Ice Ages, Witches and Magic from Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and Alan Carlin

I suppose I can understand the fixation that deniers have with religion, given the world view they hold. It goes some way to explaining their inability to distinguish scientific research from witchcraft and sorcery. Those who've had the benefit of any education in science, not so much.

Marc Morano - burning witches

Today Raw Story reported how Marc Morano, a professional disinformer, explained to a rapt audience of science deniers, how policies designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions are like blood sacrifices to the gods. He is reported as saying:

Aztec priests encouraged people to sacrifice blood to the gods to end severe drought...Today we are told we need a fundamental transformation of our lives in order to end bad weather, ...  We are told we need EPA regulations and UN treaties in order to spare us from more hurricanes and floods and droughts and all this bad weather.

Sophisticated Satellites and Other Denier Weirdness at WUWT

How's this for a lead in from someone who studied meteorology (albeit didn't graduate).  There is so much wrong in so few words.

I have always found a stark contrast in the way the forecasts of meteorologists on television and radio are limited in accuracy to about a week and beyond that become more speculative while the claims about global warming are always stated in decades. For example, the polar ice caps were supposed to have all melted by now. The daily forecasts are formulated based on sophisticated meteorological satellites. The global warming claims are all based on computer models, not empirical observation and data.

Anthony Watts of WUWT is quoting Alan Caruba, who didn't have to tell us he wasn't a scientist.  Anyone reading the above would know that for certain.

Forecasting a few days of weather is very different to making climate projections.  I can forecast with reasonable confidence several months ahead as, I'm sure, can you.  (It will be considerably warmer in January than it is now, even though we're having a very warm winter!) But I leave it to the experts to forecast tomorrow's weather.  I'll even predict decades ahead with some confidence.  By 2050 the Arctic will be pretty well ice free and January where I (will have used to) live will be a lot hotter than it was this year.  (If I'm still around and wrong, I'll buy you a beer.  That is, if hops can still be grown in these parts, and you come here to collect.)

Deniers love their satellites and hate models.  Well I've got news for Alan Caruba!

Alan says the daily forecasts are "formulated based on sophisticated meteorological satellites".  Satellites don't predict the future.  All they can do is give information about what has happened from the past to the now.  These days weather forecasters use models. They just plug in the latest data, unlike climate modellers. That's why forecasts can go out not just a day ahead, not just three days ahead, but anything up to around ten days ahead now.  And it's why the forecast can change.   Day 7 of the seven day forecast might be different by the time it gets to Day 3, 2 or 1.  And the data doesn't just come from satellite instruments either.  Weather bureaux also get data from land based instruments such as automatic weather stations, from instruments on weather balloons, from instruments on buoys in the sea, from ships and from aircraft.

This website describes how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) makes rainfall forecasts.  BoM says "Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) or computer models included in the calculation of the rainfall totals and the chance of rain are from" - and lists the places and the computer model names as follows:

• Australian Bureau of Meteorology ACCESS-R, ACCESS-G
• US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration USAGFS
• UK Meteorological Office UKGC
• Japanese Meteorological Agency JMAGSM
• European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting ECSP
• Meteorological Service of Canada CMCGEM
• German national weather service, Deutscher Wetterdienst DWD

Don't tell Alan Caruba - he'd be terribly disappointed and would never leave his house without a brolly - because he just knows computer models can't be trusted.  And as for feeding in data from land-based weather stations - well he'll probably tell you that can't be trusted either!

Alan Caruba doesn't read science.  Here's proof!

Okay - not proof (science isn't about proof).  Here's the evidence.  I have no idea where Alan gets his crankery from but it's not science.  He wrote that "the polar ice caps were supposed to have all melted by now".  Maybe he just made it up all by himself.  Let's guess why Anthony Watts posted that silliness.  Not because he believes it, but because it's good disinformation for his readers.

Just in case there's a reader who doesn't know the facts - then he's wrong.  There is no reputable scientific source that predicted that the "polar ice caps" would have melted by now.  In fact, the Arctic sea ice is melting much more quickly than was predicted a few years back.  There are no solid predictions for Antarctica that I'm aware of.  But the general consensus (there's that word again) is that the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica are going to continue to warm and the ice there will contribute to sea level rise.

You don't have to look far to find his motive.  On his own blog Alan Caruba writes:

I am, however, a science writer who has followed the global warming hoax since it began in the late 1980s and picked up momentum as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing its computer-based doomsday claims.

Alan Caruba just makes it up as he goes along.  He's effectively denying that scientists have known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas since at least the 1860s.  He denies the work of Fourier, Tyndall,  Arrhenius, Callendar, Plass, Revelle, Broecker, Keeling and many others who were studying CO2 well before the 1980s.  And he can't claim it was a secret known only to scientists - CO2 was discussed in newspapers even in Australia, well before the 1980s.

Caruba comes across as a crank paranoid conspiracy theorist like our old mate from HotCopper, BenBradley.

I couldn't be bothered reading any further.  The first couple of paragraphs was enough to know Caruba is a fiction writer posing as a science writer and I find it difficult to imagine he fools even the most foolish of the 8% Dismissives.

From the WUWT Comments - The Daily Ad HomineMann Competition

Nothing much to report in the comments at WUWT.  A couple of people pulled Anthony up about Alan Caruba's  "sophisticated meteorological satellites" and pointed out that models are used to forecast weather.  The rest of them were too busy competing to win the prize for the most libellous ad homineMann.  That seems to have become a daily event at WUWT.  Anthony hasn't announced the Grand Prize yet.  (Maybe the prize is to share the stage with Tim Ball at an upcoming event.)

Selective memories of climate science deniers

In a guest post on WUWT, a science denier called Alan Caruba writes an article titled: "Short Meteorological Memories".  He draws together a couple of denier memes.

How can one remember something that hasn't ever happened in living memory?

Caruba writes:

What I always find interesting is the way much of the population seems to have absolutely no memory of any previous heat wave or, for that matter, a major blizzard. Either way the news media goes bananas, usually seeing it an apocalyptic scenario. No, it’s just a perfectly normal heat wave or blizzard.

That may be true or not in any one instance.  Caruba does mention the record heat Australia had last January where the average for the entire continent hit 40.3 degrees Celsius (104.6 degrees Fahrenheit).  That's not a hot temperature in one location, which, while extra hot, would no longer be unremarkable in many parts of Australia these days.  What it is is the average maximum across the entire continent of Australia.

Just think how hot it must have got over such a vast area to record a continent-wide average of 40.3 degrees Celsius.  Not only that, but there have only been 21 days in 102 years where the average maximum temperature for the whole of Australia has exceeded 39°C; eight of these days happened last summer.

I doubt there'd be anyone living today who would have a prior memory of anything like that because it hadn't happened before in the entire instrumental record.  You can see just how hot the continent was in this animated gif chart. (Click to enlarge.)

Global warming causes climate change

Caruba goes on about terminology, claiming that "climate change" has replaced "global warming".  Not so.  The terms are not identical.  Global warming signifies the earth heating up.  Climate change is what happens as a result. Here are some references to the two terms going back some time:

• The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change by Gilbert N. Plass (1956); Tellus Vlll
• Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? by Wallace S. Broecker, published in Science in 1975
• Arctic climate's alarming change - a newspaper article from 1947 on the possibility of global warming and climate change, warning of the possibility of catastrophic rises in sea levels.

It's happened before, but not like this

Caruba then cites two extreme events (for the time) that happened thirty years apart.  One in the UK and one in the north-east USA.  Most reasonable people would come back with ten or more events that have happened in the past ten years.  Consider just these events, listed on Jeff Master's blog on Wunderground:

Earth's Deadliest Weather-Related Disasters Since 2000

1. Cyclone Nargis, Mayanmar, 2008: 138,366
2. Heat wave, Europe, 2003: 71,310
3. Heat wave, Russia, 2010: 55,736
4. Flood, India, 2013: 5,748
5. Cyclone Sidr, Bangladesh, 2007: 4234
6. Heat wave, Europe, 2006: 3418
7. Hurricane Jeanne, Haiti: 2004, 2754
8. Flood, Haiti, May 2004: 2665
9. Flood, Pakistan, 2010: 1985
10. Typhoon Bopha, Philippines: 2012, 1901
11. Hurricane Katrina, U.S., 2005: 1833
12. Landslide, China, 2010: 1765

I reckon it's Alan Caruba who has a very selective memory, deliberately ignoring what is happening around the world weatherwise these days.  I'll amend the last sentence of Caruba's fluff denial of reality:

By the end of the week, deniers on WUWT are sure to issue another boring claim that the latest weather disaster is "nothing new to see, climate is always changing, CO2 levels were higher 3 billion years ago". Ignore them.