On reproducibility: Replicated errors and double standards from Anthony Watts at WUWT

The most recent article from Anthony Watts, who runs a climate conspiracy blog called wattsupwiththat, or WUWT, demonstrates once again that he doesn't understand the first thing about scientific research. It also provides another lesson in the telltale techniques of climate science denial, and the double standards of Anthony Watts. 

What the WUWT article (archived here) is about is an article in the New York Times (without a link), which in turn is an article about a paper in Science about the lack of reproducibility of many psychology papers. That is, Anthony published a "guest essay" about a New York Times article about a paper, topped and tailed with some irrelevant silly comments from Anthony himself. (Anthony doesn't write much himself these days. He's probably conscious that most of what he writes is too silly for public consumption so he copies and pastes press releases and denier blog articles from elsewhere, and relies on "guest essays" of dubious quality from his readers.)

Roy Spencer is comparing himself to Nobel Prize winners!

I just saw this at WUWT, in an article by Roy Spencer (archived here):

Comparing John Christy and me to “scientists who disputed the links between smoking and cancer”, Dana once again demonstrates his dedication to the highest standards of journalism.

Well done, Grauniad.

I prefer to compare us to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who rejected the scientific consensus that peptic ulcers were due to too much stress or spicy food. While they eventually received the Nobel Prize ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthony Watts blows his dog whistle to round up the cosmic ray lynch mob

Ha ha ha. This is hilarious. There's an article by Anthony Watts on his climate science denier blog WUWT where he writes (archived here):

A peer reviewed Nuccitelli smackdown
Posted on June 19, 2014 by Anthony Watts
Reply to “Comment on ‘Cosmic-ray-driven reaction and greenhouse effect of halogenated molecules: Culprits for atmospheric ozone depletion and global climate change’ by Dana Nuccitelli et al.”

Anthony copies the abstract of the reply to the comment but nothing else apart from the above and a link to the reply. He leaves it up to readers to try to find the original paper, figure out who wrote it and see if they can lay their hand on the comment. (The reply was published a month ago, so Anthony is losing his touch.)

Click "read more" to read the rest :)

Hoity Toity Christopher Monckton sez the Earth is losing energy and other silliness at WUWT

The potty peer has done it again.  He's trying to argue that Dana Nuccitelli is wrong in his recent article in the Guardian: The Weekly Standard's Lindzen puff piece exemplifies the conservative media's climate failures.

Christopher Monckton has to play fudgery with numbers and I'm not sure if he's fooling anyone except the hard core deniers.  And they'll be fooled by anything as long as it rejects climate science.  Here is the archived WUWT article.

(I see that Christopher, like Bob Tisdale a couple of days ago, has taken a leaf out of HotWhopper's book and has webcited the Guardian article, but I can't access it.  No-one else has complained so I don't know if it's just me or if no-one at WUWT clicked on the link.  Neither would surprise me. Update: the webcite version is accessible now, but it doesn't look too good in Chrome.)

I won't go over all Christopher's silliness.  He's done it all before, including wanting to running off to his dreaded government  crying crocodile tears when he doesn't like something.  (Deniers typically hold government in contempt unless they are claiming to be members of the House of Lords or wanting the government to intervene in some fabricated slight.)  Here's a short sample.

Yes, Christopher - fewer than two out of every hundred climate science papers in the last twenty years dispute the notion that humans are to blame for global warming. No reputable scientist disputes this fact.

And yes, Christopher, Lindzen's Iris Hypothesis was found wanting.

And yes, Christopher, we are in a period of warming that is unprecedented in a very long time, and are heading for 10 times the pace of warming in 65 million years.

You get the picture.

At one stage Christopher shows he himself doesn't agree with Richard Lindzen.  Christopher writes:

it is possible – indeed, quite likely – that a net loss of energy from the Earth-atmosphere system is now underway. If so, global temperature may even fall,

First of all, if there was a net loss of energy then global temperatures would definitely fall.  No maybes, ifs or buts about it.  But that's physically impossible as long as we keep adding greenhouse gases at the rate we are, and as long as there are no supervolcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes or similar to stop the sunlight penetrating the atmosphere.  Christopher doesn't provide any evidence to support his nutty claim, understandably, because there is none.


Here's another blooper - Christopher writes:

Since natural variability has yielded warming at 4.33 Cº/century within the past 350 years

What natural variability?  What 15ºC of warming over the past 350 years?  Let's look at the longer term record - of the past 2000 years. (Click to enlarge.)

Figure 5.7 IPCC AR5 WG1 Reconstructed (a) Northern Hemisphere and (b) Southern Hemisphere, and (c) global annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions (see Appendix 5.A.1 for further information about each one) are shown as indicated in the legends, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extra-tropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (HadCRUT4 land and sea, and CRUTEM4 land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881–1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on timescales less than ~50 years.

No.  There's not been anything like a warming of 4.33 degrees a century (or 15ºC) in the past 350 years.  Even taking it to the present day with the "unnatural" forcing, there's not a 4.33 degree rise from the coldest temperature in the last 1500 years to the temperature today.  Imagine what it will be like if we let global surface temperatures rise by four degrees!

At one point Christopher goes for another bit of disinformation.  He wrote:

A: Before the U.S. Senate on 23 June 1988, Hansen said that his Scenario A, which predicted 0.5 Cº/decade warming to 2060, was the “business-as-usual” case; yet Nuccitelli has only shown Hansen’s less exaggerated Scenario B.

But that's wrong.  In Dr Hansen's testimony, he describes Scenario A as assuming 1.5% a year emissions growth.  But emissions haven't grown at that rate.  The growth averaged over the period since 1988 would be roughly 0.5% a year, going by the rise in atmospheric CO2 over that period.

Christopher cries "libel" a lot.  But it's he, Christopher Monckton, who is one of the biggest frauds in the deniosphere.

The deniers who think they are modern-day Galileos won't be happy with Christopher for writing this bit of nonsense:

The Church, as well as informed scientific opinion, had long agreed that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way about. However, Galileo had drawn inappropriate theological conclusions from heliocentricity, perpetrating the notorious non sequitur that since the Earth was not the centre of the Universe the Incarnation and Crucifixion were of less importance than the Church maintained. It was Galileo’s theological conclusion the Church objected to, not the scientific conclusion that the Sun is at the center of the solar system. 

And Christopher proves to be a passive smoking denier, too, writing:

And, as far as I know, Professor Lindzen does not dispute the well-established link between smoking and lung cancer, though he would be within his rights to dispute the imagined link between passive smoking and lung cancer. 

Since Anthony Watts is so anti-smoking I'm surprised he let that one through. For Richard Lindzen's position on passive smoking - check out pages 25 and 26 of this transcript.

From the WUWT comments

Here is how Christopher finishes up:

What is your verdict? From my own knowledge of the Professor and his distinguished work, I find Nuccitelli’s piece misleading, offensive, and cruel. Damages will be huge.

It's now offensive and cruel to point out errors and listing errors is misleading?  Let's see if the WUWT-ers agree.

Lew Skannen says:

January 13, 2014 at 8:48 pm
Sueing is an expensive, difficult and risky process. Better to get a peice in the Graun refuting the garbage so all the Nuttycherry sycophants can have their noses rubbed in it.

Dr C objects to Christopher rewriting history and says (excerpt):

January 13, 2014 at 9:01 pm
Sorry to quibble, Mr Monckton, but this part is incorrect: “The Church, as well as informed scientific opinion, had long agreed that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way about.” First, no one used the word ‘orbit’ at the time. Kepler invented that word (as we understand it), and few in Rome were reading Kepler at the time. More important, however, is that Rome at the time remained firmly geocentric in its cosmological outlook: the official line in Rome was that the Sun revolved around the earth. This is an indisputable fact. 

jorgekafkazar says, without a hint that he sees the double standards at WUWT:

January 13, 2014 at 9:01 pm
Ad hominem slurs, the first refuge of scoundrels…

tallbloke has got as far as realising you can only claim "Little Ice Age bouncing" for so long and hope to get away with it, even for hard core deniers.  He's yet to wake up to the reality that there is no such thing as a Little Ice Age bounce.  It takes a forcing to change the climate. He says:

January 13, 2014 at 11:32 pm
“on the evidence there could be as little as 1 Cº global warming between now and 2100″
Or minus 0.5C. The recovery from the LIA won’t go on forever.

Bugs Man is probably one of the 8% who really and truly "believes" people like the potty peer, even though he can't understand a thing about science.  He says (excerpt):

January 13, 2014 at 11:22 pm
Lord Monckton’s article is a tour de force example of a complete* de-bunk of Nuccitelli and Abraham’s piece in The Guardian (6 Jan 2014). That it is libellous is, for me, well proven.
At least one preceding comment questions the economic sense of persuing a libel case which can be cost-prohibitive for individuals. I suggest that a formal complaint to the (UK) Independent Press Complaints Commission (regrettably also abbreviated to IPCC), using Lord Monckton’s article as evidence*, would be a far less expensive exercise and, if upheld, arguably more effective in getting The Guardian to be more circumspect before regurgitating Nuccitelli’s venomous opinions in future. A privately funded libel case on the back of such a judgement by the IPCC should then be considered.

Bob Tisdale hides the warming and tries out a conspiracy theory at WUWT

Did I ever say that Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale can be very long-winded?

If one didn't know better on would mistake today's WUWT article as a Poe.  (Archived here.) But Bob Tisdale is ever so serious.  He didn't see the humour in Tamino's take-down of his antics a couple of weeks ago, and I guess he's been stewing on it ever since.  And as regulars know, Bob has a crush on Dana Nuccitelli, who gets more than a mention.

To cut to the chase, Bob reckons that 1990 wasn't a hot year because, wait for it, he says:

1990 was an ENSO-neutral year, according to NOAA’s Oceanic NINO Index. Therefore, “1990 was…” NOT “…an especially hot year”. 

In Bob's world, if there is neither an El Nino or La Nina, the surface temperature must be normal.  (Tell that to us in Australia!)  The temperature can't lie above the trend unless there's an ENSO event according to Bob.  It doesn't matter to Bob that in 1990 the global surface temperature was above the trend line.  It "was an ENSO-neutral year...Therefore, “1990 was…” NOT “…an especially hot year"!

Did I say Bob Tisdale can be a bit odd?

At this point I can hear some readers say "well, Bob Tisdale might be tedious and a bit odd, but Sou at HotWhopper repeats herself".  And you'd be correct.  Here's a chart from when I wrote about his first attempt, that prompted Tamino and me to respond earlier this month.

Data Source: NASA and WUWT!

The chart above shows 1990 compared to prior years and to the trend, which it lies above.

How Bob hides the warming

Now Bob has a good trick to show that 1990 wasn't warm at all.  He disputes the record and I think he's trying to argue that 1990 wasn't really the hottest year on record until 1995 (which it was).  Here's Bob's "proof".

Source: WUWT of course!

Really and truly.  Bob removed the heat to prove it wasn't hot in 1990!  ha ha ha...

I wonder why he included the years after 1990, which of course over time (from 1995) got warmer because of global warming.  I did say one could mistake his article for a Poe.

(Update: It's been pointed out in the comments that the point of detrending the data is to show how much or how little the temperature deviated from the trend - in Bob's case he wanted to show that some deviations were greater than that of 1990.  But that's not the issue as I discussed previously here.  Tamino showed the same but in his case it was to determine by how much 1990 deviated from the trend, not to see if other years deviated.  The deviation of other years is not relevant.  All that is relevant is by how much 1990 deviated because it gives an indication of how much the model runs were wrongly shifted upwards.

The point about the problems with the display of model runs was twofold.  Firstly: The model runs were all aligned to a single point, which was wrong.  They didn't all converge to a single point in 1990 let alone converge exactly on the observed average global temperature anomaly, and shouldn't have been shown as if they did.  Secondly: that point lay above the trend, which meant that the model runs looked higher than they were in reality.  Both of these combined to make the chart wrong.  So Bob going on and on about whether or not 1990 was especially hot or not isn't the point.  The fact that Bob goes to such lengths is doubly odd given that the heat record broken in 1990 wasn't broken again until 1995.  So it really was especially hot in 1990 - and even more "especially hot" since, as Bob pointed out, it wasn't an El Nino year!)

Bob writes more...

Now for the long-winded observation.  Bob took nearly 3,000 words to say that 1990 wasn't a hot year because it was ENSO-neutral.  This time around.  The first time it took him about half as many words.  Next time will it take him 6,000 words?

(For the curious, this article has 494 words down to the WUWT comments, and 1008 words in total. And I'm not known for being parsimonious with words!)

It's a guvmint plot!

If you're wondering where the conspiracy theorising comes into the picture, this is from Bob's latest attempt to turn 1990 into a year that wasn't hot:

Adapted from source: WUWT of course!

He seems to think that the final draft AR5 report was changed by politicians.  AFAIK it was the second order draft, not the final draft in which the authors changed the chart.  But I could be wrong, because they may have still been doing the model runs up until the final draft.  I don't know. Whenever it was introduced I know for a fact that the "politicians" had nothing to do with it.  The changes to AR5 following the meeting with member governments and observers are listed here.  The chart wasn't changed.  (As you'll recall the chart in the first order draft was flawed.)


I've written enough.  I'll hand you over to some WUWT-ers for their reaction to Bob's tedious, long-winded, serious, boring article :)

From the WUWT comments

Here is a short selection for your edification (archived here).  Just so you know that the scientists are right about being wrong or wrong about being right or whatever twisted logic the WUWT-ers are coming up with today.


François GM has his own conspiracy theory and it's a cute one (my bold italics).  Now this might be a Poe, but who can tell at WUWT?

October 26, 2013 at 4:37 pm
Wonderfully entertaining, Bob. And so much work ….

Amazing how they never thought of disappearing the 1998 temperature peak in the early 2000s when the ENSO-induced warming trend suited their purpose.

Now that the 1998 peak belittles the recent temperatures, they attempt to make it go away by de-ENSOing it. Pathetic. So much deception.

Bill Illis says a whole lot more than this.  I've just chosen enough to give you the gist:

October 26, 2013 at 4:58 pm
1990 was the most neutral year one can get.
The average ENSO value (with a 3 month lag) was 0.03C (certainly Zero in ENSO terms with an impact on the global average temperature of 0.002C).

BarryW is having trouble with his anomalies and says:

October 26, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Comparing anomalies is ridiculous if you don’t align them to the same absolute starting conditions. It’s like taking a 100 volt signal and saying it matches a 1 volt signal because I can aline them on the oscilloscope. The only thing I can compare is the pattern of the two signals. The real values are not comparable by using anomalies. The only valid comparison here is the trends.

Theo Goodwin makes no pretence at scepticism and says:

October 26, 2013 at 7:14 pm
Great work, Mr. Tisdale. Thanks for keeping us up to date on what I will call Tamino’s childish efforts at misinformation.

Post script - what's in a name?

Incidentally, there's a lot of discussion of Tamino's name in the comments.  A whole lot.  By lots and lots of people, starting with Anthony Watts.  Bob Tisdale doesn't buy into it (not so far anyway) and I'm thinking it's just possible that Bob Tisdale is not Bob Tisdale's off-screen name (July 1, 2011 at 3:52 pm).

I could be wrong and it doesn't matter one iota to me and neither to any HW regular I should think.  But such things seem to be important to WUWT-ers.  If someone knows if it is his name (or not) they might let me know privately or here, because I don't want to go spreading unfounded rumours.  It's just a thought I had when I read that comment of his some time back.  Plus I don't think he's ever referred to me as anyone but Sou (plus adjectives), unlike his host.  So whatever name he goes by on or off the internet, Bob does seem to respect other people's preferences, which is a mark in his favour.


Anthony Watts behaves like a jerk again and whistles his WUWT dogs:

October 26, 2013 at 4:06 pm
@Bob Tisdale.

Don’t give this jerk “Tamino” the benefit of anonymity. His name is [Sou: redacted out of courtesy to Tamino], he lives in [Sou: redacted out of courtesy to Tamino].

Use his name when discussing his claims, if he stands behind his work, then he should have any problem with his name being applied to it.

Anthony Watts repeats David Rose's fibs and more denier weirdness from WUWT

Poor old Anthony is late to the party but he still wants a piece of the action.  Anthony Watts has repeated the disinformation and lies from David Rose, the anti-science propagandist for the Mail Online. I'll give Anthony the benefit of the doubt because he's not that bright.  He wouldn't understand an IPCC report if he decided to try and read one - but I've not seen any evidence that he's attempted that.

This is a follow up to my previous articles here and here.

Anthony Watts and David Rose are wrong again - the IPCC reported 0.13°C per decade from 1956 to 2006.

Anthony Watts writes (archived here):

What they say: ‘The rate of warming since 1951 [has been] 0.12C per decade.’

What this means: In their last hugely influential report in 2007, the IPCC claimed the world was warming at 0.2C per decade. Here they admit there has been a massive cut in the speed of global warming – although it’s buried in a section on the recent warming ‘pause’. The true figure, it now turns out, is not only just over half what they thought – it’s below their lowest previous estimate.

What this really means: David Rose and Anthony Watts are telling big fat lies again.  Here is what is written in the IPCC AR4 report - a linear trend from 1956 to 2005 = 0.13°C per decade.  Not a 0.2°C per decade in sight!

Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850). The 100-year linear trend (1906-2005) of 0.74 [0.56 to 0.92]°C is larger than the corresponding trend of 0.6 [0.4 to 0.8]°C (1901-2000) given in the TAR (Figure 1.1). The linear warming trend over the 50 years from 1956 to 2005 (0.13 [0.10 to 0.16]°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the 100 years from 1906 to 2005. {WGI 3.2, SPM}

And because they are not crash hot at comprehension, or they are deliberately setting out to decieve their readers, this is most probably what David Rose and Anthony Watts are misrepresenting - pretending a future likelihood was a statement about the past:

For the next two decades a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emissions scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all GHGs and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected. Afterwards, temperature projections increasingly depend on specific emissions scenarios. {3.2}

Anthony Watts confuses regional and global - again!

Once again, Anthony Watts doesn't understand the difference between regional and global.  I don't know why he loves the medieval climate anomaly so much.  Does he think it "disproves" the greenhouse effect? What a nutter of a denier. He writes (my bold italics):

What they say: ‘Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly  (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century.’

What this means: As recently as October 2012, in an earlier draft of this report, the IPCC was adamant that the world is warmer than at any time for at least 1,300 years. Their new inclusion  of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ – long before the Industrial Revolution and  its associated fossil fuel burning – is a concession that its earlier statement  is highly questionable.

What this really means - Anthony Watts can't tell the difference between regional and global.  What a plonker!  There is no "concession" at all.  The two statements are different.  One is about "some regions" and the other is about global surface temperatures.  It's just that Anthony can't tell the difference between regional and global.  Not that it's relevant to the rapid rise in temperature of the past few decades, which everyone knows is caused by human activity.

Anthony Watts falls back on ad hominem

Anthony is also feeling the pressure of not writing too many ad homs for a while.  He seems to think that playing in a band as a teenager is relevant to one's professional career - maybe even "murky", which will be news to every amateur and professional musician and their parents and siblings.  It's also a bit rich coming from someone like Anthony Watts, whose primary goal is to reject scientific knowledge and to spread lies and disinformation about science and scientists.

He also complains that John Abraham and Dana Nuccitelli didn't delete some comments from their blog on the UK Guardian.  Guess what, Anthony.  They don't have the power to do so.  They aren't moderators. They can't delete comments.  In any case, that is just too, too hypocritical coming from someone like Anthony Watts who encourages worse on his own blog!

I've covered most of the rest in my article on the latest David Rose blurb in Mail Online.

What all this really means: as usual, the denialati are trying to get ahead of the game and control the message.  They are intent on delaying action to mitigate global warming and will go to any lengths to do so.

HotWhopper readers probably know most of what will be in the new IPCC report, because they keep up with the science.  There will be some parts of interest, like how the report treats different aspects like climate sensitivity, modeled projections for surface temperature and sea level rise etc.  Overall though, we know the clock is ticking down.  It's about one minute to midnight.

This is the critical decade.

Bob Tisdale is Perennially Puzzled about ENSO

Bob Tisdale has another go at his favourite person, Dana, who wrote an article about ENSO, short term variation and long term trends - on Skeptical Science.  Every time Dana mentions ENSO, Bob trots out the same old line.  Each article looks the same as every other piece he writes.  You'd think he'd have cottoned on by now.  But no.  Bob asks a number of questions on WUWT.  I'll paraphrase because it seems to be just the one question:

Why doesn't the earth cool as much from La Niña as it heats from El Niño?  

I'll add another question.  After La Niña and El Niño, when ENSO returns to neutral, why does the earth still get hotter?

Seems simple to me (and to Tom on WUWT).  If there were no global warming, this is a simplified representation of what would happen in relation to ENSO:

If Earth's temperature were rising, like there is global warming, then this is what would happen (simplified):

You can read about the three phases of ENSO at the Bureau of Meteorology.

Bob nearly answers his own question but doesn't seem to know it:

It is blatantly obvious to anyone ... that there would be little to no long-term warming of the lower troposphere temperature anomalies for mid-to-high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere if lower troposphere temperature anomalies had cooled proportionally during the La Niña events of 1988/89 and 1998-01.

Let's look at this chart from this WMO report showing La Niña and El Niño years.

Yes, both La Niña and El Niño years are getting hotter as are the ENSO neutral years.  Sometimes the simplest answer is the right answer.

I wonder if Bob will ever manage to connect the pieces and have a 'light bulb' moment.

For a more detailed look at ENSO, see related article here, and more here. Not to forget this or this, given Bob's latest article and ensuing comments (archived here). (Sou - Jan 14)

How Far and Fast Can a Denier Fall?

Roy Spencer gave an interview recently, which Dana critiqued very well on SkepticalScience.  Roy should know better than to try to hoodwink people.

It seems the poor old chap has no-one left to defend him except Lord Monckton, in an article on Anthony Watts' anti-science blog, WUWT.

One of Monkton's first defenses of Spencer is that:

The satellites reveal the inconvenient truth that there has been no global warming for approaching two decades.

"Approaching two decades"?  Approaching from how far away I wonder.  Monckton needs new glasses.  Here is what the satellite reveals, using the record from UAH as measured by the self same Spencer that Monckton is 'defending':

Do we need to go any further?  I mean if Monckton gets it so wrong from the start...

Alright, just to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe he had a brief seniors moment.  Let's see what he says next.  Nah, we'll skip the next three paragraphs, which are nothing but insults leveled at John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli and see what he says after that:

Nuccitelli begins by condemning Roy Spencer for saying, “No one knows whether it is currently warming, because we only see warming in the rear-view mirror, after it has occurred.” This truism is characteristic of Roy, who gently nudges the language of climate science in the direction of greater rigor. One cannot measure that it is warming, only that it has warmed.

Yet Nuccitelli, in a fine illustration of that blind faith that TH Huxley denounced in 1860 as “the one unpardonable sin”, asserts that “We absolutely do know that the planet is currently warming”.

I guess if Spencer and Monckton were dropping out of the sky they'd comfort each other by gently nudging the language of physical science in the direction of greater rigour, saying: "Don't panic! No-one knows whether we're currently falling, because we only see us falling in the rear view mirror, after it has occurred."

To paraphrase Monckton some more:

One cannot measure that we are falling, only that we have fallen! 

Oh! And how the 'mighty' have fallen!

'Nuff said!