Medieval Anthony Watts reveals a disinformation "trick" in Five Easy Steps plus assumptions

Updated: see below for Bernard J's chart, which puts medieval climate in perspective with that projected for this century and the global surface temperatures of past eons.

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Deniers at WUWT have gone back to regurgitating old worn out denier memes.

I've frequently come across deniers saying silly stuff like "warmists deny the MWP".   What they mean is that "warmists" are aware it was real but not global.

Why do some fake sceptics hang onto their MWP meme and why are they so hung up on "MWP denial". Why are they are so convinced, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the medieval warm period was whatever they variously think it was.  How do they know anything at all about it if not for science?  A lot of them seem to get their "science" from Nordic myths and legends.

Deniers and their sources of disinformation rarely if ever quote the science of that period.  Instead they quote snippets from stolen emails that they've spent hours digging through to find quotes they can twist and misuse.  If that fails they revert to statements made by climate disinformers at US Senate Committee hearings.

Anthony Watts reveals a tactic of climate disinformers

In a rare moment of openness about the disinformation tactics of the "leading darks" in the disinformation business, Anthony explains to the world one tactic used by disinformers.  He did it in a comment he elevated to an article (archived here) that he called:

The truth about ‘We have to get rid of the medieval warm period’

Six basic assumptions made by disinformers about fake sceptics

First, some basic assumptions about the denialati that are made by the disinformers:

1. Most people who reject science never read scientific literature.
2. Most people who reject science never do any fact checking at all.
3. Most people who spread what the disinformers write are fake sceptics or are themselves disinformers. 
4. Fake sceptics refer to themselves as "skeptics" but never do any fact checking, particularly of things they want to believe.
5. Most fake sceptics will "believe" what disinformers say, even when they make contradictory statements.
6. Most people who believe disinformers reject climate science.

The basic assumptions made by disinformers like Anthony Watts and others are quite reasonable, from what I read from fake sceptics.  They don't hold in all cases but in sufficient numbers of cases to make the disinformation tactics work (with fake sceptics). They are a reasonable set of assumptions for people engaged in disinformation campaigns (eg Anthony Watts) to work from.

A Disinformation "Trick" in Five Easy Steps

Today Anthony Watts explains one of the disinformers' magic tricks.  It's quite simple.  Here are the steps.

1. Pick a private email stolen from a scientific research unit
2. Pluck part of a sentence from the email
3. Write something quite different and say it's a "paraphrase" of that plucked clause
4. Repeat the false paraphrase a few times on your blog and claim "so and so scientist said this"
5. Voilà - you now have a denier meme that will be broadcast forever and a day by the denialati all around the world!

Anthony Watts describes the "trick" in detail

Anthony Watts describes the trick in more detail, using a stolen email and his own false paraphrase.  He makes an article out of an inline comment to a comment by Robert.  Here is the comment  (archived here):

Robert says:

December 8, 2013 at 9:50 am
The quote is a fabrication. Jonathan Overpeck’s exact words are:

“I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature.”

Christopher Monckton, like Andrew Montford before him, alters the text to instead read:

“We have to abolish the medieval warm period.”

Here is Anthony Watts inline reply to Robert (my bold italics):

REPLY: I checked for a citation, and the quote you state is correct:
http://di2.nu/foia/1105670738.txt

From: Jonathan Overpeck
To: Keith Briffa , t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Subject: the new “warm period myths” box
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:45:38 -0700
Cc: Eystein Jansen , Valerie Masson-Delmotte

Hi Keith and Tim – since you’re off the 6.2.2 hook until Eystein hangs you back up on it, you have more time to focus on that new Box. In reading Valerie’s Holocene section, I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature. The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.

So, pls DO try hard to follow up on my advice provided in previous email. No need to go into details on any but the MWP, but good to mention the others in the same dismissive effort.

“Holocene Thermal Maximum” is another one that should only be used with care, and with the explicit knowledge that it was a time-transgressive event totally
unlike the recent global warming.

Thanks for doing this on – if you have a cool figure idea, include it.
Best, peck
–
Jonathan T. Overpeck
Director, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
Professor, Department of Geosciences
Professor, Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Mail and Fedex Address:
Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
715 N. Park Ave. 2nd Floor
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

As to this being a fabrication, no, it’s a summation or a paraphrase of a long quote, something that happens a lot in history. Monckton and Montford aren’t specifically at fault in this, as the summed up quote has been around for a long, long time and it appears to have originated with Dr. David Deming’s statement to the Senate.

The conversion to a paraphrase maintains the meaning. “Mortal blow” certainly equates to “get rid of” (as it is often said) or “abolish” as you state it, and “we” equates to “I’m not the only one”.

The most important point is that Overpeck thinks it should be gotten rid of so that people that don’t agree with his view can’t use it.

And that, is the real travesty. – Anthony

Yes, you read that correctly.  Anthony Watts tries to claim that: “We have to abolish the medieval warm period.” means the same as "would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature."

Johnathon Overpeck quite reasonably wants to hit on the head misuse of "supposed warm period terms and myths".   Anthony Watts claims that is the same thing as "abolishing the medieval warm period". Note also the context in the email for the "mortal blow to the misuse" sentence: "The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish." That they do!

Anthony isn't the only one.  He also quotes the disinformer Steve McIntyre as morphing " deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths" into "“deal a mortal blow” to the MWP".  Click here for an archived copy of Steve McIntyre's article here.  Steve writes:

To a third party, it’s hard to understand why someone who wants to “deal a mortal blow” to the “myth” of the MWP would take exception to being labeled as someone who wanted to “get rid of” MWP. The objective in each case seems pretty much the same.

The only way you could argue that the objective of "dealing a mortal blow to the misuse" seems pretty much the same" as "getting rid of the MWP" is if you are a disinformer wanting to spread disinformation.
.
What surprises me is how Anthony Watts is so open about the process behind the dishonest tactics he and other disinformers use.  It's like seeing a magician reveal his tricks.  One can hear the disinformers saying among themselves, trying to justify their lies to each other and themselves:

"Well, it's almost the same thing, isn't it? No?  Okay then it's not quite but it's nearly the same thing. No?  Okay it's nothing like the same thing, but if we say it's the same thing, that's all we need to do. Our readers will process it as meaning exactly the same thing.  And even though it means nothing like the same thing, with the mob that read what we write, they'll believe us when we argue it means the same thing."

David Deming started the meme back in 2006

It turns out that the 2005 email from Jonathon Overpeck wasn't the original source of the meme after all. According to Steve McIntyre, the denier myth began before the CRU emails were stolen.  He attributes it to a climate disinformer called David Deming in a statement to the US Senate Committee back in 2006.  (I read his statement.  Full of misdirection and half truths.  Isn't it illegal to make dishonest statements to the US government?)   You might recall me writing about how David Deming defended the nonsense put out by Denier Don Easterbrook, with his silly claims and misleading charts.

In his statement, climate disinformer David Deming said that he got an email "around the time" his paper was published in Science, which was back in 1995. His statement reads in part:

I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

That statement of Deming's has never been verified to my knowledge.  The "major researcher" has not been publicly identified nor has the email been unearthed as far as I know.  And over time science has taken great strides in working out what climates around the world were like going back 2000 years or so - particularly through the work of the PAGES 2k network.  (I'll bet a lot of the scientists working on PAGES 2k have never even heard of David Deming or Steve McIntyre or Anthony Watts or Christopher Monckton!)

How fake sceptics misuse the medieval warm anomaly

I've written about the medieval warm anomaly before. Fake sceptics misuse it in the following fashion, complete with logical fallacies.

1. Disinformers and fake sceptics try to argue it was a globally synchronous event. It wasn't. 
2. They then try to argue that because it was a globally synchronous event (which it wasn't), the current warming isn't "unusual". It is. 
3. They then feel they can argue that because the medieval warm anomaly happened without a concurrent rise in CO2, then the current warming isn't because of CO2. But it is!

What science tells us about the medieval warm anomaly

I reckon most fake sceptics wouldn't know that scientists like Michael Mann have papers and book chapters on the subject. Here's an excerpt from my article for fake sceptics (who don't follow links, but then they don't read HotWhopper either - so this is really to save the time of Hotwhopper readers :)):

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Here are a couple of charts of temperature reconstructions, which span the medieval period. The first on is from Mann et al (2008) which shows the warmer period in the Northern Hemisphere during Medieval times. It wasn't as warm as now, however.

Figure 3. Composite NH temperature reconstructions & published NH reconstructions from Mann ME et al (2008) Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 36, pp. 13252-13257, September 9, 2008. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105

At the request of Phil Clarke in the comments, here is a chart from Mann et al 2009, showing the likely global surface temperature anomalies from the 1961-1990 mean during the medieval warm anomaly. You can see where it was warm and where it was cold.  However, as urged further down in the section on the Little Ice Age, I recommend you read the paper before trying to interpret the chart.

Source: Mann et al (2009)

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My original article also shows a chart of Marcott et al, with the Holocene Optimum.

Addendum

The article discussed above derived from a statement by Christopher Monckton in a previous and equally silly WUWT article, in which he wrote (archived here):

However, in 1995 Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, an IPCC scientist, wrote an email to Dr. David Deming to say, “We have to abolish the medieval warm period.”

You can see there the disinformation tactic in action with a bit of a dog-leg to the David Deming statement.  No 1995 email from Jonathon Overpeck has ever been produced.  Whether he wrote that phrase or if anyone did, the context is not provided.  Deniers want to twist it into "scientists are re-writing the facts".  Instead what happens is that "scientists are researching the facts".

What is clear from the science is that there never was a period of global warming in medieval times that is anything like the global warming we are seeing now.  In medieval times there was regional warming and regional cooling. The way the deniers and disinformers like Christopher Monckton portray a medieval warm period is nonsense!   As Jonathon Overpeck did write very accurately:

The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.

Update

Bernard J left a comment in another thread to say that he has prepared a chart based on this Wikipedia chart.  He has added in the likely rise in surface temperature if we choose to follow the RCP8.5 pathway.  Here it is - click on the chart to see the larger version:

Credit: Bernard J and Robert Rohde
Source: as listed in Wikipedia and IPCC AR5

Note that the time scale is not an arithmetic progression.  On a geological time scale, the temperature jump we could be choosing for ourselves this coming century would be viewed as a vertical line.

The above chart puts the much-fêted medieval climate anomaly into perspective, as well as the entire Holocene.  It also shows the unknown territory we are facing, especially if we choose not to rein in carbon emissions.

From the WUWT comments

You'll see that the "basic assumptions" don't hold in all cases. Even some of the fake sceptics aren't buying Anthony's line, now that he's revealed the magic disinformation trick.  However, they hold often enough to make this disinformation "trick" work quite well.  Here is a smorgasbord of comments (from the archived article here).

jeff says says he doesn't agree with Anthony's stance, but Anthony Watts digs in his heels and tries to claim that scientists "disappeared it in literature" (sic), implying that scientists have falsifed facts - utter nonsense:

December 8, 2013 at 10:41 am
seriously? i’m on your side and think many of them are crooks, but he SPECIFICALLY SAYS get ride of the “MISUSE” , not the actual MWP. learn to read

REPLY: I view it differently, as do many others, but I’ll edit for clarity. It is about the disappearing it in literature – Anthony

Michael in Sydney weakly sticks up for Anthony and says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:54 am
One mans use is another’s misuse – what exactly is the context of the misuse he complains about? The fact that he uses the term ‘ supposed’ suggests he doesn’t believe there were historical warm periods even on a regional level.

Paul just knows that "they" mean something other than what "they" said and says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:54 am
to jeff:
But any use of the MWP would be a misuse in their opinion.

GaryM finds a way to turn what was written into something completely different to suit the denier meme and  urges people to "learn to read" in the way fake sceptics are supposed to read.  In other words through a thick lens coated with confirmation bias.  He says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:56 am
Seriously? The “misuse” he is referring to is any “use” of the term.
“misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths”

He wants the MWP to disappear because he claims it doesn’t exist, hence “supposed warm periods”. To him the MWP is a “myth”, so ANY use of the term is a misuse.
learn to read – with comprehension.

Rod Chilton read something in a book somewhere and says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:15 am
I cannot believe these guys!!!!!. They will do almost anything to make sure the spin continues as to man as cause for the recent warming. There is some very interesting material presented in a book I read recently, that indicates within the Medieval Warm Period the Chinese actually sailed around Greenland. You cannot to my knowledge to that today…

Steven Mosher says something that upsets Anthony so he censors it:

December 8, 2013 at 11:16 am
[snip - Mosh, you are welcome to resubmit this comment sans the childish name calling - Anthony]

Jquip tells us what Steven Mosher wrote that so upset Anthony and then adds his own lie by implication and says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:30 am
Mosher: “That claim needs to
1. Verified Or
2. retracted.”

Indeed, if climate science held itself to the same standard we’d be rid of this pestilence at once.

Paul Matthews says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:36 am
Careful. There’s no link between the Deming quote and that CG email.

Monckton of Brenchley says it's okay to extend and expand an unverified claim made by another climate disinformer and turn it into a false denier meme that "the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present". Christopher Monckton says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:58 am
I am most grateful to Anthony and others here for verifying the word-for-word quotation from Dr. Deming that I used. I took certain steps to verify the quote some years ago. It is genuine. It dates from 1995. In 1998/9 Nature printed the Mann/Bradley/Hughes hockey stick and the IPCC picked it up in 2001. That nonsensical graph has represented the “official” position ever since, even though hundreds of papers in the reviewed literature, using measurement rather than modeling, provide evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present.

John Greenfraud is a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate science is a socialist plot and says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:06 pm
A distinction without a difference, the meaning of the ‘quote’ from these so-called climate scientists is clear. Whether it gets hot, cold, or stays the same, their solution is always the identical, socialism masquerading as environmentalism. Kick these dishonest hacks, and their lackeys, out of the national policy decision loop. Go down with the ship climate comrades, we’ll be laughing at you all the way down, just take some temperature readings when you reach bottom, so we can pull you back up and start laughing at you again. You’ve earned it.

Felix says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Watts writes: “As to this being a fabrication (as Robert claims), no, it’s a summation or a paraphrase of a long quote, something that happens a lot in history.”

When someone puts quotation marks around a paraphrase they have created a fabrication. In this case the “summation” alters the meaning as other have noted. The key word “misuse” of ignored in the “summary”. Some here may think the paraphrase is what Overpeck really meant in his heart, and they may or may not be right, but the shortened paraphrase does not have the same literal meaning of the actual quote. Fabrications happen a lot in history, that does not make then true.

John piccirilli either doesn't know when the medieval period was or he is not aware that the Medieval warm anomaly was not global or he's not familiar with Mann temperature reconstructions (see charts above) and says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:52 pm
Tell me felix..where on mann’s hockey stick [graph] does he show
The mwp? The meaning is clear by what peck says and by the actions
Of ipcc.

The bulk of the rest of the comments are from fake sceptics wanting to hang onto their myths about the medieval climate anomaly, for varying reasons of their own, but in the main for the reasons I described above.  If you have some time you're prepared to waste, you  can read more comments archived here.

Bombing out: Christopher Monckton goes in to bat for two professors at WUWT

Update - click here for a follow up article demolishing disinformation from Murry Salby.

This is still "utter nutter" week at WUWT.  Today Anthony Watts has posted an article by the potty peer from the UK, Christopher Monckton.  Christopher writes in his usual "schoolboy" fashion, using words such as "schoolboys at the University of Queensland", probably referring to John Cook, who runs the award-winning climate website, SkepticalScience.com.

Christopher is resurrecting a couple of old and utterly silly denier memes arguing that the CO₂ we emit somehow disappears by magic and goes goodness knows where.  It's a very mixed up article altogether.

One of the main difficulties I had with the WUWT article is that Christopher keeps referring to other articles and comments but doesn't provide any links to what he is talking about.  I guess he has the WUWT target audience summed up well.  He'd have assumed that no fake sceptic would ever follow a link - that would be heresy to the fake sceptic creed.  They might be mistaken for a real sceptic.  However - in this case Christopher would have assumed wrongly.  His article generated much discussion and got lots of people doing lots of sums.  (Archived here)

Two wrongs don't make a right

As far as I can tell, Christopher Monckton is trying to make a whole out of two disparate denier memes.  One is propagated by an older retired professor Gösta Pettersson.  The other is some convoluted hypothesis or two or three of a younger retired ex-professor Murry Salby.  The two hypotheses don't make any sense on their own.  Try to put them together and you end up with a helluva mess.  But that's what Christopher Monckton is proposing.

The short version is as follows:

Gösta Pettersson

AFAIK, Gösta tries to claim that all the extra CO₂ will only stay in the air for a very short time.  He bases this on flawed deductions from analysis of  ¹⁴CO₂. (Note: In the comments, Lars Karlsson says that Gösta Pettersson has acknowledged he made an error in his analysis.)

Following the bomb testing of the 1950s and 60s, analysis has been done to work out how quickly CO₂ circulates between the atmosphere and the surface.  You can think of it as how long it takes for individual molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide to disperse through the atmosphere and surface.  This time is quite short.  A matter of a few years.  By contrast, if we stopped adding any CO₂ to the air altogether, it would take around 300 years to remove something like 65% to 80% of the extra we've added in the last 150 years or so, and hundreds of thousands of years to completely remove all the carbon we've added to the air.

Murry Salby

I think, based on what Christopher Monckton has written, that Murry has things completely back to front.  I believe he tries to claim that rising temperature has caused CO₂ to outgas from the ocean and that's why atmospheric CO₂ is rising.  He reckons it's not from burning fossil fuels.

I gather that Murry doesn't have any answer to what happens to all the waste CO₂ we've been tossing into the air.  Nor does he seem to understand that the oceans are getting more acidic - because they are absorbing more CO2 than they are outgassing.

If carbon dioxide is not going into the ocean (it is), in fact if as Murry apparently maintains, CO₂ was coming out of the ocean (it's not), and since biomass on earth hasn't increased that much, then where is all that fossil fuel CO₂  ending up?

That's it in a nutshell.  Murry Salby and Gösta Pettersson both have it wrong.  Christopher Monckton is trying to argue that "two wrongs make a right".

There's more - if you're game :)

Researching this article I found myself delving into all sorts of interesting areas and learnt a heap of new stuff.  This article evolved into a longer post reflecting my meandering travels.  It's probably the longest article I've written and I won't blame anyone for not reading it.  If you've landed on the home page and you're not deterred by my sloppiness in not cutting back to bare bones, you can click here to read more.

It's utter nutter day at the WUWT nuttery, now with the Potty Peer

Christopher Monkton prides himself on his utter nuttery.   Anthony Watts loves utter nutters.  He puts up lots of articles by them.  Today we've had:

• Anthony Watts himself arguing that UHI has affected some temperature readings in the remote regions of the Arctic because of "human warmth" - see here
• Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham writing that "climate change is dominated by natural, not man-made factors" - see here
• Christopher Monckton writing about his offensive stunt that got him permanently banned from UNFCC processes, faking that he was the "honorary delegate from Burma".

Christopher writes a really, really silly article (archived here and updated) about the recent paper by Cowtan and Way.  He seems to be arguing that the paper doesn't do something that it never claimed to have done in the first place but which, according to the potty peer it should have done.  In other words, the potty peer has built a strawman so he can knock it down.

Nick Stokes demolishes Christopher's nonsense nicely quoting Christopher:

November 20, 2013 at 1:31 am

“The fundamental conceptual error that Cowtan & Way had made lay in their failure to realize that large uncertainties do not reduce the length of The Pause: they actually increase it.”

I’d like to see a quote where C&W are making that conceptual error. In fact, the “length of the Pause” as formulated here is a skeptics construct, and you won ‘t see scientists writng about it.

The period of “no statistically significant increase” is a meaningless statistical test. Rejecting the null hypothesis can lead to useful conclusions; failing to reject does not. It means the test failed.

Yes, HADCRUT takes account of the missing data in its uncertainty estimate, but does not correct for the bias in the trend. That’s what C&W have done.

If you bother to read the archived WUWT article (updated here), you'll notice that Christopher doesn't dispute the findings of Cowtan and Way.  So far I've yet to see anyone dispute it at WUWT, other than Anthony Watts.  And even he seems to be of two minds about it.

Update

I've updated the archive.  Watch out for the "absurd" pontifications of the batty duke (physics teacher rgbatduke who takes a very large number of words to display his profound ignorance of climate), the "genetic" fudgery  of ferd berple and RussR's comment (that I overlooked), in which he pointed out that Christopher argues that AGW continues:

Before long, therefore, another El Niño will arrive, the wind and the thermohaline circulation will carry the warmth around the world, and The Pause – at least for a time – will be over.

Christopher Monckton passes Childish Bluster with Distinction (but fails Arithmetic)

Today on Anthony Watts blog, WUWT, Monckton rejects at least 97% of climate science and says that the IPCC has zero evidence that humans have caused at least 50% of global warming since the 1950s.  Clearly he has never read an IPCC report (or else he's a shameless liar).

Monckton earns a distinction in Childish Bluster

Not much more to say than that.  I'll do a Chris Horner and Anthony Watts and quote a short passage from his article, followed by some two or three word snippets - all from Monckton's essay (archived here - latest here).  Monckton writes:

Not the least of many signs that the rationalists who have dared to doubt the official story are winning the debate on the climate is the childish bluster to which the dwindling band of true-believers resort when they meet an argument they cannot defeat.

Monckton proceeds to deliver some of the best examples of Childish Bluster I've come across in an essay.  Here is a sample - as you can see he earned his Distinction through extra points for the lack of sophistication, vulgarity and aiming for the lowest common denominator among the WUWT readership.  He did aim a bit higher than the audience warranted, otherwise it would have been a High Distinction:

Many of you will have seen Monckton's previous attempt at Childish Bluster, but here it is again to remind you of just how much he has improved since the days when he was completely lost for words Childish Bluster. 

His Childish Bluster has improved out of sight...but Monckton still fails Arithmetic

You doubtless will not be surprised to learn that Monckton, while having a knack for Childish Bluster isn't that good at Arithmetic.  He doesn't know that 3896 is 97.1% of 4014.  Nor does he seem to understand that 78 is only 1.9% of 4014 and an even tinier 0.007 of 11,944.  

Yep, that's right.  Using Monckton-like arithmetic (but more accurately), only seven in every thousand scientific abstracts going way back over 20 years actually rejected mainstream climate science.  Or - of those abstracts that attributed a cause to global warming - only 1.9% rejected human activities as the cause.  Yes, fewer than two out of every hundred abstracts going way back over twenty years.

In case you were wondering, I've lost count and am not sure if this is the umpteenth or umptieth protest by Anthony Watts and Christopher Monckton against the scientific consensus.  In about three weeks they'll be able to flail at the scientific consensus embodied in the new WG1 report from the IPCC.  Let's see if they can improve their arithmetic mark.  I don't know if they can improve on their score for childish bluster.  They've already earned a Distinction but there is a clue above if they want a High Distinction :)

Oh - and you can read Monckton's Distinction-earning essay without having to suffer WUWT, because I've archived it here (latest here).  But before you do, how about a selection of comments, mostly from lovestruck WUWT-ers:

Streetcred says:

September 10, 2013 at 1:55 am
What’s there not to like about this Monckton bloke ? Just one observation M’Lord, the perceived warming is largely Mann made.

High Treason is a born again conspiracy theorist and says:

September 10, 2013 at 2:07 am
Lies, damned lies and statistics. We can look forward to more and more desperate and fanciful BS coming out in a desperate attempt to get us to believe. Eventually the propaganda machine will run out of puff/fluff and implode into the sea of treachery from which it emerged.There is a strong possibility that the AGW rubbish will be conveniently “forgotten”by the UN in 2015 to make way for the “Millenium 2015″ project.

Lilith has fallen in love and says:

September 10, 2013 at 2:24 am
I don’t think my husband would mind if I told you that I LOVE YOU.

And so has Hot under the collar:

September 10, 2013 at 2:27 am
I don’t think my wife will mind if I tell him I love him too!

Update - here are a couple of comments just in case you thought I was exaggerating when I said Monckton didn't target as low as the lowest common denominator. Satire? Politics? Sagacious and sardonic wit? Fresh intellectual air?


John Leon says (excerpt):

September 10, 2013 at 4:57 am
To those who think Lord Monckton’s description of the puerile persons responsible for his paper is insulting should maybe consider the fact that satire has always had a place in politics,

Jan Smit says (excerpt):

September 10, 2013 at 5:06 am
Oh come on guys; insults? Don’t be so bloody precious. The Good Lord’s sagacious and sardonic wit are a joy to read. A veritable breath of fresh intellectual air. May he live long and prosper.  He does not stoop to their level by returning mud pie with mud pie. No, rather he slices their petulant pétard pudding with the Saracen sword of his surgical intellect, revealing their prognistications for what they really are – hot-air tantrums. Not so much hissy fits, as hissy farts…

Christopher Monckton the Con Man's Lame Deception on WUWT

Anthony Watts can't attract anyone but crackpots to WUWT

Poor little Anthony Watts is running out of people willing to write for his disgusting little blog, WUWT.  He's relying more and more on crazies like Christopher Monckton, David "funny sunny" Archibald, Ronald D "it's insects" Voisin and filling in the blanks with endless repetition of magical leaping ENSOs from Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale and random weird wonderings of Willis Eschenbach.

Today it's back to Christopher Monckton.  He uses a lot of words to try and get rid of the 97% consensus.  He wields wordplay to say words don't mean what they mean.  He tries to con his readers into thinking 97% is actually 0.3%.

Monckton is truly weird, a crackpot, delusional or deliberately deceptive - take your pick.

I bet he wishes it was as easy to disappear the actual 97% of scientific papers and the actual 98.4% of scientists who show that humans are causing global warming.

Way down near the end of his long-winded article Monckton draws a messy picture in that putrid pink he favours.  "That's better", say the rabble.  "We like pictures."  (Does anyone actually bother to read or attempt to translate what Monckton writes or do they just look at his pictures and nod sagely, pretending they understand it.)

Here's one of his pictures.  What do you think is wrong with it?  I went for the ugly theme to complement Monckton's.  Red on pink looks ghastly, doesn't it.

If he'd got rid of the noise from seasonal effects and monthly data, and started just one year earlier than 2001, you would have seen something quite different.  If he'd started his chart ten years earlier, you'd have noticed the trend starting to show up.

What else did you notice.  Did you see how the temperature is sitting 0.4 to 0.5 and a bit degrees above even the 1961 to 1980 mean?  The surface temperature is zooming up very quickly.  

Now for some perspective.  This animation shows the period in Monckton's cherry picked chart compared to the long term record.

Christopher Monckton is a deceiver, a con man, a charlatan, a climate science denier.  And not a very good one.

A Battle of the DuKEs: Climate science deniers are getting all tied up in knots

Rgbatduke (aka Robert G Brown of Duke University aka the DuKE), Monckton, Spencer & Christy and now Willis Eschenbach and WM Briggs having a right old ding-dong battle.  It's another battle of the DuKEs.

Here is where it started, here is a continuation, and then WM Briggs "statistician to the stars" dealt a blow to deniers by saying what Professor Brown wrote was complete and utter nonsense.

This is the latest (h/t Nick Stokes).

"Wondering" Willis Eschenbach told WM Briggs what he thought of his tearing down of Professor Brown's rant.  This is part of what Willis wrote:

I know you’re a great statistician, and you’re one of my heroes … but with all respect, you’ve left out a couple of important priors in your rant ….

1. You assume that the results of the climate model are better than random chance.

2. You assume that the mean of the climate models is better than the individual models.

3. You assume that the climate models are “physics-based”.

As far as I know, none of these has ever been shown to be true for climate models. If they have, please provide citations.

As a result, taking an average of climate models is much like taking an average of gypsy fortunetellers … and surely you would not argue that the average and standard deviation of their forecasts is meaningful.

(Odd that Wondering Willis doesn't know that "climate models" are based on physics - or at least the ones I believe he's referring to are.)

Robert G Brown is embarrassingly wrong...wronger than televised wrestling

Here are some excerpts from WM Briggs' response to Willis.  This is about as big a slap down as one climate science denier (WM Briggs) can give to two others (Willis and the DuKE) and probably bigger than a science denier would give to a scientist (my bold):

1. Do ensemble models make statistical sense in theory?

Yes. Brown said no and wanted to slap somebody, God knows who, for believing they did and for creating a version of an ensemble forecast. He called such practice “horrendous.” Brown is wrong. What he said was false. As in not right. As is not even close to being right. As is severely, embarrassingly wrong. As in wrong in such a way that not one of his statistical statements could be repaired. As in just plain wrong. In other words, and to be precise, Brown is wrong. He has no idea of which he speaks. The passage you quote from him is wronger than Joe Biden’s hair plugs. It is wronger than Napoleon marching on Moscow. It is wronger than televised wrestling....

...3. A model does not have to explain the physics to be good.

Stop and re-read that before continuing.

Poor Wondering Willis.  He probably won't know what hit him.

The rigorous statistics of "it looks like"...

Now let's go back to WM Brigg's point 2. He wrote (my bold):

2. Are the ensemble climate models good? As I said originally, not for long-range predictions, but yes for very short-range ones. If Brown wants to claim long-range models are poor, even useless, then I am his brother. But if he wants to say that they do not make statistical sense, then I am his enemy. Being “good” and making “statistical sense” are different and no power in Heaven or on Earth can make them the same.

I tried to find where WM Briggs said anything about "long range predictions vs short range predictions" in his original article and its updates.  About the closest I could find was this:

TWO Are the ensemble models used in climate forecasts any good? They don’t seem to be; not for longer-range predictions (and don’t forget that ensembles can have just one member). Some climate model forecasts—those for a few months ahead—seem to have skill, i.e. they are good. Why deny the obvious? The multi-year ones look like they’re too hot.

Well, that's weird.  WM Briggs argues at length based on "statistics" but then dismisses climate models because "it looks like they're too hot".  That doesn't sound to rigourous an assessment, does it.  And he talks about climate model forecasts of  "a few months ahead".  I don't know of any such climate model forecasts.  Climate models by definition model climate, not a few months of weather.

The "short-termism" of climate science denial

This is how WM Briggs is wrong.  He said that ensemble climate models are good for short range predictions.  But climate models model climate, not "short range predictions".  Climate is long range, not short range.  Climate models do not make any claim of being "right" in the short term.  That is, the noise of weather dominates in the short term.  In the short term, the noise masks the signal.  What the models are designed for is to help understand what the various elements of the earth system will be like over coming decades to centuries, not over the coming days, weeks or months.  As noted on realclimate.org:

Short term (15 years or less) trends in global temperature are not usefully predictable as a function of current forcings. 

Fifteen years or less!  Not "a few months', not even "a few years".  It would be fair to say there is more difference between models and model runs on a daily or weekly basis than there is on a longer term basis.  This is an extract from the full comment from the article on RealClimate.org (my bold):

In interpreting this information, please note the following (mostly repeated from previous years):

• Short term (15 years or less) trends in global temperature are not usefully predictable as a function of current forcings. This means you can’t use such short periods to ‘prove’ that global warming has or hasn’t stopped, or that we are really cooling despite this being the warmest decade in centuries. We discussed this more extensively here.
• The CMIP3 model simulations were an ‘ensemble of opportunity’ and vary substantially among themselves with the forcings imposed, the magnitude of the internal variability and of course, the sensitivity. Thus while they do span a large range of possible situations, the average of these simulations is not ‘truth’.
• The model simulations use observed forcings up until 2000 (or 2003 in a couple of cases) and use a business-as-usual scenario subsequently (A1B). The models are not tuned to temperature trends pre-2000.
• Differences between the temperature anomaly products is related to: different selections of input data, different methods for assessing urban heating effects, and (most important) different methodologies for estimating temperatures in data-poor regions like the Arctic. GISTEMP assumes that the Arctic is warming as fast as the stations around the Arctic, while HadCRUT4 and NCDC assume the Arctic is warming as fast as the global mean. The former assumption is more in line with the sea ice results and independent measures from buoys and the reanalysis products.
• Model-data comparisons are best when the metric being compared is calculated the same way in both the models and data. In the comparisons here, that isn’t quite true (mainly related to spatial coverage), and so this adds a little extra structural uncertainty to any conclusions one might draw.

There is a paper by Santer et al (often misquoted by deniers) in which it is found that to determine a change in climate based solely on trends in global surface temperature generally requires multiple decades, not months or years.  In their analysis, a period of 32 years yielded a clear signal over the noise.  In the abstract they maintain you need at least 17 years.  This is from the paper's conclusion (my bold):

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.

From what I have read, all current climate models project these (among other things) over the longer term to varying degrees depending on the emissions scenario:

• Average global surface temperature will rise
• Sea level will continue to increase
• Ice will continue to melt - including Arctic sea ice and the worlds glaciers and ice sheets.

You can see this in the latest annual update on realclimate.org, which looks at the extent to which models are getting it right.  

For example, here are the projections from the IPCC AR4 report, that shows the models are intended to project climate, not short term weather, looking ahead one hundred years or so:

Source: IPCC AR4 WGI

And looking ahead several centuries to a millenium:

Source: IPCC AR4 WGI

Climate science deniers ignore what is "right" about the models.  They all show surface temperature continuing to rise, for example.  And they estimate the expected rise within a specified range for explicit scenarios of future emissions.  They can provide explicit estimates of climate sensitivity and transient climate response - within a range.

(And just in case there is anyone who thinks the world has stopped warming, check this out before you go making as big a fool of yourself as the DuKE, WM Briggs and Wondering Willis.)  

Denier models are very short term and embarrassingly wrong

Denier "models" on the other hand, tend to the short term and "project" weird and silly stuff like this, from David Archibald.  His "model" projects that before seven years is out, by 2020, the average surface temperature will have dropped below the lowest temperature in the entire Holocene:

Why deniers deny science...

It's enlightening watching the deniers fight it out among themselves.  They all bring their own "wrong" to the table.  One thing many of them have in common is embodied in this comment from DAV on WM Brigg's blog (my bold):

Policymakers are relying on these models to represent the RANGE of possible future climates that are consistent with known physics and chemistry.

To do what, exactly? Are they making preparations or just looking for a revenue source?

The thing many climate science deniers have in common is an unwillingness to accept that the deleterious affects of climate change carry a cost.  That will apply regardless of whether we do nothing or do something beforehand (like shifting to clean energy) or wait till after the damage is done (like paying flood levies to repair broken infrastructure).

PS We can add Judith Curry to the list of deniers promoting the DuKE from Duke's rubbish.  She aligns herself with the denialiati every chance she gets.  (No link from me this time.  I can't usually be bothered with Curry tripe, with some exceptions like here and here and here and here.)

PPS (23 June 2013)  Looks as if WM Briggs is trying to backtrack from his comment about short term climate models by saying he meant the models used for weather forecasting and seasonal outlooks.  I know they are called "climate" models too, although they model weather, not climate.  And they are constantly updated with real data through data assimilation unlike the climate models rgbatduke was writing about.  So this "fervent, ill-educated activist" is sticking to her guns.  WM Briggs was wrong, plain and simple in what he said.  His article was in relation to IPCC models, which are a somewhat different beast, used for a different purpose and having different features.  The climate models being discussed here are built to learn about climate not to forecast weather.

Anthony Watts attacks Christy, Spencer and Monckton

How Anthony Watts and rgbatduke attempt to expose the chicanery of Christy, Spencer and Monckton

Anthony Watts puts up an article slamming the chart of Roy Spencer and John Christie and Christopher Monckton's charts all in a few words.  All his commenters agree they are nonsense.  They've run out of arguments against "warmists" so now they are attacking each other.  Good to see.

Here's the slam from rgbatduke:

This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above (Sou: see below), where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.

Note the implicit swindle in this graph (Sou: he is referring to Monckton's chart as shown below) — 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 (Sou: ie Monckton) is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!.

Say what?

I kind of like they way rgbatduke wishes climate behaved the way a single particle behaves in a laboratory-controlled physics experiment.  If only.  (By the way, I'm not twisting this in any way.  rgbatduke is referring directly to the workings of Christy, Spencer and Monckton.  He may think he's criticising the IPCC but they are not IPCC charts.  It's not the IPCC that used the data that way.  It's only Christy, Spencer and Monckton who did the charts and calculations in the way they did.)

The rest of his article reads as if it's written by a person (maybe a physicist) who doesn't know anything about climate science.  rgbatduke says as much, admitting his "comparative ignorance".  It comes across as the logical fallacy of personal incredulity.


Anyway, here are some reactions:

Ian W says:
June 18, 2013 at 5:24 pm  An excellent post – it would be assisted if it had Viscount Monckton’s and Roy Spencer’s graphs displayed with references.

mark says:
June 18, 2013 at 5:43 pm damn. just damn.

Chuck Nolan says:
June 18, 2013 at 6:02 pm I believe you’re correct. I’m not smart enough to know if what you are saying is true, but I like your logic.  Posting this on WUWT tells me you are not afraid of critique. Everyone knows nobody gets away with bad science or math here.

Abe says:
June 18, 2013 at 6:04 pm WINNER!!!!!  The vast majority of what you said went WAY over my head, but the notion of averaging models for stats as if they were actual data being totally wrong I totally agree.

Rob Ricket says:
June 18, 2013 at 8:03 pm  What a brilliant application of scientific logic in exposing the futility of attempting to prognosticate the future with inadequate tools. It takes a measure of moral courage to expose fellow academics as morally bankrupt infants bumbling about in a dank universe of deception. Bravo!

Jeef says:
June 18, 2013 at 7:32 pm  That. Is. Brilliant.  Thank you.

Only a couple of people seemed to understand what rgbatduke wrote.  

Once again, Nick Stokes asks some pertinent questions (my bold):
June 18, 2013 at 6:22 pm  As I said on the other thread, what is lacking here is a proper reference. Who does this? Where? “Whoever it was that assembled the graph” is actually Lord Monckton. But I don’t think even that graph has most of these sins, and certainly the AR5 graph cited with it does not. Where in the AR5 do they make use of ‘the variance and mean of the “ensemble” of models’?

Monckton pops in and thanks Nick Stokes for being gracious and coming to his defense.  

No, that's not what he does.  Monckton calls Nick Stokes a liar and a troll and and then goes on to say he did exactly what Nick Stokes and rgbatduke said he did. He writes: "in my own graph I merely represented the interval of projections encompassed by the spaghetti graph and added a line to represent the IPCC’s central projection."  That's precisely what rgbatduke was referring to when he originally wrote in reference to Monckton's chart, of 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!"

Monckton somehow "forgets" to mention the variance he shows on his chart (see below).

Monckton also admits to using a confidential draft AR5 chart, which if he was an expert reviewer he pledged to keep confidential.  The AR5 chart itself has errors AFAIK and the public version will no doubt be different.

Monckton shows his lack of moral fibre and his lack of grace.  His behaviour shows he is not an upright citizen, an honest man of his word or a gentleman.  Monckton is a bombastic ignorant fool who has lost his entertainment value.  I've noticed that some people who are in the wrong are incapable of admitting it, and have a tendency to get very aggro.  As if they think it will fool anyone but other fools.  Monckton also has a very compartmentalised brain. It holds his lies and truths in different compartments but he can spout either or both at the same time, usually mixed with his misplaced self-righteous venom.

A final mention to Tsk Tsk who observes the strawman (my bold):

June 18, 2013 at 7:01 pm  Brown raises a potentially valid point about the statistical analysis of the ensemble, but his carbon atom comparison risks venturing into strawman territory. If he’s claiming that much of the variance amongst the models is driven by the actual sophistication of the physics that each incorporates, then he should provide a bit more evidence to support that conclusion.

Here are the charts prepared by Christy, Spencer and Monckton that so offended rgbatduke, all the WUWT deniers and Anthony Watts, but which they are only now saying so.

Spencer and Christy's Spaghetti

Monckton's Swindle

Here are my previous articles on:

• Spencer and Christy's exercise
• Monckton's diatribe

Here is a figure from the 2007 IPCC report - Summary for Policy Makers. The left panel is emission scenarios, the right panel shows multi-model means of surface temperature for different scenarios. The bars at the right show the "best estimate" surface temperature and likely range for 2090-2099.  The best estimate is not the same as the model means you'll notice. Click to enlarge.

Figure SPM.5. Left Panel: Global GHG emissions (in GtCO2-eq) in the absence of climate policies: six illustrative SRES marker scenarios (coloured lines) and the 80th percentile range of recent scenarios published since SRES (post-SRES) (gray shaded area). Dashed lines show the full range of post-SRES scenarios. The emissions include CO2, CH4, N2O and F-gases. Right Panel: Solid lines are multi-model global averages of surface warming for scenarios A2, A1B and B1, shown as continuations of the 20th-century simulations. These projections also take into account emissions of short-lived GHGs and aerosols. The pink line is not a scenario, but is for Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model (AOGCM) simulations where atmospheric concentrations are held constant at year 2000 values. The bars at the right of the figure indicate the best estimate (solid line within each bar) and the likely range assessed for the six SRES marker scenarios at 2090-2099. All temperatures are relative to the period 1980-1999. {Figures 3.1 and 3.2}

Denier weirdness: Monckton sings the praises of the anti-science blog WUWT

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley has written a gushing tribute to the anti-science, scientist-bashing blogger Anthony Watts for WUWT getting 150,000,000 slaps hits.  Would that be 10,000,000 from people and 140,000,000 hits from bots or something like that?  I've added examples to illustrate the points he is making.  Monckton's points are in italics:

WUWT Fictions

Monckton: It (WUWT) puts more emphasis on hard-headed assessments of what has happened than on the fanciful predictions of what might happen that are their mainstay.

Here are some examples of hard-headed assessments rather than fanciful predictions - courtesy of WUWT.  First from Monckton himself writing about global warming - from less than a month ago, saying that the surface temperature has not risen for 18 years (he's also said it hasn't risen for "approaching two decades").

Then there is this "non-fanciful" prediction on WUWT from David Archibald:

Then there's Anthony Watts' big fat lies about the 97% consensus.

For more WUWT "hard-hitting assessments and non-fanciful predictions" see the HotWhopper blog archive.  Or see a selection of them here.

Prejudices are quaveringly intense

Monckton: It discusses the science and economics of the climate debate, accessibly but in depth. They don’t do much science; and, when they do, their prejudices are so quaveringly intense that they distort it.

Yes, I'd have to agree that WUWT does not do "much science" and I suppose you could describe WUWT prejudices as "quaveringly intense".  One has to assume that is what he meant by "they".  Surely he couldn't mean proper climate sites such as realclimate.org or skepticalscience.com.

Lots of space to protesting science

Monckton: It does not take sides. It displays a genuine interest in all sides of the debate, and allows them space. They don’t do that.

Click here for a typical example of the "genuine interest" WUWT takes in science.  It is the WUWT reaction to the Marcott et al reconstruction and analysis of the Holocene surface temperature record.  There was certainly a lot of space devoted to that study.  Twenty eight protest articles and counting!

Refusing to publish critical comments

Monckton: It does not, as they do, sullenly refuse to post every comment that is critical of it. It allows both sides to be fairly heard.

About that "sullen refusal".  Sullen is indeed the wrong adjective.  Here are two more examples in the discussion of this very article by Monckton - here and here.

[Snip. 'Case closed' means move on. — mod.]

In regard to the topic of the censored comment, here is what really happened, as opposed to the WUWT version. (re Reginald Perrin's comment below.)

Definition of a "troll"

Monckton: It is tolerant of all but the most persistent and malicious trolls.

See above.  WUWT has an interesting definition of 'troll'.  On WUWT a "troll" is anyone who writes about climate science or points out facts, as shown in this example (in an article in which Anthony tries to deny that climate scientists received death threats, which they did).

Monckton's Newspeak

Monckton: It is transparently, persistently, meticulously honest. Mistakes are admitted and corrected swiftly.

Monckton is in error here.  Check almost any WUWT article, such as this one, for the evidence.

Quantity not quality (or accuracy)

Monckton: It is up to date. It posts more items daily than some of them post in a month.

Quantity not quality is the motto of WUWT.

On the topic of disinformation

Monckton: It is on topic. Occasional departures are allowed, when something catches Anthony’s ever-interested eye, or when Willis is in story-telling mode, but otherwise you know what you are going to get.

The art of disinformation
Pinocchio by André Koehne

The topic of WUWT is anti-science and scientist bashing.  Occasionally it does depart from that as evidenced by this gush.  Although Monckton's "they" is probably a reference to climate science blogs, so I guess you can argue even this article of his is on topic.

The reward?

Monckton: It isn’t subsidized. They have taxpayers’ money thrown at them to flog the long-dead horse of global warming. It gets by, but it does not reward Anthony at even a tenth the rate he deserves.

Anthony will probably eventually get what he deserves.  As for the taxpayer subsidy, given that the Heartland Institute gets an effective taxpayer subsidy because, for some ungodly reason, it apparently still has charity status - one might consider this and this.

Open a restaurant

Monckton: It is beautifully polished. Running any blog is hard work. Running a seriously good blog is even harder than running a restaurant. You have to be there just about every day. You have to keep the content and the quality up.

I advise you to take particular note of the last point.  If you were thinking of going into the business of anti-science thuggery, consider setting up a restaurant instead.  Most especially if you can find a restaurant where you don't have to do any "hard work" and don't "have to be there just about every day" or concern yourself with food "content or quality".

Maybe a restaurant that specialises in fruit cake?

H/T to Reginald Perrin for alerting me to Monckton's latest gush gish gallop.