Website feedback

UPDATE:

Thank you for all the help. I've made some more changes as a result of emails and comments here:

• The sidebar is now white. Some of you were finding the dark background hard to read and/or ugly. 
• The font has been made easier to read from what was there at first, and is bigger than the font on the old blog.
• New menu: There's a new menu. Until tomorrow, I'll leave it so it opens when you visit the page. However it's quite intrusive when it's open, so I'll only leave it like that for a short while, so you know it's there.  I hope in time, people will notice the little hamburger icon in the top right hand corner. Click on that and the menu will open and close. Click near the top of the open menu itself (it doesn't have to be right on the spot marked with an X) and it will close.
• Less white space: Not really, though it might seem that way. What I've done is adjusted the page so that on medium and higher resolution screens, such as you'll find on high end notebooks and with larger desktop monitors, the sidebar no longer sits right on the edge. The gap between the sidebar and the main articles is now a bit smaller. Smaller screens and lower resolutions can still enjoy maximum breathable space :)
• I've put the latest comments and the newest articles up the top of the sidebar. Just click on what you want and the panel will open up. It's the same content as it was on the old blog, but should now be easier to get to for most of you. 
• If on your screen the side bar is missing, it probably means you're looking at a very small screen (a small tablet or similar). The content of the sidebar is still there and accessible to you. It's just moved down the page under the main articles. You should be able to get to it easily by scrolling down the page. Or, if you know what you're looking for, use the main menu (click on the hamburger icon on the top right of the page). The sidebar items are listed under Blog Menu (the top item in the menu).

There are a few other things I've done, and I'll continue to make refinements over time, most of which you probably won't notice but I'll feel better for it :)

If there's something bugging you about the site, please let me know either by leaving a comment here, or by sending an email or tweet or even a comment at facebook . (The first three are better options. I don't really use Facebook except to let people know about blog articles).

Time to get back to the business of blogging and other important matters :)

Sou - 11:05 pm + 10 UTC, Thursday 29 June 2017

I'd be glad of any comments on the new website - speed of loading, ease of navigation, readability, colours, fonts, difficulties, complaints whatever.

It's a work in progress. (It's not been possible to test it fully before going live, because it's hosted on Google.) The old site was getting to the end of it's usability from a management perspective, but it did work.

If enough people find this new design doesn't work for them, I'll revert back to the old design. On the other hand, if you prefer this, I'll continue to do my best to overcome any drawbacks.

This is what the website should look like at the moment (I've updated the picture to show the changes as of now, 29 June in Australia). Click to enlarge.

Sou.

Anthony Watts is foxed yet again by temperature anomalies

I read the latest article from Anthony Watts at WUWT. It reminded me that he really is dumb as an ox and blind as a bat.

Now you and I know that temperatures have been going only one way - up. And it's been getting really hot these past few years. Last year was the third year in a row that was the hottest on record. This year is shaping up as possibly the second hottest.

So what does Anthony Watts do? He plunges deep into idiocy with a most ridiculous article today (archived here).

Pat Michaels theorises climate conspiracies, at Judith Curry's place

Judith Curry has posted an article by Patrick J. Michaels from the Cato Institute (archived here).  He is wearing his conspiratorial tendencies on his sleeve, and wants Donald Trump to prevent the publication of a report mandated by the US 1990 Global Change Research Act, the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4). The chapter headings of the new report are listed here.

Pat describes his conspiracy theory in the second paragraph, where he believes that US civil servants "portray global warming as alarming" for money. He wrote:

The Assessment Report will be produced by civil servants in the federal government (mainly unfireable GS15’s reporting to Obama Administration bosses), many of whom handle large amounts of climate research money. It has always been in their interest to portray global warming as alarming, and therefore in need of even more federal research dollars.

I call this projection. Would Pat Michaels retain his own job for the Cato Institute if he started to write about climate science in an objective, factual manner? It seems to me he managed to get a job with them because he was a science disinformer.

Leo Goldstein has an oddly paranoid poke at the IPCC

Some of articles at WUWT are indistinguishable from gibberish. In the past few months, Anthony Watts has taken to publishing articles by a very strange man. He now calls himself Leo Goldstein. When he first wrote articles for WUWT, he wrote as Ari Halperin. He's the chap who came up with the Google conspiracy, and developed a tool to combat it, made by Google :D.

Here's one bit of gobbledegook from Leo today (archived here, latest here). He wrote about equilibrium climate sensitivity and quoted the IPCC's AR5 Working Group 1 report:

The equilibrium climate sensitivity quantifies the response of the climate system to constant radiative forcing on multicentury time scales. It is defined as the change in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium that is caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.” (p. 16)

That's fine. Thing is, I don't understand what Leo's difficulty is.

Neanderthal Anthony Watts joins the sky dragon slayers

Anthony Watts has joined the sky dragon slayers he used to ban from his blog at WUWT. Well, he used to ban some of them. He's joined forces with Rick "Neanderthal" Perry, the US Secretary of Energy, who rejects climate science outright.

The sky dragon slayers are among the dumbest of the dim deniers, who don't believe the science of climate change. Most of them have spent their retirement years trying in vain to disprove the greenhouse effect. Sky dragon slayers reject the notion that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and is causing global warming. They think our planet stays warm by magic, or from the warm breath of their god, or from pixie dust, or something.

No hiatus (or vacation) from denial - Anthony Watts and Ryan Maue misrepresent a new scientific paper

It looks as if Anthony hasn't yet left on his promised vacation his fans have paid for. Today he copied and pasted an article from, of all places, the Daily Caller (archived here, latest here). Now the Daily Caller is not regarded as a reputable source of scientific information. It's a right wing website from the USA, apparently widely read, particularly by Republicans seeking a daily outrage fix of sensationalised sentiment. (It's owned by a guy called Tucker Carlson, who replaced Bill O'Reilly at Fox. I gather there's not much to distinguish the opinions of the two.)

The shock and awe at WUWT is over a new paper by a team of scientific heavy-weights, led by the world-renowned climate scientist, Dr. Benjamin D. Santer. The paper, published in Nature Geoscience, reports an exploration of the reasons for any differences between modeled and observed temperatures in the upper air (the troposphere). The authors examined data for the satellite era, January 1979 to December 2016, which is when there were more reliable temperature observations of the upper air.

[Note: the paper itself is about troposphere temperatures. The charts I've added are surface temperatures, in part because I'm still short of time, plus I don't have model data for the troposphere to hand (Fig 3).]

The Open Atmospheric Society has disappeared from WUWT

A heads up for everyone who was saving up their pennies to join Anthony Watts' secretive Open Atmospheric Society.

Between the 25 Apr 2017 04:13:51 UTC and 26 Apr 2017 13:21:40 UTC, Anthony Watts quietly removed his plug for people to join the quiescent, dormant, or dead Open Atmospheric Society from the sidebar of his WUWT blog.

Was this action prompted by the end of the US tax reporting year? Was Anthony feeling a rare pang of conscience about taking money from his fans and not delivering the goods?

Or was the disappearance an oversight, a temporary glitch, with the advert about to make a reappearance?

If you are still hoping to join that fake sceptic society, the OAS website is still there, though there is no sign of a board or journal or anything else. In fact, nothing has been added to the website for almost two years.

You can read more about the secretive open society with the help of Google - this is the timeline.

Second hottest May on record

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for May was 0.88 °C, which is 0.05 °C less than the hottest May in 2016, making May 2017 the second hottest May in the record.

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to May each year. The 12 months to May 2017 averaged 0.91 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.10 °C cooler than the 12 months to May 2016. This makes it the second hottest May to May 12 month period on record.

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

(Google has just made some changes to its charting program, and has yet to iron out some of the kinks. Let me know if you see any problems. I am having trouble seeing the values to the right of the charts. Hopefully it will get fixed soon.)

Hugs to climate scientists wherever you are

Lots of HotWhoppery hugs to all the climate scientists around the world from Antarctica to the Arctic, in Australia and surrounds, Africa, America north and south, Asia, Europe or running a hopeful experiment on Planet B.

First Dog on the Moon sent a reminder that It's Hug a Climate Scientist Day. Just remember: no surprise hugs!

See the full huggy greeting cartoon here at The Guardian.

Experts react to the Finkel Review on the future for Australia's electricity generation

Many of you will have been glued to the internet (or television) over the past few hours, first watching the Comey session before the Senate Committee in the USA, then the elections in Britain. While you were being entertained, an important report was released here in Australia. It's known as the Finkel Review, because the panel preparing it was headed by Australia's Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel.

The report is called the Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market. It has important implications for how Australia manages the transition away from fossil fuels (particularly coal) into the new energy economy.

Some people are being pragmatic about it, others are concerned that it will mean that Australia will not move quickly enough, and that we won't meet our international obligations.

Below is an article about the report, just published at The Conversation.

All about weather radar from Australia's Bureau of Meteorology

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology is a wonderful organisation, highly valued by almost everyone who lives here. In the last year or so, BoM has been promoting a series of videos under the heading of #Ask BoM.

The one below is all about weather radar (h/t @windjunky). Did you know that Australia has the fourth largest weather radar network in the world? It's the service I use most of all together with their weather forecasting service. I've even used it during bushfire season, because the radar can sometime pick up smoke.

Eric Worrall denounces criticism of Trump, who he knows little about

I just noticed an article at WUWT by Eric "eugenics" Worrall (archived here). This is someone who for years likened climate scientists to eugenicists. He's a bit upset at Jeffrey D. Sachs, who wrote a strongly worded piece denouncing Trump for pulling out of the Paris agreement. Eric, who is a Brit now living in Australia, was quite irate and keen to show off his double standards.

What I think upset Eric the most was when Sachs wrote that Trump's actions were anti-society. I think it was the word "sociopathic" that he regarded as "hate speech", not so much the "willfully inflicting harm" part:

President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate agreement is not just dangerous for the world; it is also sociopathic. Without remorse, Trump is willfully inflicting harm on others. 

(It's telling that climate science disinformers regard their audience as being so illiterate that they don't come up with any alternative to "hate" as a word to describe opposition to their efforts to ruin the world.)

Exploring South East Asian heat extremes of 2016 elicits silly comments from Anthony Watts

There's a new paper out in Nature Communications this week, in which the authors explore the factors affecting the extreme heat in south east Asia last year.  In mainland south east Asia, April 2016 was the warmest April on record, by a long way. It was 0.9 °C hotter than the previous hottest April (1998).

The paper opens with the following:

In April 2016, southeast Asia experienced surface air temperatures (SATs) that surpassed national records, exacerbated energy consumption, disrupted agriculture and caused severe human discomfort.

It seems a worthwhile research project, particularly with global warming likely to cause more disruption and discomfort like this over time.

[The figure at the top right is from the paper, and shows the relative contribution of El Niño (green bars) versus global warming (red bar) for the 15 hottest Aprils on record in mainland Southeast Asia. Click to enlarge it.]

David Archibald (again) predicts an ice age to cometh @wattsupwiththat

No sooner had I predicted that an ice age cometh article would appear at WUWT than Anthony Watts posted one. My wish is his command :)

David "funny sunny" Archibald wrote another of his solar articles (archived here) and, despite all the failures of his previous predictions, snuck in this comment (my emphasis):

On that assumption, Solar Cycle 25’s amplitude is likely to be two thirds of that of Solar Cycle 24, and thus 60. Further climatic cooling is therefore in store.

What climatic cooling has there been? How can there be "further" climatic cooling in store, when there's not been any so far?

Inside the Matrix: Deniers @wattsupwiththat are still debating evolution!

This will be short and weird. Today Anthony Watts posted an article at WUWT touting red pills and blue pills or red teams and blue teams or something (archived here). He's still waiting and hoping for someone from his "side" to disprove 200 years of science.  Goodness knows, they've had enough time and opportunity to do so, but haven't because they can't.

I mean, 200 years is long enough, surely, for someone to prove that we have physics, chemistry, biology and geology all wrong. That our technology can't possible work because it's based on fake science.

Reaction to Trump taunting "Drop Dead, World!" from @wattsupwiththat

Over at WUWT, eight of the nine most recent articles are celebrating Trump's decision to abdicate his responsibilities to people in the USA (see here). As you'll have heard, he has declared his intention to isolate the USA even further than he has already. In particular, at WUWT they are celebrating Trump declaring that he refuses to fulfil US obligations to mitigate global warming.

Let America and the world go jump, is the cry at WUWT. We live for the moment. If tomorrow we drown, starve or burn, at least we'll have shown those libtards what we think of them. We don't give a damn about people in far flung places, or the fact that the USA is responsible for more global warming to date than any other country on Earth.

(The picture shows how Trump's recklessness is viewed elsewhere in the world, by Der Spiegel. H/t Brian L Kahn.)

Trending troposphere temperatures to May 2017

The troposphere temperatures for May 2017 are out. This report covers the lower troposphere as recorded in UAH v6 and RSS TTT for the troposphere (without the "lower"). It follows pretty much the same format as previous monthly updates.

For RSS TTT (troposphere), the 12 months to May 2017 is the second the hottest 12 months in the record (comparing similar June-May periods). Now that last year's intense El Nino has dissipated, May itself was the just the fourth hottest May, with May 2016 the hottest.

The lower troposphere (UAH v6) also showed the 12 months to May as the second hottest on record. However, in the UAH record, May was the third hottest May on record, after May 1998 and May 2016.

Donald Trump's push to worsen climate change will reshape the world more quickly

Why does Donald Trump want to destroy the USA? What is his notion of "great again"? Going by his comments today when he announced that the USA will no longer play a leadership role in the modernisation and restructure of the energy sector, he believes that to bring back smog and increase black lung disease is what will "Make America Great Again". He referred to Pittsburgh as an example. This was Pittsburgh in its heyday:

hi I live in Pittsburgh, here's what our downtown looked like before environmental regulations (1940, taken at 12pm) pic.twitter.com/bDT4M1hLEj

— Rachel Mennies (@rmennies) June 1, 2017

This is how the Mayor of Pittsburgh reacted:

As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future. https://t.co/3znXGTcd8C

— bill peduto (@billpeduto) June 1, 2017

Sides - to fry or not to fry, or covfefe? WUWT is a haven of climate science denial

Anthony Watts is running another poll on his blog wattsupwiththat, to see how many of his readers accept science and want to mitigate global warming. He's done this before. A few years ago he found that 98.1% of his readers declared themselves as "skeptics", meaning they are conspiracy theorising climate science deniers. Today he wants to test his readership again, to make sure he's still got what it takes among the dimwit dismissives. He wrote about "sides":

Since WUWT is read by both sides of the issue, I thought I’d run a poll to ask, so here goes.