No discernible change points in WUWT temperature conspiracies

The hogwash from science deniers continues, this time with a rather silly claim by Bob Tisdale. He doesn't accept the maths behind the use of anomalies in science, and reckons the reason anomalies are used to illustrate changes in global temperature is to hide seasonal differences throughout the year, or between land and oceans, or some such nonsense.

Bob Tisdale is what at best could be termed a pseudo-scientist. He specialises in rejecting climate change science, usually using very poor and unscientific graphs to get his audience to clap. And he chooses to publish on denier blogs where the audience will clap anything, as long as it's one of climate science is a hoax, the world is cooling, it can't be happening, Trump is the best, and all the scientists in the world are wrong, or stupid, or similar.

Today he's "supported" his silliness by putting up some charts, which he says he based on data from Berkeley Earth and NOAA's sea surface temperature, ERSST v5. He seems very surprised to find that the hottest months globally are July and August.

Sea level rise commitment could already be very high

There's a new paper out in Science this week, which compares the current state of the world with that of the last interglacial period (LIG), when sea levels were much higher than now. The paper is by Jeremy S. Hoffman, Peter U. Clark, Andrew C. Parnell, and Feng He.  Their findings suggest that we could already be committed to around a six to nine metre rise in sea level. (That's about 20 to 30 feet higher for the metric deficient.) From the introduction to the paper:

The last interglaciation [LIG, 129 to 116 thousand years ago (ka)] was one of the warmest periods during the last 800,000 years (1), with an associated sea-level rise of 6 to 9 m above present levels (2). As such, the LIG provides an important target for validating global climate models used for climate-change projections (3, 4), as well as for understanding the sea-level response to a warm climate. 

Divert, Distract, Deny: Cool times ahead - protests dim Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat

Deniers at places like wattsupwiththat.com and elsewhere are every bit as weird and incomprehensible as the people who say they like Donald Trump for his honesty. They'd rather be lied to than have to deal with facts. (I've been distracted by this amazing behaviour from the new White House press secretary, which given the source is a zillion times worse than run-of-the-mill climate conspiracy blogs, which everyone who's sensible knows are only for nutters. One expects politicians to distract and divert, but one does not expect the White House to flat out lie to the American people and the world.)

Time to get away from the utter nutters in the White House and back to the utter nutters on denier blogs. There were the expected protests about the recent surface temperature announcement of yet another Hottest Year on Record - for the third year in a row.

Anthony Watts distracts with US temperature

Anthony Watts wrote an article ridiculing, but not disputing, the fact that last year was yet another hottest year ever in the instrumental record (archived here). It was the classic divert to distract manipulation favoured by science deniers. Anthony was trying to distract his readers from the hottest year on record. His headline was: "@NOAA data demonstrates that 2016 was not the ‘hottest year ever’ in the USA".

Deniers hang their hopes on wrong information from a government website in Wisconsin

It's not clear that the partial scrubbing of climate change from the website of the Department of Natural Resources in Wisconsin was at the directive of the Governor Scott Walker, or if there happens to be a stray science denier who got lodged in the Department itself. What is clear is that it's got climate conspiracy theorists at WUWT enthused and hopeful. They seem to think that if the words "climate" and "change" are scrubbed from government websites, then global warming will stop. It won't.

(Scott Walker was a presidential hopeful at one stage, and reportedly dodged questions on climate change.)

Anthony Watts is so excited about this latest bit of climate censorship that he's posted two articles about it. One was written by Bob Tisdale (archived here) and the other by Kip Hansen (archived here).

Losing his grip on ENSO: Bob Tisdale thinks he's an expert, and yet...

Bob Tisdale fancies himself as an ENSO expert, yet he doesn't show that in his WUWT article today (archived here). He's complaining that a couple of days ago NOAA removed the "watch" status for La Nina. Bob's headline was "NOAA Cancels La Niña Watch While La Niña Conditions Exist". Well, he seems to be the only person who thinks La Nina conditions exist. Oh, except maybe for Anthony Watts who, way back in June, declared that we are already having a La Nina.

Today Bob Tisdale wrote:

Regardless of the existing (and strengthening) La Niña conditions, NOAA has canceled its La Niña Watch, which had been in effect since April.

Except there are not conditions currently existing for La Nina. Bob's wrong. This is where he was wrong - almost everywhere:

1. Bob didn't base his assessment on the ENSO definition's standard of the ONI, which is a 3 month running mean;
2. He based his current sea surface temperature anomaly in the Nino 3.4 region on the wrong average baseline, making it appear approx 0.4 C colder than it is (the cutoff is -0.5 C) (h/t Rattus Norvegicus);
3. He used the wrong dataset (Reynolds OI v2), not the one used as standard for ENSO estimates (ERSST v4).

Summary added by Sou 4:57 pm 10 September 2016

NOAA's Climate Explorer fools climate quack Bob Tisdale at WUWT

Bob Tisdale has just discovered a terrific new NOAA web tool that is designed to help communities in the USA adapt to climate change (archived here). Naturally enough, Bob doesn't bother to find out the first thing about the tool or the data that underpins it. Instead he all but accuses NOAA of fraud and fakery in his usual "climate hoax" conspiratorial manner.

Climate Explorer - for the USA

First lets look at what the collaborative effort (NOAA plus more) is offering planners and communities in the USA. It's called The Climate Explorer. You can choose a city and see what may happen to your temperature and rainfall over time, under different scenarios. There are two scenarios: high emissions and low emissions. If you choose Chico, Butte County, California, you'll see the following options, each having more options:

• temperature
• precipitation
• other:- heating degree days and cooling degree days.

Bob Tisdale's trick of hiding the data, revisited

I've written previously about the trick Bob Tisdale uses to hide the fact that observed temperatures are now very close to modeled projections. He uses the same trick every time he posts his update to global mean surface temperatures (as archived here). It's an obvious trick, which should fool no-one except people who aren't familiar with charts and disinformer tricks, and those who want to deny global warming. I shouldn't need to repeat what he does, but I will, briefly. The wonder is that Bob keeps repeating his trick, even though he knows it's deceptive for two reasons:

1. Firstly it's deceitful because Bob chops off much of the past two and a half years of data, by plotting a 61 month moving average.
2. Secondly it's wrong because he doesn't let his readers know that the CMIP5 data he's using has only estimated forcings since 2005. The actual forcings had a net effect lower than what the CMIP5 models were based on.

Desperate Deniers: Bob Tisdale is lost in uncertainty of February temperatures

Bob Tisdale has got himself lost in a world of uncertainty. He's written an article at WUWT (archived here) with the headline: "February 2016 Global Surface Temperature Anomalies May or May Not Have Been Highest on Record, According to the UKMO".

In fact it was the hottest February on record. What Bob does to support his claim is say how the UK Met Office Hadley Centre publishes uncertainty limits with the global surface temperature data. Bob went looking for any month that might have had an anomaly that came close. He couldn't find any other February, but he did find a January. He wrote:

Cognitive dissidence: Quiet, if confusing, on the denier front, and a peep at Hansen (2016)

It's still quiet if a bit confusing on the denier front. Judith Curry admits to being a knowing dissident. She says she's suffering cognitive dissidence in one of her mixed up articles where, apart from that, she commits to little if anything as is usual with Judith. While it was probably a Freudian slip, it's a great term, isn't it. One that sums up disinformers rather well.

Other people seem to be afflicted by cognitive dissidence as well, arguing for the sake of arguing.

Over at WUWT, Bob Tisdale wants to know what Presidential hopefuls are going to do to protect the US populace against weather-related disasters (archived here), which he admits are happening now.

Bob Tisdale tries to hide the massive warming

How do you get rid of warming that you want to deny? That's easy. You just subtract it from the record and ignore it.

Bob Tisdale is a pseudo-scientist at WUWT who doesn't believe that CO2 is warming the planet. He's a greenhouse effect denier. His notion is that El Ninos are what's warming the Earth by magic, or what he calls "sunlight-created warm water". I didn't know that sunlight created water, but who am I to say?

In a new article (archived here), Bob is trying to persuade the climate conspiracy theorists that the big spike in the global mean surface temperature was just what he expected. That's despite his numerous articles where he tried to show this El Nino isn't as big as the 97/98 one. And despite the fact that it's way hotter now than it was in the late 1990s. Bob weirdly thinks that the recent rise in global surface temperature has nothing to do with the increase in greenhouse gases.

Bob is wanting to divert attention from the unrelenting rise in global surface temperature.  The linear rate of warming since the mid 1970s is around 0.17 °C each decade. Bob Tisdale doesn't want his readers to notice that, so what he did was subtract 0.42 °C from the 2015/16 monthly temperatures and superimposed the plot on a chart of 1997/98 global monthly temperatures. He was trying to make the last 18 years of global warming disappear. In fact he over-reached, as I'll show you.

Too much heat: Anthony Watts is becoming a greenhouse effect denier

Anthony Watts is protesting the record heat so much his brain must be hurting. He's been stuffing his blog with protests. I can't tell if it's because he's got nothing else to fill up his daily quota, or if it's that he's really disturbed by the record heat. In a very mixed up article (archived here), Anthony once again protests. He keeps mixing up USA surface temperatures with global. I wonder does he know the difference? He is also starting to show strong signs of denying the greenhouse effect, which up till recently he vowed he "believed" in.

Yesterday he posted another dumb article (archived here) protesting the record hot year, using a tweet from Andy Revkin about an article by Seth Borenstein as his excuse. He didn't post a link to either the tweet or the article. All he did was post an image of the tweet. So it's a fair bet that he didn't want his readers to read it.

Today he's made up two lies in his headline:

NOAA declares current El Niño stronger than 1997-98 event, then says record warm temperatures have little to do with it

First of all, NOAA didn't declare that the current El Nino was stronger than the 1997-98 event. Secondly, it didn't say that record warm temperatures had little to do with the El Nino (which I think was Anthony's meaning). On the contrary, the article he was referring to said that El Nino did contribute to the record warmth in the USA this winter.

Absurd levels of cranked up disinformation from Bob Tisdale at WUWT

This article will be short, I promise. It will be much shorter than Bob Tisdale's latest protest (archived here). Bob's posted a bunch of charts that show just how hot February was. The contrast between Bob's first lot of charts and what he wrote is quite extraordinary. (Bob then fudged the next lot of charts to make the warming go away, which is typical behaviour from him.) Bob thinks that people are silly to react to this chart of global mean surface temperature - and this is only since 1997!

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature since 1997. Data source: GISS NASA

Hottest February by far at a whopping 1.35 C above the 1951-1980 mean

While science disinformers falsely accuse scientists of fraud and dig up decades-old television claims of a climate conspiracy, the world is getting very, very hot. GISTemp has now released the results for February and they are startling, even for an El Nino year.

Below is a chart of annual mean surface temperature anomaly, on which I've added the anomaly for last month:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature, anomaly from the 1951-1980 mean. The chart also shows the anomaly for February 2016. Data source: GISS NASA

Last month, February, the global mean surface temperature was a whopping 1.35 °C (2.43 °F) above the 1951-1980 mean. That smashes previous records, and is the hottest February on record by 0.47 °C. The previous hottest February's were in 1998 at 0.88 °C and 2015 at 0.87 °C.

Why does science denier Bob Tisdale tell such big fat lies at WUWT?

Most people will know very well why Bob Tisdale uses a 61 month running filter when he compares HadCRUT4 temperature anomalies with CMIP5 model mean (as archived here). It's so he can string out his false claim that there is a "growing difference" between model projections and observations. He's lying. There is now practically no difference.

Let me illustrate. In all these charts except the one down the bottom, the CMIP5 projections are as for the IPCC report, using RCP8.5. That is, they don't have the actual forcings from 2006 onwards, only estimates. The actual forcings would have made the projections lower from 2006.

Below is a chart showing GISTemp vs CMIP5 model mean.

See also Addendum below.

Global sea surface temperature and model projections, with Bob Tisdale

A couple of days ago at WUWT Bob Tisdale posted a whole heap of charts of sea surface temperature and compared them to CMIP5 models (archived here). He was doing his usual thing of complaining the climate models don't model weather. He wrote:

The climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not simulating climate as it exists on Earth. 

What he was really complaining about was that:

The multi-model mean of climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not simulating climate as it exists on Earth. year to year variations in the weather as recorded by the older version of Reynold's OI v2 data, when looking at some sections of the ocean. 

Well, they aren't meant to do that. Climate models are for, you guessed it, climate not weather. The CMIP5 models are used for climate projections as well as learning more about particular aspects of climate. They are pretty good when it comes to global projections. Not as good (but not that bad) when looking at large areas like entire oceans. They are not intended to be used for weather forecasts. (Bob wants them to time ENSO events at the same time as they happen. That won't happen. There are other models specially developed for localised projections looking ahead a few months.)

There were some charts that were noticeable by their absence, so I figured I'd fill in the gaps in his article.

Bob Tisdale won't take on Mark Boslough's bet

Bob Tisdale has another "it's getting hotter because it's getting hotter" article at WUWT (archived here, latest here). Does he not realise how silly his articles are? As you know, the rapid rise in global mean surface temperature, particularly since the middle of last century, is because of the increase in greenhouse gases:

Fig 1| Global mean surface temperature - anomaly from 1881 to 1910 average.
Data source: NASA GISS

Bob Tisdale, a pseudo-scientist who uses WUWT to sell his "books", thinks this is natural, and has nothing to do with carbon emissions. He blames it all on blobs and El Niños.

Lesson 1,126½ in how to be a science disinformer, featuring Bob Tisdale

In this lesson about how to be a climate disinformer, I refer to a recent article by Bob Tisdale (archived here, cached here). In fact I refer to umpteen articles by Bob Tisdale, because his articles are often copies and pastes of his previous articles, with slight updates.

You can also watch a video with Tom Peterson, who gives The Story of Climate Data. This article is worth it for that alone. Dr Peterson is President of the World Meteorological Organization's Commission for Climatology, and recently retired from NOAA.

The purpose of the lesson, and hiding the closing of the gap

The purpose of the deception is to "prove" that all models are useless by hiding the closing of the gap.

Before you start, it's important to see what the observations actually show. Below is a chart of HadCRUT4, plotted with the multi-model mean of CMIP5. The 95% probability is for all uncertainties for HadCRUT observations - measurement and sampling, bias and coverage uncertainties. The uncertainties relating to the multi-model mean of CMIP5 are not plotted. As always, click on the chart to enlarge it.

Fig 1 | Global mean surface temperature observations and multi-model mean.
Data sources: UK Met Office Hadley Centre and KNMI Climate Explorer (CMIP5)

As you can see, with 2015 year to date (to September 2015), the observations are now approaching the CMIP5 multi-model mean. This closing of the gap must be hidden from WUWT deniers at all costs. And it's not hard to do so if you follow the steps in the lesson.

Denier weirdness: Bob Tisdale on weather and climate

In case anyone was in any doubt that Bob Tisdale knows nothing about weather or climate, read the words he published on Anthony Watts' climate conspiracy blog today (archived here, latest here, cached here). Bob wrote about the WMO definition of climate:

On their Frequently Asked Questions webpage, the World Meteorological Organization asks and answers:

What is Climate?
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the “average weather,” or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.

Denier weirdness: No pennies have dropped for Bob Tisdale at WUWT

Some deniers at WUWT seem to think that Bob Tisdale has a wonderful intellect. If he does he hides it very well. I've already written about his conspiracy theorising fantasies from his new "book". Well, he's at it again at WUWT.

He wrote a very silly article (archived here), full of meaningless charts. He was, I think, making the point that it can get warm in the day and cool at night in Central England. And in that part of the world, it's warmer in summer than it is in winter, surprise, surprise. Does he think that nobody knew that? Where I live it doesn't usually get quite as cold but it can get a lot hotter, so I'd say we experience seasonal and diurnal differences in temperature that might not be that different, just shifted up a bit on the chart.

The point Bob was trying to make is so puerile that I'm wondering if I've got it wrong. Maybe he was trying to write about some other great breakthrough. If he was he didn't explain it well.

Bob Tisdale's illusion and conspiracy theories: A Book Review

Bob Tisdale's illusion is that global warming is caused by magic, or blobs, or El Niño. Anything but human activity. He's announced at WUWT that he has written a new book (archived here). He's called it "On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control Part 1". It's very long, running to 733 pages. You'll have to wade through 82 pages before you get to the first page of the first chapter. There are three chapters plus the 82 pages of introductory material.

Bob relies on the hard work done by climate scientists for much of his book, he picks bits he likes but ignores or rejects the bits he doesn't like. That is, he rejects all the science that confirms human-caused warming. For the most part, he doesn't understand the data he uses. Certainly he doesn't understand climate models. For the other much of his book, he relies on conspiracy theories dreamt up by him or other science deniers. What his book boils down to is:

• Climate scientists are right, except when their science demonstrates that humans are causing global warming, and except when he can provide an alternative notion, usually involving a gigantic conspiracy of incredible proportions, or no alternative at all
• Bob learnt lots about ENSO from Dr Kevin Trenberth, but doesn't believe him where it matters
• According to Bob, the cause of global warming is hotter oceans (i.e. warming is caused by warming), or a magical bounce from the Little Ice Age with no cause, or the sun heating up the ocean (even though the sun's output has decreased a bit lately), or anything except human activity
• Climate models are wrong - based on Bob not understanding the first thing about them
• The IPCC is [insert conspiracy theory here] - based on Bob's denialist imagination.