No hiatus (or vacation) from denial - Anthony Watts and Ryan Maue misrepresent a new scientific paper

It looks as if Anthony hasn't yet left on his promised vacation his fans have paid for. Today he copied and pasted an article from, of all places, the Daily Caller (archived here, latest here). Now the Daily Caller is not regarded as a reputable source of scientific information. It's a right wing website from the USA, apparently widely read, particularly by Republicans seeking a daily outrage fix of sensationalised sentiment. (It's owned by a guy called Tucker Carlson, who replaced Bill O'Reilly at Fox. I gather there's not much to distinguish the opinions of the two.)

The shock and awe at WUWT is over a new paper by a team of scientific heavy-weights, led by the world-renowned climate scientist, Dr. Benjamin D. Santer. The paper, published in Nature Geoscience, reports an exploration of the reasons for any differences between modeled and observed temperatures in the upper air (the troposphere). The authors examined data for the satellite era, January 1979 to December 2016, which is when there were more reliable temperature observations of the upper air.

[Note: the paper itself is about troposphere temperatures. The charts I've added are surface temperatures, in part because I'm still short of time, plus I don't have model data for the troposphere to hand (Fig 3).]

The water vapour penny precipitates, almost, for Willis Eschenbach at WUWT

There's a new article at WUWT by Willis Eschenbach (archived here, latest here). It took him almost twenty years, but he's finally found the RSS total precipitable water (TPW) record. For years Willis has been arguing that Earth's climate can't change much because of thunderstorms. It seems that he may have finally woken up to the fact that there is more water vapour in a warmer atmosphere than in a cooler one and that this is contributing to the greenhouse effect. He wrote (about the dataset that was reported 20 years ago in 1996): "One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset."

I've been meaning to write about global warming, water vapour and precipitation for some time. There have been several papers on the subject (see below). What's happening is:

• the amount of water in the air is increasing as the world warms,
• the water cycle is intensifying,
• therefore there is more rain (and snow), and
• more greenhouse warming because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas.

Warning: This is a rather long article, with no apologies :)

Global surface warming continues without pause contrary to denier claims

There's another new paper out in Nature Climate Change today that discusses the recent trends on global surface temperature. It's by a rash of notable authors: John C. Fyfe, Gerald A. Meehl, Matthew H. England, Michael E. Mann, Benjamin D. Santer, Gregory M. Flato, Ed Hawkins, Nathan P. Gillett, Shang-Ping Xie, Yu Kosaka, Neil C. Swart. Anthony Watts heralded the paper (archived here), which is unusual because he normally scoffs at the findings of most of these authors. He referred to an article in the Examiner newspaper, which claims that this paper contradicted "another study last June" that stated that the "the hiatus was just an artifact that “vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.”

Well it doesn't contradict it. Needless to say Anthony and the Examiner was comparing apples and oranges.

The new paper, Fyfe16, discussed the reality of the slowdown. There was no "hiatus" or stopping of global warming, contrary to Anthony Watts' headline. The rise in global surface temperatures slowed down earlier this century compared to the rate of rise from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. As Jeff Tollefson of Nature wrote about the lead author: "Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory."

A strong, alarming warning from scientific luminaries: We have to decide...

This is an alert for denier watchers. Get ready for the possibility of another "whopping mad (crazy)" onslaught from the climate conspiracy theorists. Peter U. Clark and a team of leading scientists have published a paper in Nature Climate Change, this time looking ahead 10,000 years to changes in climate and sea level. The team is laden with some of the heaviest of heavyweights from the world of climate science:

Peter U. Clark, Jeremy D. Shakun, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix, Michael Eby, Scott Kulp, Anders Levermann, Glenn A. Milne, Patrik L. Pfister, Benjamin D. Santer, Daniel P. Schrag, Susan Solomon, Thomas F. Stocker, Benjamin H. Strauss, Andrew J. Weaver, Ricarda Winkelmann, David Archer, Edouard Bard, Aaron Goldner, Kurt Lambeck, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Gian-Kasper Plattner.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach makes more mischief with volcanoes

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a well-earned reputation for wandering off on a tangent and avoiding scientific research. He's done the same today at WUWT (archived here, latest here). He decided that two recent papers relating to volcanic forcing are "wrong". Not because he took any notice of the content of the papers - he didn't. Not because he took any notice of the observations reported. He didn't. He decided to reject the months of hard work by multiple scientists, on the basis of his own five minutes of "research".

Climate models and volcanic forcing

The two papers found evidence of volcanic forcing, coming from two different perspectives:

• Observed increase in Stratospheric Aerosol Optical Depth (SAOD) since 2005 (Ridley14)
• Multiple signals of volcanic forcing in sea surface temperature, atmospheric water vapour,  net clear-sky short-wave radiation, and elsewhere (Santer14)

One of the main points the scientists emphasised was that the CMIP5 models mostly assumed there was zero change in stratospheric volcanic forcing after 2000. They show that this assumption is not valid. Since 2005 in particular, there has been significant volcanic forcing, based on observations.

Smaller volcanic eruptions helped slow warming, but deniers at WUWT don't believe it

There was a paper that came out last week that you might have heard about. It was by David Ridley from MIT and a team of others, including some very high profile scientists. What they did was investigate the impact of volcanoes over the past few years. They found that the cooling effect of volcanoes since 2000 could be from 0.05°C up to as much as 0.12 °C, which would be quite a bit more than previously thought.

The Sarychev Peak Volcano, on Matua Island, erupted on June 12, 2009.
Credit: NASA via AGU

There have been other recent studies looking at the impact of volcanoes, including by some of the co-authors of this paper. I've written previously about the article by Gavin Schmidt, Drew Shindell and Kostas Tsigaridis,  in a special edition of Nature Geoscience, "Focus on recent slowdown in global warming". That issue also had an article on volcanoes, two of whose co-authors were also co-authors on the Ridley paper.

This new work was different.

What this team did was look particularly at the impact of volcanic aerosols in the stratosphere below 15 km. From satellite observations, scientists know that above 15 km, volcanic eruptions that are smallish in size can perturb incoming solar radiation. David Ridley found that below 15 km in the stratosphere, there has also been a measurable impact by volcanoes.

Anthony Watts got the Quadrella with an outdated clichéd caricature of a climate science denier

Deniers must be in an out and out panic for some reason.  I don't know why that is.  Yesterday I wrote about how Anthony got the trifecta, putting up articles in quick succession on the much caricatured denier memes of:

1. Climategate
2. Greenland and
3. Al Gore is fat.

Now he's added another one to make the quadrella! (Archived here.) Anthony's posted the most stereotypical clichéd conspiracy theorising slimy article from the grubby Tim Ball. Replete with resurrecting ancient attacks on some of the world's leading scientists - which are sick and twisted and false and would be laughable if they weren't such ugly smear attacks:

• "they turned off the air-conditioning in 1988 in Congress"
• falsely accusing Dr James Hansen, one of the world's living treasures and a modern day hero, of not declaring income
• Ben Santer, who is one of the most respected and trustworthy of climate scientists, "altered" the IPCC report when it was Ben Santer who ensured that the IPCC report included appropriate wording about uncertainty and ensured the report was an accurate reflection of the science of the day
• claiming 24 years ago Ben Santer was too "green" to write for the IPCC (he was 35 years old at the time and had received his doctorate three years earlier) - He was admired by his peers back then and look at how he is revered worldwide today
• Dredging up a dumb claim about the Medieval Warm Period, from arch denier David Deming of all people
• Implying there was something shonky about Michael Mann writing for the IPCC and, laughably, that there was something shonky about this triple graduate degree holder getting his doctorate

I've not seen such a gish gallop of old, disgusting ad hominem attacks on scientists since 2010.  Which in turn were in part a resurrection of the failed Fred Seitz attack from way back in 1996.  Here is the open letter of support for Ben Santer from the American Meteorological Society - from way back in 1996. And here is a more recent article by Ben Santer himself, covering these and other issues. 

Is something about to happen that I'm missing?  Why this resurrection of worn out clichéd denier disinformation?  Is Tim Ball wanting to provide more material for the court to consider at the various law suits he's got to defend? Is he trying to rope Anthony Watts into one or more of them?

And why is Anthony stuck for guest authors that he has to rely on people like the slime Tim Ball, the clown Christopher Monckton and Eric "eugenics" Worrall (can you get more obsure than Eric Worrall?).

Not only that but yesterday he dragged out a chap called Tim Tom Harris who is the "Executive Director" of the two-bit operation that grandly calls itself the "International Climate Science Coalition".  TimTom visited here and twice denied writing exact quotes I took from his article at WUWT.  One of which he'd repeated in slightly different words in a press release published on his own website - talking about "the most expensive hoax in the history of science".

Not only that, but earlier today, Anthony proclaimed to the world that the "biggest threat" to humankind is an asteroid strike.  He's made similar claims before.  He's nuts.  Even his most rabid deniers dispute him on that score.

It's as if there's something big in the wind to send Anthony Watts around the twist like this.  Utterly more Utter Nuttery than usual.

Anthony Watts arrives late at the APS climate party ... and gets it wrong

I see that Anthony Watts has only just discovered that the American Physical Society is reviewing its climate policy statement.  He wrote excitedly (archived here):

That noise you can hear in the distance is the sound of John Cook’s, Dana Nuccitelli’s, and Joe Romm’s heads exploding

Lindzen, Christy and Curry appointed to APS climate statement review panel

He earlier wrote, quoting Simon of Australian Climate Madness, that:

The American Physical Society, which previously issued a highly alarmist statement regarding climate change, is to review it, and has appointed three climate realists to the panel of six. 

...before slightly amending it to insert the word "[address]" after "climate realists".


Anyway, Lindzen, Christy and Curry did attend a workshop of the APS sub-committee back in early January.  As well as the contrarians, the sub-committee invited three more highly regarded and serious climate scientists (Ben Santer, Isaac Held and William Collins).  Goodness knows why they had Richard, John and Judith along.

Lindzen, Christy and Curry aren't on the sub-committee and I don't hold great hopes that the sub-committee will end up with a sensible climate policy. If you read the transcript of the January workshop it's clear that the Sub-Committee members themselves know zilch about climate science.  You'd think that out of all the members of the APS they could find some climate experts to prepare a draft statement.

By the way, this is another example of Anthony either forgetting or not reading stuff he's already posted on his blog before, too. And he doesn't read Judith Curry's blog or Rabett Run either, both of whom wrote about this a month ago.

Eli's post is a must read.  He starts off scathingly:

The American Physical Society had done it again.  In a surprisingly repetitive fit of Dunning Kruger they have assembled a subcommittee to guide the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) in a review of the APS statement on Climate Change which is composed of nuclear physicists and others who know nothing about climate relevant physics.

From the WUWT comments

Even though the sub-committee has a lot of learning ahead of it when it comes to climate science, I wonder if WUWT is going to be a repeat of Richard Muller's temperature reconstruction - where they all cried "hurrah" anticipating a finding that earth had cooled or something - only to turn on him when his analysis was completed.  I mean how likely is it that the APS would reverse its current policy position?

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Terry Comeau says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:53 am
What I would give to sit in on the meetings of the panel. The alarmists on that panel must be panic stricken. Three people with such impressive scientific credentials to actually put real questions of science and integrity to their blatant and exceedingly flimsy eco-activistic pseudo-scientific constructs. How on earth can they try to maintain their house of cards under those circumstances? The gig is up and they must see it coming like a light in a train tunnel, and there isn’t a damned thing they can do to avoid it. Wow. Break out the popcorn.

Ken Hall says:

March 20, 2014 at 8:01 am
AT LAST!!! An authorititive and august scientific institution actually using a scientific approach to investigating the merits, or lack thereof, of the CAGW hypothesis. fully balanced and fully in public, without hiding anything. About effin time!

To overtly mangle metaphors, once this domino falls it should creat a crack in the dam of CAGW alarmism which should spread through all the other authorititive and august scientific institutions, including the Royal Society. Once this happens, real science may prevail and we may see a return to sanity in science and politics. It is early days yet, but fingers crossed.

John Whitman says:

March 20, 2014 at 10:29 am
It does not get any better than this for it finally shows a reasonable good level of openness and transparency in climate science assessment. The review panel has high level personnel who are very critical of the processes that supported the controversial aspects of climate science used for the IPCC reports.

This APS process is a prototype that the The Royal Society, the IPCC, the NAS, AAAS, AGU and the US Congress should emulate.
John 

Let's wait to see how this plays out.  The American Physical Society has a reputation to uphold after all.  It could well be that WUWT will suffer a series of head explosions, not John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli or Joe Romm.

Shhh - there's too much noise and I can't hear the signal - or Ben Santer's 17 years

There's an eccentric English chap called Christopher Monckton of Brenchley who has Anthony Watts of WUWT in thrall. Barry Bickmore can fill you in on this vexatious Viscount.

Monckton is claiming that there 'hasn't been any significant warming for seventeen years and four months'.

That's right.  I kid you not!  He has done his sums and it's seventeen years and four months. Oh and I guess its seventeen years, four months, one day, 13 hours and 25 seconds by now.

It's good to know that he's finally settled on a number.  His previous lucky dips were for 16, 17, 18, 19 and 23 years (all in the one letter); then he went for "approaching two decades"; then just last month it was 18 years.

Apparently Monckton is trying to put one over the 8% Dismissives over at WUWT, an anti-science blog.  I don't know why he bothers.  The clowns over there already have their heads stuffed full of insects, underwater volcanoes, exploding vegetation, ice ages peeping around corners, lack of ENSOs, leaping El Ninos and scientific dogs.  I doubt there is room in their heads for another denier meme.  Still, I suppose Anthony has to fill up that white space with nonsense several times a day to keep his crowd entertained.

The way I see it, Anthony Watts had a whole heap more than usual of Friday Funnies on WUWT this week.  This article by Monckton was just one of many.  Anthony chose to make Monckton's article a "sticky".  When you're down on your luck you take what you can get.  And Anthony hasn't been having much luck at all lately.

The basis of Monckton's article was ostensibly Santer et al (2011), so I thought I'd write some of what that research found.

Ben Santer and colleagues, the signal and seventeen years of noise and counting

The Santer paper is titled: Separating signal and noise in atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale.

First up they let us know that they are comparing satellite estimates of lower troposphere with CMIP3 model simulations.  What they find, unsurprisingly, is that the signal to noise ratio increases the longer the time period.  From the abstract:

...Because of the pronounced effect of interannual noise on decadal trends, a multi-model ensemble of anthropogenically-forced simulations displays many 10-year periods with little warming. A single decade of observational TLT data (temperature of the lower troposphere) is therefore inadequate for identifying a slowly evolving anthropogenic warming signal. Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.

In the Discussion and Conclusions section, the authors elaborate further.  Here are some excerpts (my bold):

Efforts to apply rigorous statistical methods to the problem of identifying human effects on climate commenced over 30 years ago [Hasselmann, 1979]. At the inception of this endeavor, it was recognized that any human-caused climate change signal is embedded in the noise of natural climate variability, and that separation of human and natural influences requires information on signal and noise properties over a range of timescales....

...Our estimated signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios for global-scale TLT changes were less than 1.0 on the 10-year timescale (Figure 6c). On the 32-year timescale, however, S/N exceeded 3.9 in all three observational TLT data sets. The latter result shows that natural internal variability, as simulated by current climate models, is a highly unlikely explanation for the observed lower tropospheric warming over the satellite era (Figure 6d). Comparisons between simulated and observed low-frequency TLT variability suggest that our estimates of S/N ratios on 5–20 year timescales are conservative (Figures 9 and 10). The strong timescale dependence of S/N ratios arises primarily because of the large decrease in noise amplitude as the period used for trend fitting increases (Figure 6b)....

... In summary, because of the effects of natural internal climate variability, we do not expect each year to be inexorably warmer than the preceding year, or each decade to be warmer than the last decade, even in the presence of strong anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

What I understand from that research is that:

• the longer the time period the more the signal emerges from the noise
• multi-decadal records are needed, the more the better
• it's important to not introduce noise unnecessarily.

How did Monckton fare against these findings?  First, Monckton misrepresented what Santer said.  Santer et al wrote that at least seventeen years and the longer the better to extract the signal from the noise:

Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature....

...The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

"At least seventeen years are required", and "multi-decadal records are required". Compare that to this, from Monckton:

However, as Anthony explained yesterday, the stasis goes back farther than that. He says we shall soon be approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17-year test: if there is no warming for 17 years, the models are wrong.

No, Christopher, that's not what Dr Santer and his colleagues found.  Santer didn't write about 'models being wrong'.  He was pointing out that the longer the better.  Even in the press reports this is what was written:

In order to separate human-caused global warming from the "noise" of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists.

Look we're used to Monckton making up stuff.  We don't have to just lay down and take it though.  

Let's move along.  What else did he do wrong?  

For one thing, he plotted temperature by month, not annually.  What he hoped to achieve I don't know.  Nor do I know if his "results" would have been any different.  But what I do know is that a monthly plot exaggerates the noise and hides the multi-decadal signal.  Why do you think Spencer always provides monthly plots?  It's so that every so often he can gig up the crowd by claiming a drop in temperature.  Yes, from the previous month! Even though it's well above the temperatures of the eighties and nineties.

What else did Monckton do wrong?  For another thing, Monckton misrepresented his chart as an IPCC chart, which it most certainly isn't.  Heck, he even put the name of his foundation on the chart.  And the IPCC doesn't do sloppy, not like Monckton.  Here's one of his charts.  I've animated his "brand" and added an arrow:

As if you couldn't tell anyway.  He's presenting the chart as a monthly chart, stuck some lines on it that he claims are IPCC "backcasted projections", added some dodgy numbers in the left hand corner and put a reference to an IPCC AR5 figure, when AR5 hasn't even been released yet.

Monckton describes it as follows - see if you can understand what he writes. It's not easy:

The IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report backcasts the interval of 34 models’ global warming projections to 2005, since when the world should have been warming at a rate equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century. Instead, it has been cooling at a rate equivalent to a statistically-insignificant 0.87 Cº/century:

I suppose he was right about one thing.  Any "cooling" he might have been able to fiddle is not going to be statistically significant.

On the other matters, since the IPCC's "forthcoming" Fifth Assessment Report is still "forthcoming", neither Monckton nor I would be in a position to say whether it will include any charts that hindcast or backcast or project.  He may have access to the previous draft, but that's a long way from a final version.

What is obvious is that Monckton hasn't the slightest clue about models or climate.  I mean in his second chart as shown above, he's looking at only eight years for heavens sake.  Eight years isn't multi-decadal.  Does he expect surface temperature to go in a straight line somewhere?

Let's do multi-decadal using the same temperature series, HadCRUT4.  It doesn't look anything like what Monckton drew.  You can check for yourself here.

Source: HadCRUT4

I've marked both 1995 (seventeen years of data) and 1996 (sixteen years of data) for what it's worth.  But you don't have to stop at 1995 or 1996.  You can see the trend goes back a lot further than that.  The world is getting hotter.

It's not just the land and sea surface that's warming

I didn't see anyone ask Monckton to explain all the other signs that the earth is warming, but there were a lot of comments so I might have missed it.

Recommended reading

For a different takes on global temperature trends, here are some papers and blogs to check out:

• James Hansen, Makiko Satoa and Reto Ruedy: 2012: Perception of climate change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 109, 14726-14727, E2415-E2423, doi:10.1073/pnas.1205276109.
• Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf (2011): Global temperature evolution 1979–2010, Environ. Res. Lett. 6 (October-December 2011) 044022, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022
• Nick Stokes at Moyhu has some pretty charts as well as some interactive charts for you to play with.
• Tamino's blog - with lots of articles and statistical analysis of trends
• and more in the scientific literature.

The comments at WUWT had a lot of the usual bowing and scraping to the potty peer.  There was some fun to be had though.  There was one guy called rgbatduke (yes, I read ratbag too, then came to realise it's his initials and he teaches at Duke - which leads us to another play on words).  People were calling him Professor Brown but he isn't a climate researcher.  (I don't think he does much research at all.  He teaches physics I believe.)

Anyway the rgbatduke got stuck right into the analysis, with a very strongly worded missive on how you can't do this, that and the other thing and it's all a mess and so on and so forth.  It took up a few screens so I'll only post one bit from somewhere around the middle of his rant.  rgbatduke says:

June 13, 2013 at 7:20 am  ...Note the implicit swindle in this graph — by forming a mean and standard deviation over model projections and then using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error, one is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!.

Say what?

Monckton didn't seem to object to being called a swindler and we'll see why shortly.  Nick popped in quite some time later and recognised rgbatduke had made an erroneous assumption.  Nick figured out that rgbatduke had the wrong end of the stick and thought the graph was one of the IPCC's.  rgbatduke is obviously not au fait with IPCC reports or he would have twigged at once that the charts were inventions of the potty peer himself.

The thread continued with mostly mindless denialist stuff, occasionally interspersed with Nick's astute comments and some general stirring by Mosher.  As usual, Nick was unflappable, remaining calm and polite and sticking to the facts.  Not like Monckton, who was apoplectic flinging wild accusations left, right and centre.  He called Nick a liar (and a Mr instead of Dr, while calling rgbatduke Professor - unsubtle!).  Monckton even wanted Nick to be banned from WUWT.  Then Anthony chimed in to tell Nick, the only cool head in the place, to keep it cool; to behave himself, he was upsetting the potty peer and denier rgbatduke as well as everyone else.  (On WUWT the unwritten policy is that as long as you deny science you can say what you like.  If you write sensible stuff you're under tight watch and banned if enough people flame you.)

It's a madhouse at WUWT.

As a reward for reading through to the end, here's a little bit of CO2 for your exploding plants.