Willis Eschenbach radiates more nonsense at WUWT

I sometimes wonder at the shameless way deniers boast about their ignorance, particularly their lack of understanding of basic science. Willis Eschenbach is a prime example. He doesn't understand science and doesn't make any real effort to understand it. He balks at reading a basic textbook and I doubt he could bring himself to read a science website let alone scientific papers. Yet every now and then he'll decide he's come up with some brand spanking new notion that none of the hundreds of thousands of people who've studied a subject in depth have ever thought of.

Some time ago he figured out what every student (and interested layperson) knew long ago, that storms carry heat from the surface upwards into the atmosphere, thereby cooling the surface; his thunderstorm theory.

This week he's decided there are three what he calls "theories" to the greenhouse effect, demonstrating that he doesn't understand that radiation is the emission or transmission of energy. He was trying to attack a tweet thread by Gavin Schmidt and his attack was laughable (and very very longwinded).

Paul Driessen at WUWT suggests Australia remove its forests

Wildflowers & snowgum

The weird get weirder. A bloke called Paul Driessen, whose job includes telling lies about climate change and bringing back smog to the USA, has come up with a wild idea and it's been posted at WUWT. This time he's really gone bananas. What he's saying is that Australia should get rid of all its trees, or those of the eucalypt species which is pretty much the same thing, and that would stop fires. In other words, he's suggesting we get rid of almost all our forests. That's one solution to stopping fires, though not original.

Don't believe me? Here's what he wrote:

In both California and Australia, people bemoan the loss of eucalyptus trees in fires. But many don’t want them removed or even thinned out.

More than 10 years on, Anthony Watts at WUWT is still befuddled by temperature anomalies

It's hard to believe but poor Anthony Watts, despite all the help offered him over the years, is still totally befuddled, perplexed and bamboozled by the notion of temperature anomalies. You know he's not the brightest spark in deniersville yet you'd have thought that by now even he might have learnt something about temperature charts. But no.

The oddest thing is that he's unashamed of being numerically illiterate. He might even regard it as a strength. It means his readers have found someone, somewhere, who's dimmer than they are, and that could be why they keep coming back for more.

Today Anthony wrote about the global average surface temperature for 2019, saying at least in the USA it wasn't another "hottest year". That's a classic conspiratorial diversion tactic, by the way: focus on a detail and try to dispute the big picture.

2019 was the second hottest year on record despite no El Nino

Summary: 2019 was the second hottest year on record. December 2019 was the second hottest December on record. The last decade was the hottest decade on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for 2019 was 0.98 °C, which is just 0.04 °C cooler than the previous hottest - 2016.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to December each year. 2019 was 0.06 °C hotter than the 12 months to December 2017, which is the third hottest year.

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature anomaly - 12 months to December each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

It's climate change on top of drought, heat and wind, not arson, that's behind Australia's fires

Know what? If I see another know-nothing denier try to claim "it's not climate change it's arson" or "backburning" or "not enough prescribed burns" or "it's not happening", I'll scream.

I was going to deal quickly with "it's arson", then move onto prescribed or controlled burns. However, I'll now devote this article just to the arson furphy, because the false meme is appearing all over the place, even being insinuated in mainstream media. Some people are suggesting it's an organised disinformation campaign. I don't know about that, but it is being fanned by the usual crowd of deniers, including many from the USA and other places outside Australia. [Edit: I've added a tweet below, which expresses my disdain for the people spreading this meme.]

The people spreading lies about arson are dangerous, arguably worse than any arsonist.

The "it's arson" disinformers are downplaying the extreme hazard of fire and the huge risks of going into fire-prone areas when fire conditions are extreme or catastrophic (Code Red).

— Sou at HotWhopper (@Sou_HotWhopper) January 9, 2020

Let me be clear. Arson is not the reason for the catastrophic fires this summer. There has always been arson but never a fire season as bad as this one. These major fires are there because the bush is so dry and because it's been so hot. Fires need ample fuel, wind and an ignition. The fuel is ample, because even though there's not been much growth in vegetation because of the drought, what's there is dry and easily ignited. There've been enough windy days to fan the flames and spread the fires further. And there's been ignition, obviously. Mostly (in the case of the major fires), the ignition has been lightning.

2019 goes out with many bangs - Australia's hottest year and hottest decade on record

Australia has just had another "hottest year" on record beating the last by quite a way. The average mean annual temperature was a huge 1.52 C above the 1961-1990 mean. The average maximum was a whopping 2.09 C above and the average minimum (not a record) was 0.95 C above the 1961-1990 mean.

I've plotted all these on the same vertical axis for comparison. Scroll over the charts to see the data labels:

Australia is burning

Fires in East and Far East Gippsland and the high country exploded on Monday. We were warned.

Some people who I thought would have known better were sceptical of the warning from Emergency Services to leave Far East Gippsland. After all, it's a huge area, was jam-packed with holiday-makers, and it's on the coast (water puts out fire, right?). They may have neglected to factor in a number of things: