Denier twittery weirdness, with CO2 is a very cold gas

CO2 sublimation

Over the last few days I've been spending some time on a long-running denier thread on Twitter. It was an opportunity to interact with the types you see at the climate conspiracy blog WUWT, but in an environment where it's much less likely anyone will be banned for posting science.

This article is to let you know about some of what I've learned about denier twitterers, with a new "theory" as a bonus.

Deniers yearn for attention from sciency types

One thing struck me above everything else. Fake sceptics are starved for attention.

As soon as a science type enters a room full of deniers, they get pounced on. Anyone who's followed comments at WUWT would have noticed the same thing. (Anthony Watts, the owner of WUWT, himself has demonstrated a yearning for recognition from scientists. That he can't get the type of recognition he wants has been a source of frustration to him.)

The social cost of carbon is positive, admits Anthony Watts

Prickly Pear Qld 1930s.
Wikipedia.

At last Anthony Watts admits that there is a social cost of carbon (archived here). He doesn't say what it is, he's not a climate economist after all but at least he admits it. His headline was: "The Social “Cost” of Carbon is Positive".  Unfortunately the article he posted, by ex-coal director Viv Forbes, doesn't discuss the social cost.

Viv Forbes is a climate disinformer from Australia. He's no longer a director of Stanmore Coal, but he used to be. As he's done before, his article is in the form of a letter to some unnamed editor of an unnamed publication. I guess it's to the "editor" of WUWT.

Viv lists "social benefits" of burning fossil fuels in the following terms:

Greens seem unaware that “carbon” coming from man-made CO2 is beneficial plant food supporting all life on Earth including polar bears, cane toads, prickly pear, rain forests and wheat.

Deluded deniers at WUWT about why CO2 emissions growth is stabilising and what it means

The 2016 Global Carbon Budget paper was published this week. The report is by sixty-seven people from all around the world. It is described as the "11th annual update of emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and their partitioning among the atmosphere, land, and ocean. This data synthesis brings together measurements, statistical information, and analyses of model results in order to provide an assessment of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties for years 1959 to 2015, with a projection for year 2016".

What the authors found was that carbon emissions dropped slightly in 2015, and are likely to increase only slightly this year. Over the last three years there has been almost no growth in emissions, which might be a sign that the world will soon see a decline in emissions - or not (if Donald Trump has his way).

Beware deniers wanting plant food - or - If science deniers were in charge

Over at WUWT, Anthony Watts has put up another article from his main contributor Eric Worrall (archived here). Eric is thinking of sending the world to hell in a handbasket by adding enough CO2 to the air to bring it to 1000 ppm in the next ten years. He says he wants to feed plants. His plan is to burn limestone.

Eric knows as much about atmospheric science and arithmetic as he does about climate change. His calculations are wonky. He thinks that there is only 920Gt of CO2 in the atmosphere at present. There's about 3,250 Gt or about 8 Gt per ppmv of CO2. So when he works out that he needs another 600 ppm, he thinks he only needs another 1,380Gt of CO2. In fact he needs to find about 4,800 Gt CO2. That means instead of just using 3,136Gt of limestone, he'll have to find nearly 11,000 billion tonnes of pure limestone.

Oh No! CO2 can't be plant food, say the folk at WUWT

One has to wonder at the thinking process of WUWT fans. A lot of deniers can't accept their own memes when they are supported by scientific research, even though they were originally derived from scientific research. It's a knee-jerk reaction from the scientific illiterati that science must be rejected at all costs. This time a lot of WUWT-ers reject the notion that plants respond to extra CO2. The latest from lots of people in deniersville is that CO2 isn't plant food after all!

Yesterday Anthony Watts copied and  pasted a press release (archived here). (As usual he didn't link to the paper or the press release.)  The paper in Nature Climate Change was by a large team led by Jiafu Mao of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The scientists looked at the greening of the extratropical northern hemisphere and compared it with what would be expected with no greenhouse forcing. They concluded that without human activity, the observed amount of extra plant growth would not have occurred.

As the world heats up, Anthony Watts promotes Patrick Moore's conspiratorial ice age fear

Willis Eschenbach once wrote of his good friend and conspiracy blogger Anthony Watts that he can't tell good science from bad. He said:

... it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job. ...

Anthony illustrates this inability today, promoting an article by someone called Patrick Moore (archived here, latest here). He's usually touted as being a "co-founder of Greenpeace", which is meant to indicate that he's seen the error of his past and has now become a born-again science denier.

Anthony Watts favours this "Climate Hoax" conspiracy theory from Patrick Moore

The conspiracy theory that Anthony posted from Patrick goes like this:

A powerful convergence of interests among key elites supports and drives the climate catastrophe narrative. Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; scientists and science institutions raise billions in public grants, create whole new institutions, and engage in a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; businesses want to look green and receive huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as large wind farms and solar arrays. Even the Pope of the Catholic Church has weighed in with a religious angle.

Yep, it's got all the ingredients of a good conspiracy worthy of the envy of any right wing authoritarian follower - money, key elites, environmentalists, politicians, the media, scientists and even the Pope of the Catholic Church. They are all part of the climate hoax.

How much can El Niño be blamed for the jump in CO2?

Something unusual happened in April this year. Between March and April there was a record month to month jump in atmospheric CO2 recorded at Mauna Loa. It went up by 2.71 ppmv. That's 0.6 ppmv higher than the previous highest month to month jump (2.11 ppmv) back in April 2004. However it's not wise to focus on month to month variations. For example, March could have been lower than expected, which would make the jump seem larger than it should be. (It wasn't.) This article explores some of what causes atmospheric CO2 to go up and down. It's not the answer to everything, however I learnt a lot doing the research and I have some unanswered questions too (like a quantitative answer to the title of this article). (Let me know if you see any mistakes I may have made.)

The chart below shows the month by month increase in atmospheric CO2 since the late 1950s. Hover over the chart for the values. The most recent is April at 407.57 ppmv.

Figure 1 | Monthly CO2 at Mauna Loa. Data source: SCRIPPS CO2 Program

OCO-2 baffles deniers at WUWT and prompts more conspiracy theories

The OCO-2 project at NASA has a video showing the changes in atmospheric CO2 over a year or so, as measured by the OCO-2 satellite, which was launched last year. NASA put out a press release a few days ago:

"We can already clearly see patterns of seasonal change and variations in carbon dioxide around the globe," said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-2 deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Far more subtle features are expected to emerge over time."...

...Through most of OCO-2's first year in space, the mission team was busy calibrating its science instrument, learning how to process its massive amount of data, and delivering data products to NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, for distribution to the world’s science community.

Scientists are comparing OCO-2 data to ground-based measurements to validate the satellite data and tie it to internationally accepted standards for accuracy and precision. 

CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas. Notice the legend - it spans just 15 parts per million by volume, from 390 to 405 ppmv. And I don't think the colours hit the extremes at any point during the year (you can check for yourself). It gets drawn down into plants on land and in the ocean and then released again as the seasons change.

Climate disinformer Patrick Moore talks to deniers at the GWPF

Semi-professional climate disinformer Patrick Moore gave a talk to UK climate science deniers the other day. Anthony Watts posted it under a headline: "Greenpeace founder delivers powerful annual lecture, praises carbon dioxide – full text" (archived here). Powerful? No. Pseudo-scientific rubbish? Yes. I don't know what the audience in general thought of his nonsense. It probably didn't register with many of them. All they wanted was to hear someone they felt was on "their side". The people who invited him most likely knew he would spout a load of nonsense, and couldn't get anyone more credible to talk. Well, who is left these days?

Patrick spent the first part of his talk on himself. He's a hero in his own mind. A born-again denier. I cannot imagine that he believes the words that come out of his mouth, but they help him earn a crust in his chosen field. Science denial.

The basis of his claim was that without CO2 the planet would be dead, therefore the more we have the better. That's like saying to a drowning woman - without water we'd all be dead so suck it up.

Warning: this is a long article, but it covers a lot of ground

Every day is denial day at WUWT, with models

Anthony Watts and his readers are deniers. There's no way around that. AP journalists might try calling them "climate change doubters", but deniers have no doubt. They have complete confidence in their conspiracy theory that climate science is a hoax.

A case in point. Yesterday it was greenhouse effect denial day at the climate conspiracy blog WUWT. Anthony Watts has rejected the greenhouse effect, again, publishing an article by some chap from New Zealand who went to see one of the Thin Ice viewings (archived here).

In the past, Anthony has been known to come out and declare that he doesn't exactly reject the greenhouse effect. It's just that he thinks it suddenly stopped working or something like that. This is happening less and less often, as he lets his blog slip further and further into conspiratorial paranoia.

Anyway, yesterday Anthony didn't bother with any disclaimer that he, blog owner, accepts the greenhouse effect. As climate change kicks in, Anthony knows that he must hang onto whatever visitors he can get. If that means letting go of any semblance of reality, so be it. Page hits matter.

From Shakespeare conspiracies to climate conspiracies

Yesterday I came across an article at WUWT (archived here), which Anthony Watts described as coming from an "educated listener". It was nothing but a very, very long denier screed in the form of a letter to Anthony Brandon, WYPR station manager. WYPR is a radio station in Baltimore, and associated with NPR (National Public Radio, USA). Dr. Roger Stritmatter signed himself as "Professor of Humanities Coppin State University".

I wondered why a professor of humanities thought he knew more about climate than all the specialist researchers who've spent their working lives studying the subject. What made him think he knew so much that had escaped the experts?

Another denier who gets his pseudo-science from climate conspiracy blogs

As it turned out, Roger relied on denier blogs like WUWT and Jo "Force X and the Notch" Nova. So he knew nothing about climate but he did pick up a few conspiracy theories in his travels. He's also an "ice age comether", writing:

...the real risk to the future we want for our children and grandchildren is not warming, but serious, widespread, and potentially disruptive cooling.

Yep, that's what the humanities professor wrote after the hottest decade on record, and the hottest year on record, which is about to be beaten by another hottest year on record, and quite probably yet another hottest year on record in 2016.

Is it Parody or Dunning Kruger by Mike Jonas at WUWT?

Mike Jonas recently wrote a four part series of articles for Anthony Watts denier blog WUWT. I don't think it's meant as a parody of deniers, but that's how it reads. It's like a caricature of classic denialism. I'm almost surprised Anthony Watts decided to host it - it was that bad. Mike brought up all the denial oldies, which he might as well have got from the list of most used climate myths at SkepticalScience.com:- medieval warm period (myth 27), little ice age (myth 47), CO2 lags temperature (myth 12), climate models and equilibrium climate sensitivity. If Mike was trying to demonstrate that Dunning and Kruger were right, then he did a great job of it. His series was in four parts:

1. His first article (archived here) was a lot of arithmetic around climate sensitivity and attribution, which I won't bother with. 
2. It wasn't CO2 before therefore... - in his second in the series (archived here) he resurrected the ancient denier meme about the medieval warm period (or medieval climate anomaly) and the little ice age. This calls on the logical fallacy that if CO2 wasn't the cause of warming in the past then it can't be causing warming now. Which is a non sequitur (it doesn't follow).
3. CO2 doesn't lag temperature as much as deniers think - the third article (archived here) was the denier meme "CO2 lags temperature".
4. Equilibrium climate sensitivity - in his fourth article (archived here), Mike sets out to demonstrate how little he knows about ECS, climate models and climate science in general.

Anthony Watts sez he has "no opinion"

It seems to me that over recent months, the owner of the anti-science blog WUWT has been shifting further away from science and shifting further conspiracy theories of "climate science is a scam" type. He has in the past claimed that he accepts that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect. Today he takes a step back from that, and is now claiming to have no opinion on the subject. He wrote this at the top of an article (archived here) that basically claims that the world is warming by magic, not because of the greenhouse effect:

Note: I present this for discussion, I have no opinion on its validity -Anthony Watts

Anthony seems to be admitting now what his long time guest, Willis Eschenbach wrote about him. That he doesn't know the difference between science and crackpottery. Willis Eschenbach has been devastatingly scathing of Anthony Watts inabilities, writing (my emphasis):

When Anthony publishes scientific claims from the edges of the field, generally they are quickly either confirmed or falsified. This is hugely educational for scientists of all kinds, to know how to counter some of the incorrect arguments, as well as giving room for those unusual ideas which tomorrow may be mainstream ideas.

So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job. There’s no way that one man’s wisdom can substitute for that of the crowd in the free marketplace of scientific ideas. Bear in mind that even with peer review, something like two-thirds of peer-reviewed science is falsified within a year, and Anthony is making judgements, publish or don’t publish, on dozens of papers every week.

Anthony Watts fails fossil fuel arithmetic test posed by Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira

A new paper in GRL by Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira works out how long it takes for the greenhouse forcing by CO2 to exceed the combustion warming by fossil fuels. The heat from burning fossil fuels is soon outpaced by the heat retained from putting the CO2 into the atmosphere, released when those fossil fuels were burnt.

Update: See below

More Weedz Pleeze, pleads WUWT - but where is Anthony Watts?

Anthony Watts is having trouble getting anyone to write his blog articles these days. Today he's put up a "CO2 is plant food" article by that fan of mass murderers, the conspiracy theorising Tim Ball (archived here). What CO2 will most probably bring is an abundance of weeds, and floods and droughts and wildfires and intense storms seriously affecting food production.

Thing is, Anthony seems to have all but given up on his blog. These past few weeks he's handed the WUWT keys to Eric "eugenics" Worrall mainly. But Anthony's been pretty well absent for longer than a few weeks.

I noticed some time ago that Anthony had all but stopped contributing to WUWT, so I thought I'd look at the evidence. Below is a run down of what Anthony Watts has written all by himself since the beginning of February. I don't count copies and pastes of press releases or newspaper articles, or copies and pastes from other denier blogs, but am still erring on the side of leniency.

February to May inclusive - only 21 out of 414 articles are "originals" by Anthony Watts, being generous

Out of 414 WUWT articles since the beginning of February, Anthony has only contributed 21 of his own "original" thoughts. And most of those are a very poor effort - and few have anything to do with weather or climate. Here's his contribution since the beginning of February:

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.

A near-perfect example of a CO2 denierism at WUWT

You know how deniers are likely to write along the lines of: Global warming isn't happening or if it is it's not us or if it is us it's good. Well, here's a near-perfect example taken from WUWT today. Allan MacRae and Kim are replying to wickedwenchfan:

wickedwenchfan  April 20, 2015 at 12:18 am

Who cares what is causing the CO2 amount to rise? It doesn’t do squat to alter temperature so it’s irrelevant

Allan MacRae  April 20, 2015 at 12:43 am

Correct.

kim  April 20, 2015 at 12:53 am

Well, if it does, it alters it to the beneficial side, so it’s all good. Relax, and roll with the punches, er, uh, adapt.

Here's what's happened with CO2 over the past several hundred millenia - 800,000 years or so:

Adapted from data from data at NOAA. Original reference: Luthi, D., M. Le Floch, B. Bereiter, T. Blunier, J.-M. Barnola, U. Siegenthaler, D. Raynaud, J. Jouzel, H. Fischer, K. Kawamura, and T.F. Stocker. 2008. High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000-800,000 years before present. Nature, Vol. 453, pp. 379-382, 15 May 2008. doi:10.1038/nature06949

This is what's been happening to the surface temperature as we keep adding CO2 to the air.

Data source: GISS NASA

Confirming (again) the CO2 greenhouse effect - but WUWT doesn't like it

There's a new paper out in Nature, by Daniel Feldman and his colleagues, in which they describe how they've measured the contribution of CO2 to radiative forcing at the surface. The measurements were taken in Alaska and Oklahoma. This is not something that's easy to do. It is not straightforward. There are lots of things that happen in the lower atmosphere and at the surface. The scientists managed to extract the signal of radiative forcing from CO2 from that of other things that affect spectral measurements.

No, Willis - WUWT is not a science site - eg CO2 in the atmosphere

Wondering Willis Eschenbach and his fellow deniers at WUWT are a bit miffed that no-one but a science denier would ever mistake WUWT for a science site (archived here).

Willis rambles on about the importance of "public peer review", which is a laugh. WUWT isn't for "public peer review". It's for deniers to push their varying contradictory brands of pseudo-scientific claptrap, slap each other on the back and tell each other how "scientists don't know nuffin'".  At least one denier doesn't agree that WUWT is for "public peer review", which disappointed Willis no end.

What "public peer review"?

On a science site, would people who knew anything about science (or "public peer review") let the comment below stand unchallenged and uncorrected? It's been there for about two days now and not a soul commented on it. This is in the very same discussion that is claiming that WUWT is a science site for "public peer review".

Duet on Ice: More denier silliness at WUWT

This will be short-ish - by HotWhopper standards :). It's about a duo of articles at WUWT. About ice at opposite ends of the earth - Greenland and Antarctica.

Jim Steele's Bold Greenland Prediction

Jim Steele wrote an article (without mentioning Camille Parmesan once!) predicting that Greenland will start accumulating ice next year. He pulled something out of thin (Arctic) air and wrote:

And based on historical analyses, Greenland will likely begin gaining mass in the coming years.