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.

No honesty or diligence about #climate change or coral reef science from Bob Fernley-Jones at WUWT

As you know very well by now, science disinformers abound at Anthony Watts' blog wattsupwiththat.com. It's one of the reasons his blog exists.  It's not so that Anthony can write stuff. He doesn't do that much any more. It's so that disinformers and science deniers can comfort science deniers that their false opinions are promoted by other people. (Other reasons include making money, panhandling for jaunts, and trying to convince his readers that he's cleverer than the really clever people.)

Dead coral, Lizard Is. GBR. Credit: Greg Torda

Another case in point today, when a dud ex-engineer (so he says) called Bob Fernley-Jones (Mechanical engineer retired, Melbourne Australia) made up a whole bunch of stuff about coral reefs (archived here). I'd say it was so that he could try to portray himself as being cleverer than climate scientists and coral reef experts. Instead he's a Dunning Kruger case, and a whiner.

As well as that, Bob's article shows:

• disinformers will make up stuff that they think their readers want to read
• disinformers don't think much of the intellectual capability of their readers, with good cause
• disinformers are fairly confident that their readers won't bother to do any fact-checking, again with good cause.
• Bob is sloppy and careless, with missing links and missing diagrams. Actually, it's Anthony Watts who was sloppy in this case (he also got Bob's name wrong). Bob complained in the comments about some of the missing links and diagrams.
• Bob is a messy thinker, with a summary at the end that is meaningless, incomprehensible nonsense.

Bob Fernley-Jones' fixation on hot Marches toward coral bleaching

There are some things associated with climate change that seem to upset deniers more than others. Deniers don't care much about killer heat waves, record floods or major long-lasting drought. They do seem to get upset by reports of coral bleaching. Today there was an article at WUWT by some denier called Bob Fernley-Jones (archived here). Bob was writing about an article at The Conversation published more than four months ago, on April 29, 2016.

The article was about the extraordinarily hot temperatures in the Coral Sea in March this year. Here's the chart that was shown in the article, which I've copied directly from the Bureau of Meteorology:

Figure 1 | March temperature for the Coral Sea. Source: Bureau of Meteorology.

Record-breaking hot years almost impossible without humans - and Anthony Watts' conspiracy theory

Recent record hot years are almost impossible in the absence of human-induced forcings, a new study shows once again.  A multi-national team of scientists led by Andrew King from the University of Melbourne did a study of hot weather years, and found human influences on heat extremes going back to the 1930s globally, and earlier in some places. The new paper has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Anthony Watts, a climate conspiracy blogger at WUWT, didn't read the paper, but he decided it made unfounded claims (archived here). Anthony decided, in his foolishness, that the team, led by a University of Melbourne scientist, and including other researchers from Universities in Melbourne, South Korea, Switzerland, Oxford UK, New Zealand and the New South Wales, must be wrong because Professor Chris Turney (not an author) led an expedition on a ship that got caught in the ice in Antarctica a couple of years ago. Need I say more about the weirdness of science deniers?

Record hot years influenced by human activity - going back to the 1930s globally

The authors weren't looking at heatwaves (a duration of days), they restricted their study to timescales of at least a month. They performed an analysis of hot years looking at the globe as a whole and selected regions. They found that by using the technique knows as Fractional Attributable Risk (FAR), they could determine years in which there was a detectable anthropogenic influence on especially hot years globally and in different regions of the world.

Central England Temperature has fallen out of favour at WUWT

Some of you might remember how various WUWT-ers were hailing the temperature in Central England (HadCET) as heralding in an ice age. Two years ago a denier at WUWT was claiming that an ice age cometh, and pointed to HadCET - which, as you'll see below, indicated no such thing.  In June that year, David "funny sunny" Archibald made one of his famous failed predictions, that Central England was in for a cold spell. A few months later, a chap called Tony Brown claimed that HadCET showed temperatures were back to those of the 1730s, which was utter nonsense. (That is, they weren't!)

Now that particular temperature record has fallen out of favour. Not even the most ardent denier can deny it's got a lot hotter there in the past few years. I say they can't deny it, but they do, still.

Heat, Heat Waves and Angry Australian Summers (and Years)

I recently wrote a short article about the summer of 2012-13 in Australia. It got some reaction from one person in particular who was claiming the record heat couldn't be attributed to global warming, he postulated that it was caused by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (eventually having some comments moved).

Rum Runner's challenge

He also posed a challenge. Rum Runner wrote: (October 9, 2014 at 2:26 AM)

@Lou "Why do you think I run this blog?"
A sense of empowerment I suppose. On other people's blogs you'd have your ass handed to you on a plate in an open debate. But here you can just *pop* delete any responses that are a bit too challenging for you.

I assume that by Lou he meant Sou. Here are the comments Rum Runner would have been talking about.

Now since Rum Runner regards the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society as "political advocacy", and says that therefore doesn't take his information from there; and since he doesn't seem to have recognised as Australians, the scientists who wrote the papers I referred him to, I'll admit it's not much of a challenge.

Still, I thought it worthwhile doing two things. First, reporting some of the latest scientific findings about the weather Australia experienced in 2012 and 2013. And secondly, briefly touching on the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - what it is and what is known about it and its effects on weather - in Australia and elsewhere. (I've written about the PDO a couple of times - here and here.) This article is about the former. I'll be writing a separate article on the PDO in the near future.

Australia looks forward to still hotter from the extra CO2

There are four papers in the BAMS supplement relating to the years 2012 and 2013.

The first one is: "The role of anthropogenic forcing in the record 2013 Australia-wide annual and spring temperatures" by Sophie C Lewis and David J Karoly.

What they did was investigate the roles of anthropogenic climate change and natural variability in regard to the record-breaking heat of 2013.