An economist should know better, maybe ...but what about Anthony Watts?

On WUWT today Anthony Watts seems to be trying to make up for his rampant promotion of disinformation - but is he?

An economist should know better, maybe...but what about Anthony Watts?

Anthony puts up an article about someone on a radio show who doesn't understand the greenhouse effect.  She said a car heats up in the sun because of greenhouse gases, which is woefully wrong.  Someone who works for the Natural Resources Defense Council should know better. A car with all the windows and doors closed will heat up by incoming radiation from the sunlight.  As long as it's in the sun it will stay hot until you open the doors and windows to diffuse the heat (convection).

Ridicule is both powerful and satisfying...

Anthony needs to look in a mirror.  The following aren't rare occurences.  They are typical of the disinformation and ignorant ramblings he spews out daily to pollute cyberspace:

• Girma Orssengo PhD (Mech Eng) - who doesn't accept that burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide.
• Darko Buttina PhD (Org Chem) who seems to think Armagh represents the whole world, and even then doesn't know how to work out a temperature trend. And in another article doesn't know the difference between kinetic energy and IR absorption.
• The potty peer Monckton who thinks it hasn't warmed for two decades - or is it 16, 18, 19 or 23 years - or maybe 18 years. 
• Bob Tisdale - who doesn't accept that greenhouse gases warm the world and thinks it's the frolicking ENSO taking leaps and bounds by magic. Bob's eyesight is impaired - as is that of some other WUWT-ers
• Emeritus Professor and geologist Don Easterbrook PhD who also doesn't seem to accept that greenhouse gases warm the world and gets irate when people point out that Central Greenland isn't the entire world.
• Wondering Willis Eschenbach - who fudginates with curve-fitting, who wonders why land surface heats up more quickly than sea surface, who thinks that a hotter earth can't bring more intense rain and who figures that global warming is exaggerated by aeroplanes landing at remote airports a couple of times a year.
• Tony Brown who can't connect greenhouse gases to the warming world when he looks at the temperature of Central England.
• Ed Hoskins - who reckons we're on the verge of an ice age because Central England happened to be cold in 2010 (which just happened to be the equal hottest year on record globally).
• Anthony putting up one nutty excuse after another for loathing the Marcott et al (2013) study of Holocene temperatures.
• Anthony promoting a bunch of retired NASA engineers who deny the physical evidence and say that "There is no convincing physical evidence to support the man-made climate change hypothesis."
• Anthony again, touting the Lysenko conspiracy theory - that climate science is a hoax.
• This time Anthony appeals to the ugly side of deniers...
• Anthony again, who can't do arithmetic and tells big fat lies.

Pinocchio by André Koehne

Lots more from Anthony Watts, who is so paranoid about "real science" that he enrolls his dog, Kenji, to spy on his behalf at the Union of Concerned Scientists. A man who can barely attract anyone but science deniers and bans people who have no tolerance for his anti-science nonsense. A 'free market' man who despises governments but wants to run squawking and squealing to the government when someone mocks his scientific ignorance.


PS Anthony's not doing a very good job of educating his readers about the greenhouse effect - this from Latitude who says:

May 23, 2013 at 12:04 pm  so tell me again how many people believe in global warming………I’m just curious to know how many total idiots we have

It's also nice to see Kurt in Switzerland vindicating my snark blog, writing:

May 23, 2013 at 11:38 am  ...Ridicule is both powerful and satisfying, especially when the target is begging to be shot.

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"Charts are so confusing!"

Update: Anthony Watts Classic: those baffling temperature anomalies

I'd been looking for this article for a while - and thanks to Lars Karlsson in the comments below here it is.  Scroll down the page for this real gem in which different baselines get the better of Anthony:

I was surprised to learn that only 5% of the GISS data-set was on the cool side of zero, while a whopping 95% was on the warm side. Even with a rising temperature trend, this seems excessive.

When the distribution of data is so lopsided, it suggests that there may be problems with it, especially since there appears to be a 50% greater distribution on the cooler side in the HadCRUT data-set.

(Kenji whispers to Anthony: GISTemp uses a baseline of 1951-80 while HadCRUT uses a baseline of 1961-90, so of course the temperature anomaly will move above the baseline sooner with GISTemp than for HadCRUT.)

Kenji, the scientific dog, must be so embarrassed.

Dunning and Kruger at WUWT

From Darko Butina on WUWT, confusing kinetic energy with IR absorption among other things:

So if you want to find whether there is correlation between CO2 and temperatures, you don’t calculate but you measure daily concentrations of CO2 at the same place where the thermometer is. And what you will find is that it is not there since and cannot be there since it would violate all gas laws. No gas molecule of the open system, as our atmosphere is, can control temperature – it is the other way around – temperature control behaviour of gas molecules. And how do I know that – because I worked twenty years in carbon-based chemistry, used CO2 in chemical reactions and to perform chemical reaction you have to know everything that is known about molecules that are used in that chemical reaction.

The Dunning Kruger Effect in Action 

1. "...you don't calculate but you measure daily concentrations of CO2 at the same place where the thermometer is". No that's not what you do.  If you do that all you'll see is the changes in local temperatures over time at the site of a single thermometer plus an increase in CO2 that's pretty well the same as at every other place on earth. Butina's assertion is naive in the extreme.  It takes no account of land-ocean-atmosphere as a dynamic system; nor any other forcings or feedbacks; nor how CO2, H2O and other greenhouse gases work.  
2. "No gas molecule of the open system ... can control temperature - ... temperature control behaviour of gas molecules". Here Butina confuses kinetic energy of air molecules with IR absorption and emission by greenhouse gas molecules.
3. "I know that because I worked twenty years in carbon based chemistry...you have to know everything about molecules that are used in that chemical reaction". A good example of the Dunning Kruger effect.  Butina draws on his knowledge of "carbon-based chemistry" and "chemical reactions" (from when he worked in the "drug discovery sector") and tries to apply it to atmospheric physics and the physics-based properties of particular gas molecules.  He is unaware of the absorptive properties of greenhouse gases and totally ignorant of any and all climate science.

For more of Mr Butina's errors click here.

Click here for the paper by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

Click here for an article explaining the Greenhouse Effect.  It's not perfect but not too bad either.  There's more here in Wikipedia and there's an excellent booklet on the subject by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Two questions:

1. Where does Anthony Watts find these people?
2. What motivates him to promote such articles, when even Watts own band of science deniers can see they are complete and utter nonsense?

Is this the answer to question 2?

The Rabett Chimes In

Even better, Eli has just posted a lesson for Darko Butina and any other chemist or anyone at all who might benefit from such knowledge.

Denier Weirdness, Begorrah, from WUWT

WUWT gets sillier by the day

See updates here and here below and see this post about Darko's follow up article.

This is not just a silly comment from one of the WUWT rabble. It's from an article in WUWT - at the express invitation of Anthony Watts.

In the article the author, Darko Butina, claims that the global warming isn't real, based on his analysis of the temperature record at a single location, the Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. The dataset used goes from 1844 to 2004.

Darko Butina writes (I've just realised this is the actual title he's given to his twenty page 'paper'. What a laugh!):

Should We Worry About the Earth’s Calculated Warming at 0.7OC Over Last the Last 100 Years When the Observed Daily Variations Over the Last 161 Years Can Be as High as 24 (degrees) C?

Good grief - I guess he's not experienced the Chinook:

In Pincher Creek, the temperature rose by 41°C (74°F), from -19 to 22°C (-2 to 72°F), in one hour in 1962.

And there's more:

So if one wants, for some bizarre reason, to compare two annual patterns then one year can be unequivocally declared as warmer only if each daily reading of that year is larger than each corresponding daily reading of another year:

Really? Here is an example to illustrate what Butina would have you think.  Butina's thesis would be that Week 1 below was not hotter than Week 2 because not every day of Week 1 was hotter than the same day in Week 2.

As more astute WUWT commenters observe:

lsvalgaard says:
April 15, 2013 at 2:22 pm Troed Sångberg says: April 15, 2013 at 1:56 pm

but claiming that every single day over the year would need to be warmer than every single day another seems to stretch things a bit. If “day”, then why not “hour”, “millisecond” or “three week period”? It becomes quite arbitrary.

More than arbitrary: nonsense. Why not “century”, or “decade” as well? There is no doubt that Houston, TX is hotter than San Diego, CHA, but there are every year days with temperatures below 25F in Houston, but never in San Diego.

How not to determine temperature trends

Let's leave aside the fact that Darko Butina bases his dismissal of global warming on a single location in Northern Ireland. We'll look at how he determines the temperature trend despite having more than 150 years of detailed temperature observations at his disposal:

Can we detect unambiguous warming trend over 161 years at Armagh (UK) in thermometer data? All we need to do is to take difference between the youngest (2004) and the oldest (1844) annual fingerprints and display it as a histogram:

No, that is not "all we need to do".  Taking the difference between same day readings (ie 1st January compared with 1st January through to 31 December compared with 31 December) over two different years will not yield nearly as much information as would a series. In fact, it probably wouldn't tell you anything at all.

By contrast, here is the chart of the mean annual temperature at the Armagh Observatory, plotted with a ten year moving average (red line).  The chart is based on these data:

The data for the above chart were compiled by the same people who compiled the daily set used by the author of the WUWT article.

Does it prove or disprove global warming? Of course not.  It shows the temperature trends at Armagh in Northern Ireland.  It indicates that at Armagh Observatory there was a cooling trend to the 1870s, then a warming trend, then a slight cooling in the sixties and seventies followed by a more rapid warming since the late 1970s.

There's more...

There is a lot of other silliness in the article, such as:

Thermometer reading of 15.1 has several links attached to it that cannot be broken: it is linked to a unique grid point, unique date and time stamp, unique instrument – thermometer and that thermometer to unique symbol (OC). So if someone wants to analyse any temperature trends those trends have to come from thermometer readings; it follows that if thermometer to be used is calibrated using Celsius scale, no datapoint can be older than 1743, follow link to Anders Celsius.

Surely he is not saying that the entire history of Armagh observations were recorded in degrees Celsius? (They weren't.)  Or that degrees Fahrenheit cannot be converted to degrees Celsius?

Put on a head vice if you decide to read the article.

Anthony Watts seems to be getting sillier by the day inviting nonsense like this to his blog.  At least some of the commenters are a bit more discerning than he is.

Update:

Just for fun I subtracted the daily maximum temperatures in 1844 from those in 2004 and took an average of the daily difference for each month.  The result is shown as a chart below. The chart doesn't actually tell us anything much more than that 2004 was hotter in seven months out of twelve in 2004, and by a fairly large margin in February, August and December.

All the chart above suggests is that no two years are ever the same (more precisely, these two years were not the same). To see the trend over time you'd need to look at a time series (as above), not just compare two years of data.

Update 2:

Richard Telford has done some different calculations on his blog.  Worth a look see.