Election denial, epidemiology denial and climate science denial

Congratulations to the people of the USA, who turned out in record numbers and finally got rid of Donald Trump, his family and the various remaining hangers on who've occupied the White House for the last (almost) four years.

There has been much celebration in the media, dancing in the streets, hope on Twitter and mockery on SNL. It seems surreal to celebrate a return to sanity. What this to-ing and fro-ing shows is both the fragility and the strength of democracy.

March toward reality or away from it?

Now I hate to be a wet blanket but I have to say while this was a terrific result, the march away from reality isn't over. There are populists rearing their heads all over the world, some of whom, like Trump, express views reminiscent of the worst leaders of the twentieth century.

Apologies

I woke up this morning to find that something has changed at Google and broke this blog.

I've reverted it to a standard theme so you'll find some things missing (like the menu).

It might be a while before I work this out, along with working out where to take blogging from here on in.

Till then, take care of yourself.

Update

As you can see, I've found out what Google broke. It was probably unintentional. In any case, I was able to use a workaround and get the blog back to normal.

Sou - 7 August 3:03 pm AEST

Anthony Watts' Russian steampipes move around the world - amazing!

Every three or four years Anthony Watts (who owns a conspiracy blog called Watts Up with That, or WUWT) claims steam pipes in vast empty spaces in remote and largely unpopulated areas of Russia are what's causing global warming. This year he's at it again (archived here).

I don't need to write much about this, you can see it in pictures. In fact, Anthony himself put up a photo of steam pipes in a small town called Omyakon (population ~500), one of the coldest permanently inhabited places on earth.

The map below shows where the tiny settlement of Omyakon is located on the GISTEMP January temperature map . It's not in the middle of where the highest temperature anomalies were recorded.

Figure 1 | Temperature anomalies for January 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean, showing the location of Omyakon and its steampipes that conspiracy nutters blame for global warming. Data source: NASA GISTEMP

Hot enough for you? The faster it warms the hotter it gets

An interesting if ominous paper was recently published in Nature Climate Change. It came out just before Christmas, at the height of the holiday season here in Australia while fires were raging. For some weeks I've been meaning to write about it. That moment has finally arrived.

The authors of the Nature Climate Change paper, Andrew D. King, Todd P. Lane, Benjamin J. Henley and Josephine R. Brown (from The University of Melbourne) tell us that it's up to us to a large degree (excuse the word play). We know that already, and we also know that recent history and current weather-related events in Australia, the UK, Africa and elsewhere demonstrate we've not yet been willing to take enough action.

However the authors weren't writing about our reluctance to do enough to save ourselves. They were in effect exploring what will happen if we can slow down global warming compared to if we let it continue to warm as quickly as it is. It probably won't surprise HotWhopper readers that the rate of warming makes quite a difference.

Judith Curry's temperature predictions - charted

It's been brought to my attention that there's another set of projections guesses about global surface temperature floating about, this time from Judith Curry.

I don't have time to go into her "arguments" in detail. Suffice to say she seems to be hanging on to the failed "stadium wave" theory and has maybe tossed in a few other ideas as well such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation flavoured with a smidgen of "it's the sun".

Judith has put up three options for the temperature change over the next 30 years: warmest +0.7C, moderate +0.11C and coldest -0.5C.

What I will do is what she hasn't (for reasons that seem obvious to me). I'll put up some charts showing her guesses. I can't tell from her post what she's used as a baseline, so I've taken it as the average global surface temperature for 2019. I've also made the assumption her predicted change relates to the last year of the prediction. That is, her prediction of 0.5 cooling is that in 2050 the average global surface temperature will be 0.5C colder than it was last year.

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.