Desperate Deniers head for the clouds at WUWT

My last article was a report of the latest surface temperature, from NASA. This one is about the lower troposphere changes - and denier dross from WUWT.

I've not spent much time at WUWT in recent months (or here at HotWhopper). The articles there have changed a bit since Anthony Watts took time off. There are a lot more political articles and fewer science articles. Charles the Moderator is in charge but doesn't have a lot of people to write - it's mainly childish Eric Worrall and a petrol-head called David Middleton. Most of the regular WUWT contributors from days gone by have disappeared (justthefacts, Bob Tisdale, Tim Ball etc., and Anthony Watts himself.)

These days, when Charles copies and pastes a press release about a scientific publication, he doesn't have to add the dog-whistling word "claim" at the front of the headline. WUWT readers are now very well trained and understand that if there's a scientific press release it means they are expected to add comments along the lines of "climate science is a hoax" (repeated 100 times or they are put in detention).

To bring you up to date, Anthony Watts has got himself a gig at The Heartland Institute (so he can sit around and do pretty well nothing and get paid for it, as far as I can tell. The pay can't be all that good. He's still begging money from his readers.)

Hottest month on the surface, but look at the clouds, sez Kip Hansen

I headed over to WUWT today and, sure enough, deniers still occasionally move off pro-Trump articles to deny science. Kip Hansen is protesting the fact that last month was the equal hottest month on record and hottest July on record. He's saying - don't look at the surface, look up at the sky. If he looks up far enough, into the stratosphere, he'll be able to say "it's cooling" with some justification :D. (The stratosphere cools while the troposphere warms.)

Below shows why deniers stick to UAH lower troposphere data and reject any and all other temperature records, including surface and RSS lower troposphere. It's a plot of GISTEMP surface data, RSS lower troposphere and UAH lower troposphere. Note that the last data point (2019) obviously is an average of January to July 2019, so it's not a full year of data.

Data sources: GISTEMP, RSS, UAH

Looking at the linear trend, UAH is 1.3 C a century, RSS is 2 C a century and GISTEMP is 1.8 C a century (since 1979). Which is the odd one out?

There are hints as to why there is a divergence between the latest versions of UAH and RSS in this article I wrote some time back: 101 conspiracy theories about troposphere temperature: the RSS love affair is over. There is more here: The mid-troposphere has been warming faster than you thought. It's mainly to do with ageing satellites.

There's one more point worth thinking about. The troposphere tends to accentuate bursts of warming, such as El Nino spikes. In addition, temperature is just one indicator of climate change and doesn't mean a lot on its own except when it exacerbates heat waves, wildfires and droughts. Other effects include rising seas, stronger storms and bigger floods (a more vigorous hydrological cycle) and melting ice. Then there are flow on effects, like migration (humans and other animals), food production and so on.

From the WUWT comments

Well, it's a while since I've ventured into the sewer, but here goes:

The greenhouse effect denier, commieBob, thinks the planet warms and cools by magic, or gravity or something. Weird, eh?

August 16, 2019 at 6:52 pm
We continue to warm up out of the Little Ice Age. So what if July were the warmest in 500 years? Is that not what you would expect?
The alarmists should not get away with ascribing perfectly normal climate variability to humanity. It’s the same kind of superstition that demands human sacrifices to the volcano gods … exactly the same … think about it.

Kurt asks what's causing the warming. No-one at WUWT has the right answer. Is he being provocative? (Hint: think CO2)

August 16, 2019 at 7:11 pm
Has anybody else noticed that in the most recent revision of the RSS dataset, for both of the 1998 and 2016 big El Ninos, the temperatures after each event never dropped below the point that the temperatures were at before the event? Is this just coincidence, or can anybody think of an explanation?

Smart Rock has a conspiracy theory, which is not novel for deniers. Climate science is a hoax. Oddly, he doesn't wonder why global temperatures have dropped in the past sometimes, like after 2016.

August 16, 2019 at 7:28 pm
No surprise here. In fact, I’d have been surprised if they didn’t make it the hottest month ever. They need it to keep up the constant flow of climate alarmist news that’s getting to be more like a torrent now.
They also need it to make sure that 2019 is the hottest year ever. These things take advance planning, don’t they? I mean, come next January, if they hadn’t got all the data lined up every month, they might have to go back and rewrite history. Not that rewriting history would be such a problem, there could be a few discreet instrument failures that didn’t show up until they audited their data. Or just change the data anyway and see if anyone notices. Drop the uncorrected data into the memory hole.

That's enough.