Various views flying about at WUWT

There's not a lot happening in the deniosphere today as far as I can see. Anthony Watts posted another of his "claim" headlines, this time with slight variation (archived here). His headline read "Model claim: airplanes of the future won’t be able to take off at some airports due to global warming". His headline implies some airports would have to close, which isn't what the paper said.

The copy and paste this time was the abstract from a paper in the AMS journal, Weather, Climate and Society, about how the increase in surface temperatures is affecting aircraft. (For some reason, Anthony Watts said it was published in BAMS, but it wasn't.) The abstract, which was all Anthony published, states in part:

For a given runway length, airport elevation, and aircraft type there is a temperature threshold above which the airplane cannot take off at its maximum weight and thus must be weight restricted. The number of summer days necessitating weight restriction has increased since 1980 along with the observed increase in surface temperature. Climate change is projected to increase mean temperatures at all airports and significantly increase the frequency and severity of extreme heat events at some.

It goes on to discuss how it will be a particular problem in the future for airports having short runways and no room to extend them.

Confirmed: 97% consensus that in utter nutter week there are a few roos loose in the top paddock at WUWT

The descent into utter nuttery continues at WUWT.

Anthony has probably spent a heap of time copying an image of The Consensus Project, trying to argue that an opinion survey of members of the American Meteorological Society can be equated with a survey of scientific literature by Cook et al.  And this after goodness knows how many WUWT protests that "opinions don't count".  (Anthony's probably been working on this article for a while because the paper came out a little while back.)

Anthony Watts hasn't even read the abstract of the Cook13 97% consensus paper

What is really weird is that Anthony Watts hasn't even read Cook13, the paper that he's made umpteen protests about.  How do I know that? Simple.  This is what Anthony has written - at least four times.  And he's wrong each of those times:

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work

And again:

Most people who read the headlines touted by the unquestioning press had no idea that this was a collection of Skeptical Science raters opinions rather than the authors assessment of their own work. Readers of news stories had no idea they’d been lied to by John Cook et al².

And again:

...The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts.

And again:

Had Cook actually done an honest survey, we’d have the opinions of the authors about their papers, not the opinions of the SkS pal review squad in place of those opinions.

Anthony Watts has always had a tendency to leap first look later. In the case of Cook13, Anthony has leapt about twenty times or more and looked not once.  It looks as if he "read the headlines" and not the paper.

Although he has no excuse for not reading the paper itself because it's open access, Anthony wouldn't even have had to read the whole paper to know that he was wrong.  He could have just read the abstract - from Cook13:

. ..In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus. 

If Anthony Watts had bothered to glance at the full paper he would have seen (my bold italics):

To complement the abstract analysis, email addresses for 8547 authors were collected, typically from the corresponding author and/or first author. For each year, email addresses were obtained for at least 60% of papers. Authors were emailed an invitation to participate in a survey in which they rated their own published papers (the entire content of the article, not just the abstract) with the same criteria as used by the independent rating team. Details of the survey text are provided in the supplementary information

In Anthony's eagerness to embrace the opinions of meteorologists, particularly those who've never studied climate or done any research on climate, he shows once again that he is:

• is a  stubby short of a six pack
• has a few roos loose in the top paddock
• is thick as a brick...

You get the idea.

Acceptance of AGW increases with increased knowledge

Anthony is delighted that he's found a paper showing that there are quite a few meteorologists who don't do any scientific research and who don't think that humans are affecting the climate to any great extent.  (AFAIK in the USA, even a television weather announcer can call themselves a "meteorologist", and they are likely to have had some post-secondary education in the science of weather at some stage.  AMS members these days would probably mostly have at least a bachelor degree in science.  Maybe a reader from the USA can shed some light on the situation.)

Most of the AMS members who have done research say they know that climate change is real and that humans are causing it.   But that latter finding just supports Anthony's conspiracy theory.  He's a nutter of the 'climate science is a hoax' variety - and getting more entrenched as time goes by.  Anthony twists deeper knowledge of climate science into "fudging results" to suit some supposed funding body objective.  Why any government or funding body would want to fabricate such a problem is answered by the "new world order" conspiracy theory, which merges with the anti-semitic "evil banker" conspiracy theory and the "fiat money/someone stole all the gold in Fort Knox" conspiracy theory.

It's a tangled web of paranoid conspiracy theories in climate science denier land.

WUWT is "unreliable" - changing articles and censoring comments

As the thread grows, Anthony gets increasingly stroppy with anyone who points out where he went wrong.  Funny thing is that when people do point out in the comments that the opinions of scientists on their own work was obtained, Anthony backtracks and edits his original article changing this (archived here):

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting the authors of the papers rate their own work. The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters’ beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts.

To this where he added the bolded italics sentence (archived here):

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. 

Aha - so he's now tentatively admitting that authors were contacted - but he's not properly correcting his article or comments.

From the WUWT comments

It didn't take long before someone brought up another "opinion poll" - the fraudulent "petition" known as the Oregon Petition. .  dbstealey says:

November 20, 2013 at 11:11 am
As I’ve often said, you couldn’t get 97% of Italians to agree the Pope is Catholic.
Anyone who believes that 97% of scientists think human activity is the cause of global warming appears to be ignorant of the OISM Petition, in which more than 30,000 American scientists co-signed a statement saying that more CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
There is nothing comparable from the climate alarmist crowd, whose numbers are much smaller than generally assumed.

itooktheredpill is a fake sceptic who didn't bother reading Cook13 either, not even the abstract, and says, quoting Anthony Watt's fib:

November 20, 2013 at 11:14 am

You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting the authors of the papers rate their own work. The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters’ beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts.

Those who can’t handle the truth,
try to silence those who speak it.
Cook effectively silenced the authors’ beliefs by replacing them with his SkS raters’ beliefs.
Cook can’t handle the truth.

Anthony wouldn't brook any facts in the comments.  He got very irate when Dumb Scientist asked some pertinent questions.  Dumb Scientist says:

November 20, 2013 at 11:28 am

Anthony Watts: The 97% consensus myth – busted by a real survey … We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots … Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers … a lie of omission … they’d been lied to by John Cook et al². … we’ll be fighting this lie for years … blown Cook’s propaganda paper right out of the water.

==================================
Isn’t a survey of opinions different from a survey of scientific abstracts? If so, how can an opinion survey show that a survey of scientific abstracts is a “lie”?

Note that 78% of meteorologists who publish mostly on climate agree that the warming is mostly human-caused. Only 5% of all meteorologists claim that the warming is mostly natural, and only 4% claim that the warming isn’t happening.

If we can agree about these facts, that’s great news!

True to form Anthony demonstrates bullying and cowardice. First off, Anthony doesn't give any real sceptic the courtesy of using his screen name. He figures 'naming and shaming' people will intimidate them and scare them away. (After all, what self-respecting person would admit to visiting a site like WUWT!).  It's not as if he's a dinky di fake sceptic like itooktheredpill above.

REPLY: Bryan, This response suggests you are simply concern trolling. Had Cook actually done an honest survey, we’d have the opinions of the authors about their papers, not the opinions of the SkS pal review squad in place of those opinions.
For more shenanigans related to SkS, you might look up the sort of pea and thimble switcheroos (they didn’t survey skeptical blogs) and statistical techninques (populations of N=0 are allowed, add your own interpretation) employed by the gang that couldn’t shoot straight when it came to their published opinions on skeptics and their supposed belief in “faking the moon landing”. What you have here with SkS is an organized propaganda team. They aren’t interested in science.
– Anthony

Concern trolling?  The questions and statements were matter of fact, on point and courteously expressed.  Anthony must really be feeling under the hammer, mustn't he.

Anthony couldn't cope with much more from normal people.  Heck.  That's not what WUWT is all about.  WUWT is for people who don't read abstracts.  People who don't check up on Anthony's fibs.  People who embrace wacky conspiracy theories and all the utter nutter fake sceptics.  There is no room for reason, fact-checking or science on WUWT.

Since bullying didn't work, Anthony takes the coward's way out. Anthony got out his censorship keyboard and went haywire any time he saw a comment that pointed out where he got it wrong.  For example. when Dumb Scientist suggested that WUWT do its own survey, Anthony "snipped" it.  At least he left the follow up comment though not without another whine:


Dumb Scientist says:

November 20, 2013 at 12:55 pm
[snip - not interested in your characterization of me - Anthony]
==========================================
Just a few days ago, dbstealey and Ferdinand Engelbeen drew my attention to the WUWT sidebar which criticizes SkS for deleting user comments and noted that this means SkS is “dishonest”.

So it’s disappointing that my comment was snipped, but even more disappointing that Anthony claims it was because of a “characterization” after he accused John Cook and other SkS authors of dishonesty.

I still think it’s possible that Anthony has the integrity to not snip this comment, so I’ll repeat my challenge that got snipped earlier: “I’d be very interested to see WUWT read through 10,000 scientific abstracts and rate them. You could show the world how to do a proper survey… right?”

REPLY: Oh please. Bryan for the record, I don’t give a rats ass about what you think about comment policy (see here). You put words in my mouth in the last comment, I snipped it because of that. Get over yourself. Why don’t you get your peers at JPL to do it, if it is so important to you? After all, you’ve got millions of dollars of government money at your disposal there and we have next to nothing.

The whole consensus chasing is a waste of time in my opinion, Mother Nature will be the final arbiter of the AGW issue- Anthony

For a "waste of time" Anthony has sure spent a lot of time and written an awful lot of articles in protest :)  And he complains he can't be bothered surveying the literature because he wouldn't get paid for it!  I guess the Heartland Institute don't see it in their best interest to have Cook13 confirmed yet again.  John Cook and his team looked at more than 10,000 abstracts in their own time without being paid a penny.  But Anthony Watts isn't interested in doing it because, as he knows, he'd end up with the same result as Cook13.

There are a number of people who've noticed that although the uninformed (non-research) meteorologists are less likely to attribute climate change to mostly human activities, only 5% have said that "it's natural".


I'm on the road so won't write any more on this right now, but I see there is lots more fun to be had with articles put up at WUWT in the past few hours.  So I'll be back soon.

Meanwhile, you can read the various WUWT archives on this zany article here in order:  First, second, third, fourth.  The comments are a mix of the rational through to the utter nutters.  Anthony Watts is leaning towards the utter nutter end of the spectrum but there are quite a few who surpass him.

---

Neil Stenhouse et al (2013), Meteorologists' views about global warming: A survey of American Meteorological Society professional members, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2013 ; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00091.1

Six Grand Challenges - 12 Extreme Weather Events in 2012

While Anthony Watts is scurrying around trying to think up an angle to "prove" that the world's top climate scientists "don't no nuffin'", he's drawn attention to a new analysis by 78 scientists from around the world.  The analysis is of several extreme events last year (2012) and has been published as a special supplement to the latest issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).

The paper is called "Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective".  There is a news release from NOAA here.  It states in part:

The report shows that the effects of natural weather and climate fluctuations played a key role in the intensity and evolution of many of the 2012 extreme events. However, in several events, the analyses revealed compelling evidence that human-caused climate change was a secondary factor contributing to the extreme event. “This report adds to a growing ability of climate science to untangle the complexities of understanding natural and human-induced factors contributing to specific extreme weather and climate events,” said Thomas R. Karl, LHD, director of NCDC. “Nonetheless, determining the causes of extreme events remains challenging.”

In addition to investigating the causes of these extreme events, the multiple analyses of four of the events—the warm temperatures in the United States, the record-low levels of Arctic sea ice, and the heavy rain in both northern Europe and eastern Australia—allowed the scientists to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of their various methods of analysis. Despite their different strategies, there was considerable agreement between the assessments of the same events.

The second paragraph is interesting.

Six Grand Challenges

I have only started reading the report myself and really like the style of the introduction.   Here are the opening paragraphs:

One of us distinctly remembers in graduate school when a professor put the first ever satellite image of a tropical cyclone on the screen and explained various features of the storm. Then he proceeded to editorialize by pointing out that someone wrote his entire PhD dissertation based on this one image and how we started graduate school too late because all the easy projects have been done. Now with decades of definitely not easy scientific analyses under our collective belts, we can look back and realize how wrong the professor was. The “easy” science of decades ago only looks easy now because its results seem obvious. Their work was difficult then and our work is difficult now.

However, among the difficult work we have before us, a few grand challenges arise. These are challenges (i) that have specific barriers preventing progress, (ii) where targeted research efforts would have the likelihood of significant progress over the next 5–10 years, (iii) that have measurable performance metrics, (iv) that can be transformative, (v) that are capable of capturing the public’s imagination, and (vi) that can offer compelling storylines (WCRP 2013). The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) has identified six grand challenges that meet these criteria. Prediction and attribution of extreme events is one of them. It is gratifying to see that scientists from across the world are taking on this grand challenge. This includes the scientists that contributed to this collection of analyses, which assess the causes for 12 specific extreme events that took place around the world in 2012 (Fig. 1.1).

You can download a copy of the report here.

Does Anthony Watts not believe global warming can influence weather?

What Anthony Watts writes says all you need to know about him (archived here).  First his headline, where he describes NOAA as "alarmist" for reporting what the scientists have found:

NOAA goes full alarmist with new publication, seeing AGW in extreme weather events. 

In other words, he thinks the 78 scientists are exaggerating.  Why does he think that?  He hasn't figured out an angle yet but he does make a promise:

I’ll comment in detail later, but for now I’ll simply provide the report

What's the bet he'll renege on his promise to "comment in detail later"?  He often says he'll do that without anything appearing "later".  Mostly I think he just says that in the hope that someone will offer in the comments something he can use - or maybe get one of his "guest authors" to write an article for him.  He's not that good at dreaming up angles that he can sell to anyone but the most dismissive of the 8% dismissives.

So it would appear that Anthony Watts doesn't think global warming can influence weather.  You'd not think two people in the world could be so dumb, but it's so.  There is at least one other person, Cheshirered who says:

September 5, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Weather is not climate.
It takes 30 years, apparently.
So how does climate change become weather?
Confirmation bias, writ large.
And a large cheque, writ.

How does climate change become weather, Cheshirered asks.  Does Cheshirered know that climate is just a description of expected weather and when climate changes then - well, you can guess the rest (I hope).

Global warming means more energy in the earth system.  It affects all weather.

There is a nice Q&A on climate change and attribution with NOAA's Thomas Peterson here.


Peterson, T. C., M. P. Hoerling, P. A. Stott and S. Herring, Eds., 2013: Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 from a Climate Perspective. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 94 (9), S1–S74.

State of the Climate in 2012 - with some WUWT spin

2012 was among the coolest years this century ...and among the hottest 10 years on record

Not since 2011 could deniers claim this.  That 2012 was among the coolest years this century!  That's how Anthony Watts portrays it on his WUWT blog today.

According to GISTemp, it was the fifth coolest year this century - or the sixth coolest if you include 2000!  We're heading for an ice age any day now.

Data Source: NASA

State of the Climate 2012

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has released State of the Climate in 2012 as a supplement to the August 2013 issue.  You can download it here.

Here are some highlights from the NOAA:

The report used dozens of climate indicators to track and identify changes and overall trends to the global climate system. These indicators include greenhouse gas concentrations, temperature of the lower and upper atmosphere, cloud cover, sea surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean salinity, sea ice extent and snow cover. Each indicator includes thousands of measurements from multiple independent datasets.

Warm temperature trends continue near Earth’s surface: Four major independent datasets show 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record, ranking either 8th or 9th, depending upon the dataset used. The United States and Argentina had their warmest year on record.

La Niña dissipates into neutral conditions:  A weak La Niña dissipated during spring 2012 and, for the first time in several years, neither El Niño nor La Niña, which can dominate regional weather and climate conditions around the globe, prevailed for the majority of the year.

The Arctic continues to warm; sea ice extent reaches record low: The Arctic continued to warm at about twice the rate compared with lower latitudes. Minimum Arctic sea ice extent in September and Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent in June each reached new record lows. Arctic sea ice minimum extent (1.32 million square miles, September 16) was the lowest of the satellite era. This is 18 percent lower than the previous record low extent of 1.61 million square miles that occurred in 2007 and 54 percent lower than the record high minimum ice extent of 2.90 million square miles that occurred in 1980.

The temperature of permafrost, or permanently frozen land, reached record-high values in northernmost Alaska. A new melt extent record occurred July 11–12 on the Greenland ice sheet when 97 percent of the ice sheet showed some form of melt, four times greater than the average melt this time of year.

Antarctica sea ice extent reaches record high: The Antarctic maximum sea ice extent reached a record high of 7.51 million square miles on September 26. This is 0.5 percent higher than the previous record high extent of 7.47 million square miles that occurred in 2006 and seven percent higher than the record low maximum sea ice extent of 6.96 million square miles that occurred in 1986.

Sea surface temperatures increase: Four independent datasets indicate that the globally averaged sea surface temperature for 2012 was among the 11 warmest on record.  After a 30-year period from 1970 to 1999 of rising global sea surface temperatures, the period 2000–2012 exhibited little trend. Part of this difference is linked to the prevalence of La Niña-like conditions during the 21st century, which typically lead to lower global sea surface temperatures.

Ocean heat content remains near record levels: Heat content in the upper 2,300 feet, or a little less than one-half mile, of the ocean remained near record high levels in 2012. Overall increases from 2011 to 2012 occurred between depths of 2,300 to 6,600 feet and even in the deep ocean.

Sea level reaches record high: Following sharp decreases in global sea level in the first half of 2011 that were linked to the effects of La Niña, sea levels rebounded to reach record highs in 2012. Globally, sea level has been increasing at an average rate of 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year over the past two decades.

Ocean salinity trends continue: Continuing a trend that began in 2004, oceans were saltier than average in areas of high evaporation, including the central tropical North Pacific, and fresher than average in areas of high precipitation, including the north central Indian Ocean, suggesting that precipitation is increasing in already rainy areas and evaporation is intensifying in drier locations.

Tropical cyclones near average: Global tropical cyclone activity during 2012 was near average, with a total of 84 storms, compared with the 1981–2010 average of 89. Similar to 2010 and 2011, the North Atlantic was the only hurricane basin that experienced above-normal activity.

Greenhouse gases climb: Major greenhouse gas concentrations, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, continued to rise during 2012. Following a slight decline in manmade emissions associated with the global economic downturn, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production reached a record high in 2011 of 9.5 ± 0.5 petagrams (1,000,000,000,000,000 grams) of carbon, and a new record of 9.7 ± 0.5 petagrams of carbon is estimated for 2012. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by 2.1 ppm in 2012, reaching a global average of 392.6 ppm for the year. In spring 2012, for the first time, the atmospheric CO2 concentration exceeded 400 ppm at several Arctic observational sites.

Cool temperature trends continue in Earth’s lower stratosphere: The average lower stratospheric temperature, about six to ten miles above the Earth’s surface, for 2012 was record to near-record cold, depending on the dataset. Increasing greenhouse gases and decline of stratospheric ozone tend to cool the stratosphere while warming the planet near-surface layers.