Quote of the Day from Bob Tisdale at WUWT: It is easy...

From an article by Bob "blob" Tisdale a few hours ago on the climate conspiracy blog, WUWT. After years of WUWT articles insisting "it's not warming" or "if it was warming it's stopped" or "if it ever warmed it's now cooling", or "the tide is turning and we're heading for an ice age", or whatever, here's this little gem:

"Alarmists happily ignore the fact that it is easy to have record high global temperatures in the midst of a hiatus or slowdown in global warming"

Errr - what? If it was so "easy" surely there'd not have been a slowdown. Despite all that it's true that there was a record hot year in 2005, and another in 2010, and another in 2014, and this year'll be another no doubt, and probably next year as well. And where's that "slowdown" gone?

Data source: GISS NASA

WUWT's Bob Tisdale and Hurricane Joaquin

Anthony Watts finally put up an article about Hurricane Joaquin (archived here). It was from Bob Tisdale, one of the regular "guest" pseudo-scientists at WUWT. Bob thinks global warming is caused by a "blob" of warm water in the Pacific, or ENSO events. He has never tried to prove that. He just makes assertions. And he never tries to explain what caused the blob to appear, or why ENSO suddenly decided to heat up the world when it didn't for thousands of years. Bob's a hard-core denier of greenhouse warming and not good at logic (or evidence). Probably the only reason Anthony allowed him to mention Hurricane Joaquin was because it was another "it's not us" articles. In fact it was a very strange article altogether.

The point of Bob's article can probably best be summed up by this bit, where he wrote:

If history repeats itself, and it’s very likely to do so, alarmists will be claiming that Hurricane Joaquin is being made worse by oceans warmed by manmade greenhouse gases.

So far, the cause of the intensity of Joaquin is being attributed to the combined effect of very hot seas (some of the warmest on record in the region), and low-ish wind shear.  A weather underground tutorial on wind shear starts off by saying that "Wind shear is often the most critical factor controlling hurricane formation and destruction. " Below is the latest Earth Wind Map:

Credit: Earth Wind Map

Double Trouble: For Whom the Tol Bells: and What 2014 El Nino is that?

For Whom the Tol Bells

Greg Laden asked on Twitter "is this the end of Tol?  Shall he ask for whom the Bell ...".

It's really hard to resist making bad puns about tolling, isn't it, when you think of Richard Tol (if you've ever heard of him. If you haven't read on.) The remarkable thing is that the bell isn't Toling. Normally as soon as someone mentions Richard Tol's name "somewhere on the internet", up he pops, relishing the attention. Not this time however. Or not so far.

Collin Maessen of Real Skeptic has written a devastating take-down of Richard's latest swipe at the 97% consensus. You'd think he'd have given up by now wouldn't you. But he hasn't. Instead he's broadened out to misrepresenting not just the Cook13 97% study, but most of the other research papers that have gauged the level of scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.

Obviously - what? Bob Tisdale on global mean surface temperature trends

"Obviously, Cowtan and Honeycutt are overlooking something very important. Their graph shows that it took well over a century for global surface temperatures to reach the 1.0 deg C halfway point. Many newcomers will look at the graph and wonder what all of the hubbub is about."

Bob Tisdale, WUWT

Oh my! Those words were actually written with serious intent. Can you believe it? That's from the keyboard of Bob Tisdale (archived here). He's one of the resident pseudo-scientists at Anthony Watts' climate science denial blog, WUWT. His forte is conspiracy theories, not scientific research.

Let's see what will happen if surface temperatures keep going up at different rates.

Global Warming and the Pacific: Kevin Trenberth's Perspective

Earlier today, Anthony Watts copied and pasted a press release about a new article from Kevin Trenberth (archived here). Anthony, who didn't even link to the press release, complained he couldn't find the article and asked his readers to tell him where it was. Did he really want that? Or did he just pull out that press release because, for a change, he recognised the name and figured it was sure to rouse the lynch mob? Anthony wrote:

Another excuse for the pause, Trenberth says ‘Internal climate variability masks climate-warming trends’

From the  AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE and the “if warming can’t overcome Nature, is it really there at all?” department.

Bob Tisdale's latest conspiracy theory about ocean heat

Today Bob Tisdale has found a new conspiracy theory that he's promoting (archived here). It's much the same as all the others. From his ergonomic computer chair in his basement (is he that advanced?) Bob decided that another group of scientists must be fudging the data. Problem is, Bob doesn't understand the data or how to use it, let alone how the scientists analysed it.

A warning that this article is long. I enjoyed writing and researching it. The paper this article is based on is a great example of the sort of effort and thinking required to scope out and quantify the changes we're bringing about. Which is of critical importance IMO.

Progress in determining changes in ocean heat content

The paper Bob doesn't like this time is by Dr. Lijing Cheng  from the International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences in China, and co-authors Jiang Zhu and John Abraham. They have been looking to improve the record of heat content of the top 700 m of the ocean. The paper is called: "Global upper ocean heat content estimation: recent progress and the remaining challenges". As the title suggests, the paper describes recent progress in this regard, and the challenges that remain.

Biased Bob Tisdale is all at sea

Bob Tisdale is one of the pseudo-scientists who frequently writes articles for Anthony Watts' climate conspiracy blog, WUWT. His articles are often overly long, overly tedious and overly wrong. He is also a greenhouse effect denier. He thinks that it's the sun that's causing global warming through El Ninos and blobs. He's wrong.

Bob's what you'd might regard as a plodder. Not a quick-witted chap. He's not a research scientist and has never boasted of any educational qualifications. Where his expertise lies, if you can call it that, is in regurgitating the same mix of pseudo-science tinged now and again with real science - over and over and over again.

Elegant Terns move house when it gets too hot, and Bob Tisdale tries to cover it up @wattsupwiththat

If you mention global warming in a press release, deniers will be all over you. If seas are sometimes getting much hotter much more often, don't think for a minute it might possibly be part of a world-wide trend. Not even in the context of this:

Data source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

No pause in the frenzy of denial: at WUWT

Anthony Watts wrote about the new NOAA paper in Science that: "WUWT has already found the fatal weakness in the paper". Already he's published two protest articles. We're still waiting. There's not a mention of any "fatal weakness".

As I wrote in the main article about it, the new paper describes an analysis of global surface temperature trends, and shows that the trend in surface temperature this century is indistinguishable from that for the second half of last century. Global warming continues at the surface. There is no "hiatus".

NOAA: No pause in the global surface temperature

Anthony Watts prepared the ground on Monday, with an article, in which he alleged fraud and skulduggery at NOAA. At the time I wrote the response, I didn't know what he was referring to (and neither did anyone at WUWT). Peter Thorne was awake to it, however, and gave me time to prepare for the upcoming "frenzy of denial". He was coyly referring to a new Science paper about global surface temperature.

Anthony Watts has since written another article, breaking the embargo on this new paper, which was published in ScienceXpress today. He rationalised his behaviour by saying that "multiple sources have sent me a press release and advance copies of a paper", meaning maybe two people.

The new paper is by a team of scientists, mostly from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The title is:

Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

The paper describes an analysis of global surface temperature trends, using much more data from land stations in particular. It also includes corrections, particularly for time-related bias in sea surface temperatures. The main finding is that the trend in surface temperature this century is indistinguishable from that for the second half of last century. Global warming continues at the surface.

Update: I've added more links to blog articles elsewhere about this new paper.

Bob Tisdale goes AMO-ing to a big chill - not!

Update: The University of Southampton has issued a clarification. It doesn't address the substantive issues raised here. There's also no mention of 0.5C.

Also see Gerard McCarthy's replies to my query to him via Twitter - here and here and here.

Sou 2 June 2015

---

There was a new paper that came out this week in Nature, which had a bit of coverage around the traps. Deniers rather liked it not so much because of what was in the paper itself, but because of what was in the press release.

The paper was by a team from the University of Southampton, led by Dr. Gerard D. McCarthy. The paper was about the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO and ocean heat transport, and related.

The AMO is used to indicate changes in sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic. It is of such long duration that there aren't instrumental records going back far enough to show multiple repeating patterns. It's probably not a regular cycle with a fixed period. Estimates seem to place the latest period at around 70 years (from the beginning of a warm phase in the 1920s to the end of a cool phase in the 1990s - see here). The latest IPCC report had this to say about it (page TS-25):

A number of studies have investigated the effects of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) on global mean surface temperature. While some studies find a significant role for the AMO in driving multi-decadal variability in GMST, the AMO exhibited little trend over the period 1951-2010 on which these assessments are based, and the AMO is assessed with high confidence to have made little contribution to the GMST trend between 1951 and 2010 (considerably less than 0.1°C). {2.4, 9.8.1, 10.3; FAQ 9.1}.

From the above paragraph I take it that the nature of the AMO is not all that well agreed upon - by some at least.

The Joke's on Bob Tisdale! His papal mockery falls flat in a sea of solar panels in The Vatican, World's Greenest State.

Bob Tisdale had a shot at mocking Pope Francis by putting up a recent photo of him with the Harlem Globetrotters (archived here).

The photo made headlines last week, when Pope Francis was made an honorary globetrotter. He was only the ninth person (and the second Pope) to be so awarded, according to Latino Fox.

This got under Bob's skin - is he a globetrotter fan? He's not a fan of Anthony Watts' religious leader, that's for sure.

Bob wrote:

Stunning Photo Reveals How Vatican Learned to Spin Global Warming
...Will the Vatican be adding solar panels atop the Sistine Chapel and a windmill at the peak of the obelisk in Saint Peter’s square?  They should lead by example.

A little Google would have gone a long way.

2,000 photovoltaic panels on top of Nervi Hall, Vatican. Photo: Reuters

The Vatican has installed panels to power all of its 40,000 households, making it arguably the greenest state in the world. Some are installed on top of the building shown in the photo above - that happened seven years ago in 2008. There is also a solar plant installed on 740 acres near the medieval village of Santa Maria di Galeria.

Note: It looks as if the 40,000 homes / 740 acre solar farm hasn't happened. I don't know if it is still on the drawing board or not. See comment by Lotharsson below.

Sou 21 June 2015

Oh, and Renault gave the previous Pope an electric vehicle.

This isn't the first time Bob Tisdale failed the Google test.

CO2 is at 400 ppm and rising - and Bob Tisdale thinks we can reduce it easily!

May 2013 was the first time atmospheric CO2 of 400 ppm had been recorded at Mauna Loa. Now there's a new record. In March this year CO2 was at 400 ppm globally, average for the month. This is what we've done since around 1840:

Data sources: Law Dome from Etheridge(06) and Mauna Loa

As I wrote last time, this has never happened before since humans evolved. It's never happened in at least 800,000 years and probably much longer.

Bob Tisdale trots over to Berkeley Earth to fetch a red herring from China

Bob Tisdale has trotted over to Berkeley Earth to have a look at what is happening to surface temperature in China (archived here). It's odd that he's allowed to do that, because Anthony Watts disowned Berkeley Earth because it failed to show that we are heading for an ice age, or something like that. (Anthony has to pander to the bulk of his readers who deny that global warming is happening.)

Anyway, Anthony gave Bob Tisdale a free pass. He probably thinks that no-one ever reads Bob's articles anyway, and they fill the gaps in his daily quota of blog nonsense.

Bob Tisdale gets enthused about surface temperature in China

Bob set out to prove that China isn't warming any faster (or slower) than the land surface of earth as a whole.  He reckons the media should have fact-checked something that the head of China's Meteorological Administration, Dr Zheng Guoguang, reportedly said to the Study Times, as reported by Reuters. That "the country's rate of warming was higher than the global average".

At WUWT, Bob Tisdale pleads "no more sea surface temperatures"

The rest of us plead "no more of Bob Tisdale's nonsense".

Bob Tisdale must be thinking of retiring. Bob is a frequent contributor at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He writes very, very long articles full of charts of sea surface temperature. He also write a lot of junk about climate models, about which he doesn't have the first clue.

Bob is a greenhouse effect denier who thinks that ENSO events suddenly, out of the blue, for no known reason, started to heat up the world. ENSO has been trundling along nicely for hundreds, probably thousands of years. According to Bob, back around forty years ago ENSO took it into its head to heat up the sea surface - such that it never cooled it back down.

Today he says he wants to stop climate science research (archived here). Perhaps he's sick and tired of preparing chart after chart after chart. I'm sick of his charts and I've only been looking at them a short while.

Bob wrote:

Believe It or Not There Are Plans for a 6th Assessment Report from the IPCC

He probably got that news from yesterday's article here. His last paragraph is where he suggested there be no more research or monitoring of earth's systems. He wrote:

What an incredible waste of money!!!  We got the message after the first report.  Assuming those continuously unchanging predictions are correct, those tens of billions of research dollars would be better spent on adaptation.

In case you think that Bob thought that the IPCC spends tens of billions of dollars, well he probably did. But he recovered in the comments when someone pointed out that the IPCC just collates and reports on the science. Bob's comments was:

March 3, 2015 at 6:07 pm
Richard Treadgold says: “In general, I agree, but you don’t mean to imply that the IPCC is spending those billions, surely?”

It was not my intent.

“The science is settled”, the climate science community and activists keep telling us. If it is settled, then taxpayers surely don’t need to keep funding the repetitive, uninformative research that allows the IPCC to function.

Hmmm. I foresee an open letter to some politicians in the near future. 

Someone tell Bob that he's under no obligation to continue to clog up WUWT with his tedious articles. That doesn't mean that the rest of us don't want to monitor what's happening. TimTheToolMan remains interested, and wrote:

March 3, 2015 at 5:17 pm
I would have thought much of the ongoing expense was in measuring the various quantities (ie various temperatures, sea level, gravity anomolies and so on) we analyse to try to come to grips with how the earth works. I’m all for continuing to do that.

Eric Worrall is an ice age comether, and says, despite last year being the hottest on record globally, and January being the the second hottest January on record globally, and February - well there aren't any global numbers out yet, but in Australia it was the second hottest February on record. Ever hopeful, Eric wrote:

March 3, 2015 at 5:29 pm
The 6th assessment may occur a few years into a significant cooling trend – it could actually be entertaining, to watch them tie themselves into bizarre contortions as they try to demonstrated they predicted this all alone.

The rest are similar nonsense comments, replete with climate conspiracy theories.

What would WUWT deniers do if the science stopped? Where would the deniers congregate once WUWT shut down? My guess is Jesse Ventura, or one of these - until they got too hot, hungry or thirsty - or there was a total failure of communications and/or energy infrastructure as global warming kicks in. They wouldn't see it coming.

A short pause: Bob Tisdale thinks climate models are weather forecasts of the Northern Hemisphere

There's a new paper out in Science mag, which is another one looking at the so-called hiatus. This time it's from a different angle. The researchers, Byron A. Steinman, Michael E. Mann and Sonya K. Miller, were exploring climate models and observations in relation to natural variation. They studied surface temperature variations in the northern hemisphere over the past 150 years.

A temporary respite before more heat kicks in

The abstract sums up the research. The study suggests the supposed pause is merely a coincidence of two features of natural oceanic fluctuations - a peak in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and a strongly negative-trending Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation (PMO). That it is the combined effect of these (in other words, natural variability) that partly offset the ongoing greenhouse warming.

The paper suggests that it may not be long before we get a lot hotter.

Getting a tad excitable at WUWT over the ups and downs of ENSO

The little WUWT-ers have been getting quite worked up lately. I think it's got something to do with the fact that reports from GISS and NOAA and the Hadley Centre and others point to the fact that 2014 was the hottest year on record.

Today Bob Tisdale, who seems to be Anthony Watts' proxy while he's on holidays or whatever he's been doing this past few weeks, has written a very short article about a new paper in Nature Climate Change. Very short for Bob Tisdale, that is. It must be almost another record. And he's broken still another record. There's not a single drawing, diagram or chart of anything, let alone sea surface temperatures.

What Bob did write?  Well you can read it for yourself here if you want to. The paper is more interesting than Bob's article. Wenju Cai et al have written in Nature Climate Change about some work they've been doing on modeling ENSO.

Bob Tisdale sez "I knew that", 'cept he didn't!

You've probably come across the sort of person who when asked a question gives the wrong answer. Then when told the correct answer will squirm and sulk and say "I knew that". They get scornful looks but it doesn't seem to faze them.

Bob Tisdale is behaving like that today (archived here). He is writing about what he regards as "An Unexpected Admission from Dana Nuccitelli at SkepticalScience". What did Bob not expect? He didn't expect Dana to explain how El Niños lift average surface temperature and La Niñas suppress it. Though he did twist Dana's words. Bob wrote:

Dana admitted that during a decade-long (or multidecadal) period(s) when El Niño events dominate (when El Niños are stronger, last longer and happen more frequently), the El Niños enhance global warming, and during periods when La Niña events dominate (when there are weaker, shorter and fewer El Niño events), the absence of El Niño events suppresses the warming of global surfaces.

Note the use of the word "admitted". Bob has been getting tips from David Rose on the abuse of rhetoric. Bob twisted what Dana wrote a bit. Fortunately he then quoted him directly. There was only one paragraph on ENSO and this is what Dana wrote (from the Guardian):

...average global surface temperatures have warmed between 0.6 and 0.7°C over the past 40 years (lower atmospheric temperatures have also likely warmed more than 0.5°C, though the record hasn’t yet existed for 40 years). During that time, that temperature rise has temporarily both slowed down (during the 2000s, when there was a preponderance of La Niña events) and sped up (during the 1990s, when there was a preponderance of El Niño events). Climate models accurately predicted the long-term global warming trend.

Do you spot the difference? Bob was saying it was the absence of El Niños, whereas Dana was writing it was the preponderance of La Niñas, when surface temperatures didn't rise as quickly were suppressed. That's not splitting hairs. Bob Tisdale wrongly thinks that El Niños cause global warming, which is why he talks about it in that way.

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale doesn't know water moves in the oceans

I find it odd that Bob Tisdale doesn't know that there are currents and upwelling and all sorts of movement of water in the world's oceans. He's written before about how he rejects the fact that oceans have currents that run deep and long.

Today in a repeat of at least one previous article, Bob Tisdale writes about how he is puzzled that the oceans don't heat up at exactly the same rate and amount at exactly the same time. (Archived here.)

Let's just clear this up once and for all. Last year was HOT!

Deniers are busy protesting the hottest year on record. Climate disinformers are trying every trick in their book to persuade the dumb denier that it's not so. The dumb denier doesn't need persuading so it's not clear why professional disinformers bother. Perhaps it's to give them something they believe is half plausible (even though it's not). Or perhaps it's just so they can say "it's true - I read it in black and white at WUWT".

WUWT has had a few protest articles already. The latest is a repeat article from Bob Tisdale (archived here). It's not enough for Bob to bore the pants off readers - he has to do it over and over and over again. He's worried that they might have missed his message the last time because it was just one of many wrong messages in a very, very long, very tedious article, which I've covered already.

This time Bob's kept his words to a minimum (or what Bob Tisdale regards as a minimum) and managed by a miracle to stay on point - although he got the point wrong, as usual. (It must have taken a lot of self-discipline for him to do that.)

Now Bob knows that this year has been recorded as the hottest year on record. He knows that the odds of any other year having been hotter are quite low. Much lower than that this year is the hottest. And yet Bob and other deniers are all in a tizz about whether last year was the hottest or was it 2010 or 2005 and are going for full blown conspiracising - that the guvmint is trying to pull a fast one. Not on this topic they aren't.