CEI and WUWT attack the messengers, and the strange role of Judith Curry and Peter Webster

Deniers get very excited when they get their grubby paws on private emails between scientists. It doesn't matter what is written in those emails. The very fact that academics have been using email to communicate from a time before most people had heard of the Internet is sufficient for them to claim that climate science is a hoax.

Yesterday Anthony Watts posted some emails released through yet another FOI demand by Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) (archived here). They were related to the support from some scientists of a RICO investigation, proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, into fossil fuel companies and other organisations who have allegedly "knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change". The emails contain nothing that shows anything more than the very real concern by scientists that there are wicked people who are trying to thwart efforts to mitigate global warming. That there are evil people in the world who have been knowingly working to deceive the public by by saying that global warming either doesn't exist or is not dangerous. They've even got some people believing that climate science is a hoax.

Anthony Watts of WUWT is one of the low-level tools used by anti-mitigation activist organisations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that wish harm on the world.

Yucky tasting medicine: You can't do that - only us - sez CEI

At WUWT today, Eric Worrall has written how the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is getting a taste of its own medicine (archived here). The CEI is complaining that they've been issued with a subpoena to produce twenty years of emails and other documents relating to their climate science denial campaigns. You might have heard of CEI, they are the same mob who usually appear at WUWT boasting how they asked for decades of emails from other people. Now the tables have turned and CEI doesn't like it.

In a complete about face, the CEI is now claiming that letting people know what is said in emails is a violation of freedom of speech! The article claims it to be part of "an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate". Wow! (Is that why Chris Horner and the CEI spend almost all their time suing people for emails - to intimidate and stop research on climate?)

WUWT round-up: Chris Horner's Email Withdrawal and a New Denier Don

I'm a bit flat chat at the minute so will just do a quick round-up of denier nonsense from WUWT.

Climate science is a hoax because Chris Horner has no emails

First of all, Chris Horner of ATI, who gets his kicks from reading emails between scientists, when he can get them, is running out of emails to read (archived here).  He's suffering email withdrawal symptoms.  Chris doesn't understand science but he reckons that if he could only get his hand on some emails he'd be bound to find something nefarious in them.  Like "regards".  Now what hidden code could that be?  "Regards" would obviously be shorthand for "no regards" which would mean that scientists have "no regards" for the likes of Chris Horner.  As for "cheers".  Why would a scientists be cheery if they seriously believed the earth was heading for catastrophe.  The word "cheers" in an email would signify that climate science is a hoax.

Cheers to Andrew Dessler, I say.

Another Professor "Gone Emeritus" who lists denier memes

Climate science denier Donald C Morton has declared that he's given up astrophysics and gone emeritus.  He has posed a number of questions and outlined some difficulties he has with climate science (archived here).  For the most part these are answered in the literature but Donald C Morton is no longer capable of understanding or doesn't want to understand.  Donald has decided to embark on a new career of climate science denial.

Here are his questions.  Well, they aren't questions for the most part.  They are a random collections of tired denier memes drawn from SkepticalScience.com.  Perhaps a reader will help him out further.

His first question isn't a question it's a statement that global surface temperatures haven't gone up lately.  He doesn't explore this in any depth, like looking at what's happened in the earth system overall.  For example:

.

His next question isn't a question either.  He says he thinks that water vapour isn't a greenhouse gas any more, or something like that.  He also doesn't appear to understand the first thing about climate models. Here is what he wrote - you can see if you can figure it out.

Without justification the model makers ignored possible natural causes and assumed the rise was caused primarily by anthropogenic CO2 with reflections by clouds and other aerosols approximately cancelling absorption by the other gases noted above. Consequently they postulated a positive feedback due to hotter air holding more water vapor, which increased the absorption of radiation and the backwarming. The computer simulations represented this process and many other effects by adjustable parameters chosen to match the observations. As stated on p. 9-9 of IPCC2013, “The complexity of each process representation is constrained by observations, computational resources, and current knowledge.” Models that did not show a temperature rise would have been omitted from any ensemble so the observed rise effectively determined the feedback parameter. [Sou: Huh? What models were 'omitted'?]

Now that the temperature has stopped increasing we see that this parameter is not valid. It even could be negative. CO2 absorption without the presumed feedback will still happen but its effect will not be alarming. The modest warming possibly could be a net benefit with increased crop production and fewer deaths due to cold weather.

In the above you'll notice that he's managed to squeeze in "CO2 is plant food", "people die in the cold" and "water vapour feedback might be negative".

Don's next question isn't a question, it's a speculation.  He's invoked the denier meme "it's the sun" and speculates that climate scientists don't know how the sun works.

The sun has entered a phase of low activity. Fig. 5 shows that previous times of very low activity were the Dalton Minimum from about 1800 to 1820 and the Maunder Minimum from about 1645 to 1715 when very few spots were seen. Since these minima occurred during the Little Ice Age when glaciers were advancing in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres, it is possible that we are entering another cooling period. Without a physical understanding of the cause of such cool periods, we cannot be more specific. Temperatures as cold as the Little Ice Age may not happen, but there must be some cooling to compensate the heating that is present from the increasing CO2 absorption.

Regrettably the IPCC reports scarcely mention these solar effects and the uncertainties they add to any prediction.

He could try reading some science about the impact on climate of changes in solar radiation.

Someone told Don to mention the dumb writings of Essex, McKitrick and Andresen (2007) and Essex and McKitrick (2007). So he did.  He reckons that because a bunch of denialists don't see the relevance of temperature to global warming or global cooling or climatology, that it can't be much use as a gauge.  Don thinks that it's quite meaningless to claim that summer is generally warmer than winter.  And it would be especially foolish to try to work out the average temperature difference between a summer's day and a winter's night in the desert.

Finally Don does come up with a question.  It's about chaos.  Don, like so many at WUWT, can't understand why weather forecasts are short term because of chaos but climate can be projected.  Maybe someone will point him towards Lorenz and explain the difference between initial value problems and boundary conditions. Don asks:

Why do the climate models in the IPCC reports not show these instabilities? Have they been selectively tuned to avoid them or are the chaotic physical processes not properly included? Why should we think that long-term climate predictions are possible when they are not for weather?

Once more, Don probably can't figure out how people are so sure that winter will generally be colder than summer.  I bet he has a really hard time with figuring out how anyone can be so certain that Florida has a different climate to that of McMurdo Sound, given the chaotic property of weather.  Here's a tip for him from Gavin Schmidt:

Weather concerns an initial value problem: Given today's situation, what will tomorrow bring? Weather is chaotic; imperceptible differences in the initial state of the atmosphere lead to radically different conditions in a week or so. Climate is instead a boundary value problem — a statistical description of the mean state and variability of a system, not an individual path through phase space. 

Next Don both protests the consensus and complains that those who reject science are described as denying science.  He asks: "Why do some proponents of climate alarm dismiss critics by implying they are like Holocaust deniers?" Don is a classic example of a climate science denier.

Don summarises his denial as follows - I've reformatted them as a list for your convenience:

At least six serious problems confront the climate predictions presented in the last IPCC Report.

1. The models do not predict the observed temperature plateau since 1998,
2. the models adopted a feedback parameter based on the unjustified assumption that the warming prior to 1998 was primarily caused by anthopogenic CO2,
3. the IPCC ignored possible affects of reduced solar activity during the past decade,
4. the temperature anomaly has no physical significance,
5. the models attempt to predict the future of a chaotic system, and
6. there is an appeal to consensus to establish climate science.

His second item demonstrates he doesn't understand climate science.  His first and third item could be regarded as cancelling each other out to some extent.  His fourth item is plain silly. His fifth item shows he doesn't understand the difference between climate and weather.

I haven't checked, but one wonders, going by his sixth and last item, whether he wrote all his astrophysics papers from first principles with no need for references to published literature of science that went before.  His papers would have been very long. It's amazing he was still able to get published.

There you go.  Another physicist bites the dust.  Still, he does demonstrate he's not proud.  He's not so arrogant as to disdain association with an ex-television weather announcer and anti-science advocating blogger.

From the WUWT comments

Just one, belatedly added for the record (archived here).

Greig says:

February 17, 2014 at 8:19 pm
Hi Don,
The knaves over at HotWhopper are “twisting the truth you have spoken”, here. Whilst you say critical comments are welcome, deliberate misinterpretation perhaps deserves to be challenged.

Hockey by email ~ more vexatious lawsuits by political science deniers

It's pretty obvious that the vexatious lawsuits by ATI are not to explore science, I'd say they are to try to flag the spirits of the dispirited science deniers like blogger Anthony Watts and his ragtag band of followers.

Anthony has a new post titled: ATI Files Suit to Compel the University of Arizona to Produce Records Related to So-Called “Hockey Stick” Global Warming Research

Why the ATI files a law suit instead of just reading the published research is obvious.  Scientific research holds no interest for them.  They want to trawl through personal emails looking for something, anything, the smallest phrase that they think they might have some chance of misrepresenting as "dirt".

According to WUWT (archived here), ATI has filed yet another frivolous lawsuit, this time trying to get emails from the University of Arizona, where meso-climatologist Professor Malcolm Hughes is Professor of Dendrochronology.  Professor Hughes was a co-author of the 1998 temperature reconstructions published in Nature and related work - for example:

• Mann ME, Bradley RS and Hughes MK Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries, Nature, 392, 779-787 (1998)
• Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S. and Hughes, M.K., Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations. Geophysical Research Letters , 26, 759-762 (1999)
• Bradley, R.S., K.R. Briffa, J. Cole, M.K. Hughes and T.J. Osborn, : The climate of the last millennium. In: Alverson, K., R.S. Bradley and T.F. Pedersen (eds.) Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 105-149 (2003)
• Mann, M.E., Rutherford, S., Bradley, R.S., Hughes, M.K., Keimig, F.T., Optimal Surface Temperature Reconstructions using Terrestrial Borehole Data, Journal of Geophysical Research, 108 (D7), 4203, doi: 10.1029/2002JD002532 (2003) (with correction)
• Rutherford, S., Mann, M.E., Osborn, T.J., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D. Proxy-based Northern Hemisphere surface temperature reconstructions: sensitivity to methodology, predictor network, target season, and target domain. Journal of Climate. 18, 2308-2329 (2005).
• Mann, M.E., Zhihua Zhang, Hughes, M.K.Bradley, R.S., Miller, S., Rutherford, S. and Fenbiao Ni. Proxy-Based Reconstructions of Hemispheric and Global Surface Temperature Variations over the Past Two Millennia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. 105:13252-13257 (2008).
• and many more.

If you can't tell what sort of lobby group the American Tradition Institute is by its name (it's nothing to do with what I understand as proud American tradition), it's an extremist lobby group aka "think tank".  You can tell why they target high profile distinguished scientists such as Professors Hughes and Mann.  They figure they might be able to isolate and discredit them for the "crime" of doing solid scientific research and making an enormously valued contribution to the understanding of the world around us.

Needless to say ATI is anti-science and one of the grubbier organisations in the USA.  The fact that it thinks science is done by email says it all.  It's looking for any snippet in any email that it can distort the meaning of to try to "prove" climate science is a giant hoax.  It doesn't have a good reputation in the courts either.

Too late, deniers - that horse has bolted

Guess what, Anthony Watts (his rationalwiki entry where someone - not me - has kindly listed yours truly!) and Christopher Booker (more on him here and he's King of Hearts in Monbiots list of top 10 deniers) and Chris Horner (who is the muck-raker in chief at ATI and unsurprisingly failed to dig up any dirt on Professor Mann after gaining access to documents) - you're too late.

I know you aren't aware of the fact because you don't keep up with science and even if you tried you wouldn't understand it.  Not only are there too many hockey sticks around - beat up on one and there are many more waiting in line behind - but there are much longer temperature reconstructions now.  This is what Chris Horner and his denier backers are chasing, not from the upcoming IPCC report, nor from the 2007 IPCC report but from way back in TAR - from twelve years ago (the first paper was published fifteen years ago):

Source: IPCC TAR

Too many and too hot to handle!

But it's no longer just 1,000 years of northern hemisphere reconstructions, or 2,000 years of northern hemisphere and global reconstructions, and lots of them, plus long term regional reconstructions - now there is a reconstruction of the entire Holocene, from 11,300 to the present.  Not only that but there is a reconstruction of the last deglaciation from 22,000 years ago to 11,300 years ago.

This is what ATI and other deniers will be faced with after they've tried and failed to smash all the other hockey sticks - the wheelchair!

Adapted from: Jos Hagelaars on Our Changing Climate

What is Chris Horner to do?  How can he keep the ATI donor degenerates happy enough to keep him employed? A weak attempt at getting some mileage on the biggest anti-science blog in the blogosphere, maintained by a chap who still, after years of protesting climate science, fails at simple arithmetic and can't grasp the concept of temperature anomalies.   Will it suffice or will Chris Horner eventually be told he's spent enough of ATI's funds on pointless lawsuits?

Even if ATI does get access to some emails, just like their attempt at the University of Virginia, they won't find anything worth shouting to the world. (Whatever happened to the 200,000 plus stolen emails that deniers couldn't wait to chomp? Nothing, nada, zilch!)

It looks to me that what ATI wants to do is shut down research. To tie researchers and universities up in knots responding to lawsuits.  To shut down houses of learning because they don't like the lesson. Or maybe they hope to "prove" to the 8% dismissives that the all levels of government across the USA and the world, including the judiciary is corrupt and part of the secret climate cult, together with all scientific bodies and most of the general public.  Everyone, that is, except for the 8% dismissives that flock to the echo chambers of science denying blogs like WUWT.

Good luck with that - not!

Some of the idiotic comments at WUWT

The comments are archived here with the main WUWT article.

Gerry Dorrian is deluded and still looking for straws:

September 9, 2013 at 10:47 pm
Hopefully this will be one of the last straws on the hockey-stick’s back!

dp is calling for someone to hack university computers again and steal personal emails says:

September 9, 2013 at 10:55 pm
Mr. FOIA – time to act (again).

Go Home wonders why nothing of consequence was found in the 200,000 plus emails that were already stolen and says:

September 9, 2013 at 11:02 pm
So what happen to climategate 3 email dump? Was it a hoax or was it real?

Steven Mosher, who tried to make money from the stolen emails replies:

September 9, 2013 at 11:07 pm
its real

Richard111 can't believe no-one uncovered the non-existent mischief in the stolen emails and decides that it's all a conspiracy - he says:

September 9, 2013 at 11:27 pm
So why was it stomped on and by who?

And that's about it - only nine comments (not all shown above) after three or more hours.  It looks as if the most of the deniers at WUWT have lost interest - or maybe they are fast asleep.  It's night time in the USA.