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.

If Anthony had checked, he'd have seen that the paper was received for publication 27 May 2016. That means it would have been prepared in the first few of months of last year, 2016 - at the latest. (Update: See comment from Zeke Hausfather below. It was completed in March 2016.) Yet Anthony jumped up and down and sang and danced and wrote:

Personally, it looks just like ignoring the most current data available for 2016, which has been cooling compared to 2015, invalidates the claim right out of the gate.

If a climate skeptic did this sort of stuff, using incomplete data, we’d be excoriated. yet somehow, this paper using incomplete data gets a pass by the journal, and publishes with 2015 data at the peak of warming, just as complete 2016 data becomes available.

As if a fake sceptic would take the time to "do this sort of stuff". Not only are they incapable, Anthony Watts finds it easier to do nothing except falsely accuse scientists of fraud - without understanding the data.

Anthony Watts ignores SIX YEARS of data!

Heck! Anthony hasn't even published the paper he promised way back in July 2012 - and that didn't use current data. In his AGU poster on the subject in December 2015, he only used data to 2008! Not only did he not use data to 2015 in December 2015, he didn't use data for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 or 2014 - all of which was available to him!

Anthony thinks the oceans cooled this year - he's wrong!

There's more. Anthony put up a chart, not from the paper (which he probably didn't barely looked at) but from the press briefing, and wrote:

What’s missing? Error bars showing uncertainty. Plus, the data only goes to December 2015. They’ve missed an ENTIRE YEAR’s worth of data, and while doing so claim “the pause” is busted. It would be interesting to see that same graph done with current data through December 2016, where global SST has plummeted. Looks like a clear case of cherry picking to me, by not using all the available data. Look for a follow up post using all the data.

Here is ERSST v4 with all the data. As you can see, the meteorological year 2016 (Dec to Nov) was the warmest sea surface temperature on record, at 0.05 °C hotter than the previous warmest year, 2015! (Hover over the chart to see the average annual temperature each year.)

Figure 1 | Global mean sea surface temperature, average of 12 months from December to November each year. Data source: NOAA

No Anthony. The "Error bars" aren't missing!

There's still more. Remember how I surmised that Anthony Watts didn't bother to look at the paper. It turns out he didn't even look at the pictures in the paper. He complained: What’s missing? Error bars showing uncertainty. 

Of course the authors wrote about the upper and lower limits of the data. They even put up a picture showing, guess what - "error bars showing uncertainty". Here it is:

Figure 2 | Trends and 95% confidence intervals (°C per decade) in difference series for each IHSST and composite SST series, masked to common composite SST coverage.Each difference series represents a composite series minus an IHSST series. Confidence intervals for trends are calculated using an ARMA(1, 1) autocorrelation model. Values below 0 indicate that the composite series has a lower trend than the IHSST series over the period examined. The two trend periods examined are January 1997 to December 2015 and January 2005 to December 2015. Source: Hausfather17

What more can I say? Except Anthony Watts has lost it (again).

From the WUWT comments

Deniers cannot do anything but deny and make up conspiracy theories. It's hard to believe that they like to call themselves "skeptics". Not a single one of them took the time to do what Zeke Hausfather and his colleagues did. No. That would be too hard, and if they'd put up, they'd have been worried that they'd have to shut up.

Shub (@shubclimate) doesn't know one end of a circle from the other, and his reasoning is off, big time, as is his knowledge about the work. He clearly hasn't bothered to take the time to understand the paper or Karl15. He's no excuse. It's open access.

January 4, 2017 at 1:34 pm
I commented on Twitter on this paper.
The authors claim they validate and/or cross-check Karl et al adjustments by comparing ERSST4 against ‘instrumentally homogenous’ temperature records (IHSST) from buoys, and the like. Karl et al adjustments were made on the reasoning that buoys had a cool ‘bias.’ Now, the authors say they see the adjusted SSTs match buoys. This is circular reasoning. Additionally, the other IHSSTs used by the authors are themselves buoy-dependant, as the authors themselves admit.

When will we put a full stop to flawed non-independent reasoning in climate science? Of course, I could be wrong and I am happy to be educated but this sort of thing seems to repeat itself in climate science a lot. The author list is not confidence-inspiring either.

Anthony Watts repeated his false claim that in 2016 the sea surface was colder than in previous years. It wasn't. The latest data (December to November 2016) shows it as the hottest year on record as shown in Figure 1 above. Yet Anthony wrote:

[Hey Mosher, does the pause remain “busted” when you plot the 2016 data? Is a pause busted one year, but returning in the future via cooling still “busted”. Plot it and let’s see. Some scientist…-Anthony]

It looks as if Kiwiseven is struggling with the complexities of measuring changes in sea surface temperature.

January 4, 2017 at 1:38 pm
Surely if they used consistent measurement techniques from buoys from 1998 to 2016, the fact that buoy measurements were slightly cooler than ship measurements is entirely irrelevant.
The amount of warming should be similar even if measured from a slightly lower baseline? 

Nick Stokes tries to explain:

January 4, 2017 at 2:06 pm
The point is that the proportion in the mix changed, with buoys increasing relative to ships.

Kiwiseven still doesn't understand. If you separate them, then you won't get the long term record, since buoys are a recent thing. (Thing is, Zeke Hausfather and his colleagues did just look at modern instruments without ships, for the recent years - where there was sufficient global coverage.)

January 4, 2017 at 2:15 pm
But why try and integrate different datasets with different measurement techniques.
Why not create a buoy based dataset and a separate ship based one? 

I see that Zeke Hausfather has done what I did, but for more data sets than just ERSST v4. He also explained why 2016 data wasn't included, and wrote:

January 4, 2017 at 1:50 pm
Hi Anthony,
I challenge you to find me an Ocean temperature record that was cooler on average in 2016 than in 2015. I for one haven’t been able to. 

The reason that the figures shown in the paper end on January 1st 2016 is that we submitted the paper for publication in March 2016. No nefarious hiding of the data involved.

I don't know where deniers get their weird ideas from. Jon didn't bother to read this latest paper, or the ones on ERRST v4, or Karl15 - or he'd have known that the composite data sets use measurements from both ships and buoys, and more.

January 4, 2017 at 1:51 pm
Didn’t NOAA reject buoy temperature in favour of ship temperature to get a higher reading years ago? Now it’s back to buoys! Sounds like the Apocalyptics go wherever it’s hottest to get the result they want.

This is what passes as "exasperated" from the unflappable Nick Stokes:

January 4, 2017 at 2:09 pm
“Didn’t NOAA reject buoy temperature in favour of ship temperature to get a higher reading years ago?”
I wish people would look up and cite, instead of just proceeding from an unanswered question. The answer is they didn’t.

Oh boy. There's lots more. Including a lot of people who don't know that Karl15 showed that uncorrected data had a steeper rise in temperature than corrected data. They wrote comments like this one from Bitter&twisted

January 4, 2017 at 1:47 pm
Is’nt it amazing? Climate psyientists can always manage to find a “cold bias” in the data, but never a “warm bias”. 

Sheesh. That's enough. Like I predicted in the last article, Deniers are never satisfied - "something must be wrong" with everything science.

References and further reading

I'll just point to the comprehensive list of references in the main HotWhopper article on Hausfather17.