbated by human-caused global warming, then it would never get any reprieve. Once a drought always a drought and not a drop of rain would be got.

In other words, it's not just the drought that might be breaking, the brain of Anthony Watts is broken. But that's not all that's wrong with his article - read on for more.

Willis Eschenbach beclowns himself as a racist Trump fan who tries to distract people away from reality

President Obama, V-P Biden, and House Speaker Pelosi, 2009
Source: White House

Willis Eschenbach hasn't been wondering as much lately. Perhaps he didn't like the way I discussed his articles. Today he's a lot more positive and forthright - if wrong, conspiratorial, and showing his bigotry.

Willis was whining about the fact that in the Policy Forum of Science today (or yesterday here) there was an article by President Obama. It appears to be a Science mag article, in which case it will probably be in this week's edition, which will come out this Friday. For now the full article is available online (open access).

The article has the title "The irreversible momentum of clean energy" and is about, yes, renewable energy and particularly how mitigation of greenhouse gases can boost the economy, and doesn't have to conflict with economic growth. The subtitle is "Private-sector incentives help drive decoupling of emissions and economic growth".

Paul Driessen and CFACT promote climate "hoax" conspiracy theories at WUWT

Anthony Watts loves a good conspiracy theory, particularly the one about climate science being a hoax. He would probably claim that he doesn't "believe in" conspiracy theories, yet he constantly posts them on his blog.

Today it was Paul Driessen, who's employed by CFACT to lobby against environmental protection, in one of his more blatant articles (archived here). Usually he is moaning about clean air and water, wishing the USA would resurrect the smog and dirty water of decades past. Paul wrote stuff like this today:

The notion that manmade carbon dioxide now drives climate and weather – and we can predict climate and weather by looking only at plant-fertilizing CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” – is just as absurd now as before.

The quotes are a giveaway, even if you knew nothing about the subject. Putting the words "greenhouse gases" in quotes shows that Paul is a greenhouse effect denier. He doesn't believe in physics and chemistry.

Annual large scale coral bleaching: Eric Worrall @wattsupwiththat sez - who cares?

Coral feeding at night. Credit: Laszlo Ilyes  via Wikipedia

Once again the "climate hoax" conspiracy theorists at WUWT show that they are also fake sceptics. Eric Worrall has written an article (archived here) about another paper in Nature's open access journal, Scientific Reports. This one is about the bleaching of coral reefs, looking at the likelihood of what they term annual severe bleaching (ASB), which should be self-explanatory. The paper is by a nine-person team led by Ruben van Hooidonk from NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami.

Annual coral bleaching will probably happen fairly soon

Using statistically downscaled models to get a picture of what is likely to happen in particular areas, the authors found that before this century is out, practically all coral reefs will suffer severe bleaching every year. That's if we continue on the current emissions path. Given that it takes five years or more to recover from a severe bleaching, that means that coral reefs are in dire danger - which you knew already, I expect.

2016 was the hottest year on record for the troposphere

For the troposphere, 2016 was the hottest year on record!

The troposphere temperatures for December 2016 have been released. 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") and follows pretty much the same format as previous monthly updates.

For RSS TTT (troposphere), 2016 was the hottest year in the record. Last month was the second hottest December on record.

The lower troposphere (UAH beta v6.05) also showed 2016 as the hottest year in the record. However, December was only the sixth hottest December on record, with 2015 the hottest.

Dumb as: Anthony Watts complains Hausfather17 authors didn't use FUTURE data

Anthony Watts is complaining that scientists didn't use data that has yet to be published. What?

He did post an article about Hausfather17, which I've just written about.  Anthony's almost as nuts about this one as he was about the NOAA paper, Karl15. His headline was: Yet another study tries to erase “the pause” – but is missing a whole year of data.

The new paper uses latest available data

The new paper uses data to the end of the full year that's currently available - 2015. Since the paper would have been completed some months ago (it's just been published), not only would December 2016 data not have been available (it isn't yet), but the most recent months this year would not have been available to the authors, unless they had a Tardis.

The winner is NOAA - for global sea surface temperature

There's a new paper out that shows that, contrary to what you'll read on denier blogs, NOAA's latest version of global sea surface temperature is probably the best and most accurate around. It's the closest to observations, when you compare it to measurements from moored and floating buoys, Argo floats and radiometer-based satellite records of sea surface temperature.

Umpteen denier protests

Lamar Smith

You might remember how climate hoax conspiracy theorists, professional disinformers and other deniers protested loud and long when NOAA scientists published a paper about the revised NOAA temperature data. The US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, led by arch denier Lamar Smith, harassed NOAA endlessly with subpoena after subpoena. A lot of the changes to the NOAA temperature record were a result of a new version of the global sea surface temperature data set, known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature, or ERSST v4. The papers on that were published in February 2015 (see below). The protests only came, though, in June 2015 when there was a paper by Karl et al. That paper pushed denier buttons because it challenged the so-called "hiatus". You can read about Karl15 here, and the paper itself is here.

Insignificant record warming and other climate remarkables from deniersville

Despite climate science deniers thinking global warming will stop on 20 January, there is little changed in climate conspiracy land. It's just more of the same old denier memes that have been circulating for years. At WUWT they've had John Christy going on about CO2 being plant food, and some very detailed work to try to prove something or the other about the medieval climate anomaly (see the interactive map and references here).

Deniers still enraptured with medieval warming

Regarding the latter, I'm not sure that deniers know that it was climate scientists who did the hard work to determine the extent and timing of warmer and cooler periods in recent history. (In climate terms, the Holocene is recent history.)  Many of them have some odd notion that climate scientists, who've been the ones finding out about the past, have also been trying to "cover up" what they've found.

Deniers are a odd bunch.

Luddite Eric Worrall huffs and puffs and wants to bring back smog @wattsupwiththat

This is interesting. Probably without knowing it, Eric Worrall at WUWT is arguing for a national strategy for the shift to renewable energy. He was writing about an anti-renewables article in The Australian. In part, the article was about how, in the absence of a national electricity strategy, more people will leave the grid. However, the article was clearly propaganda against the shift to renewables, as is the norm for The Australian and it's war against humanity.

That article in The Australian was a Murdoch slant on the preliminary report released last month by the Energy Expert Panel, chaired by the Chief Scientist, Dr. Alan Finkel: Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market (saved here).