WUWT conspiracy theorists think Scott Pruitt can change physics

Greenhouse Effect. Credit/Source: NASA

The crazies at WUWT are still out in force. I'd say they've taken over Anthony Watts' blog, WUWT.

After EPA administrator Scott Pruitt admitted on television that global warming is happening, but all but rejected that it was caused by an increase in greenhouse gases, the crazies at WUWT went berserk (archived here). A chap who writes nonsense there from time to time, David Middleton, wrote how "of course" the EPA website still has science on it. His theory was that it was only because Pruitt hasn't yet got to it on his "to do" list. He thinks that soon enough Pruitt will replace any science on EPA's website with quackery.

Do WUWT-ers live on another planet? Dim Denier David Middleton takes on science journalist Seth Borenstein

At WUWT, Anthony Watts has posted another article by David Middleton (archived here) who asks: "Is Seth Borenstein a journalist or a political activist?". He adds "This should matter to the associated press, but clearly doesn't." David described a recent article by award-winning journalist Seth Borenstein as "a particularly ignorant rant" and then proceeded to write a particularly ignorant rant on the conspiracy blog WUWT.

Seth Borenstein's article is part of the series called "Why It Matters", which is examining three dozen issues at stake in the presidential election in the USA. In this particular article, Seth Borenstein begins by comparing what Hillary Clinton says about climate change with what Donald Trump has been saying. He said "it's as if Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump live on two entirely different planets: one warming, one not." You can guess which planet Donald Trump thinks he lives upon.

Desperate Deniers Part 2: David Middleton fakes satellite data "Just for grins"

This is the second article in the Desperate Deniers series and is about David Middleton's deception. In the first article, I posted charts of the global mean surface temperature from four different sources: the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, GISS NASA (USA), NOAA (USA) and Berkeley Earth (USA). Below is the chart that probably explains best why climate science deniers are so desperate:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature from four datasets. The 2015 line is the average of the 2015 temperature from all four sources. Data sources: GISS NASA, UK Met Office, NOAA, Berkeley Earth.

David Middleton is hot and bothered by the spurt and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation

As you know, Anthony Watts (quite wisely) mostly uses guests to write freeby articles for his blog. He gets into too much trouble when he tries to write something all by himself. Anthony doesn't need to determine whether his guests write nonsense or not. His good friend Wondering Willis Eschenbach gave him an "out" writing: "So it is not Anthony’s job to determine whether or not the work of the guest authors will stand the harsh light of public exposure. That’s the job of the peer reviewers, who are you and I and everyone making defensible supported scientific comments. Even if Anthony had a year to analyze and dissect each piece, he couldn’t do that job..." Yes, even his close allies think Anthony's incapable of distinguishing pseudo-scientific waffle from science.

Today Anthony's posted another article by David Middleton. This time David is waffling on about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO is measured by an index. As Kevin Trenberth explained it in a recent Perspective article in Science (my paras):

Ice age deferred stymies David Middleton at WUWT

Anthony Watts has posted another ice age article at WUWT (archived here, cached here). This time, instread of it being an "ice age cometh" article, it's an "ice age isn't coming" article. The WUWT article is by David Middleton, who is one of Anthony's pet deniers. He was writing about a new paper in Nature about how we've deferred one and may possibly defer two major glaciations. We're certainly going to perceptibly affect the climate for more than 100,000 years ahead.

It's been known for some time that we've deferred major glaciations

The fact we've deferred at least one glaciation won't be news to anyone who's familiar with previous work on the subject. The fact we may have deferred two might well be news, although mathematician and astronomer Sir Robert Ball predicted it would take 200,000 years way back in 1906:

Only 8% of Americans think climate change is "natural" but you wouldn't know it from the WUWT headline!**

Science deniers at WUWT are complaining that a lot of Americans know more about climate change than WUWT conspiracy theorists know. It turns out that a lot of Americans still don't know much of anything at all about climate change, but the majority do know something. That's according to a poll reported by WUWT (and probably some other climate conspiracy blogs), as well as various media outlets. The poll was conducted by Monmouth University. Anthony Watts has a guest article by David Middleton. The headline reads:

Poll: 73% of Americans reject so-called AGW consensus (but you wouldn’t know it from the headline)

Now what that shows is that David Middleton, unusually for a science denier, understands that since around the middle of last century, the scientific consensus is that probably all the warming we've had is because of human activity.  What has shocked him is that the media reports it differently. He's appalled at a headline that reads:

Poll: 70 percent believe in climate change

So am I, but for different reasons. From where I sit (in Australia) it should read: "Poll: 70 per cent believe in climate change" or better yet: "61% in the USA know that humans are contributing to climate change".

Satellites rule in deniersville, except when sea levels are rising

Science deniers at WUWT are a funny lot. Their sole purpose in visiting denier blogs seems to be to sing the refrain "it's not happening", with the occasional faint chorus of "if it is it's not bad". WUWT deniers in the main haven't got quite as far as "if it is bad, there's nothing we can do about it".

Some of Anthony Watts' guest articles are good illustrations of that. There was a "guest essay" by David Middleton  yesterday (archived here) about a press release on the NASA website about how quickly sea levels may rise.  The press release was consistent with other recent estimates that seas will probably have risen by a metre or more by the end of this century or early the next, particularly if we stay on our current emissions trajectory (and maybe even if we don't).

David Middleton, who you might recall thinks all lizards are the same, wanted to reject the NASA article outright, claiming that "The only way sea level rise could approach the high end of the IPCC range is if it exponentially accelerates…". And he drew a chart with an exponential curve. Having made that wrong statement and putting up his exponential chart, he then drew a wrong conclusion, writing: "The rate from 2081-2100 would have to average 20 mm per year, twice that of the Holocene Transgression. This is only possible in bad science fiction movies."

One major flaw in David's argument was that he assumed that seas would rise according to some smooth chart, either linearly or exponentially. What he failed to factor in was that the main contribution to sea level over coming decades will be from melting ice. Another major flaw was that he himself used data and referenced a paper that showed that seas have risen at more than double his "impossible" rate in the relatively recent past.

How David Middleton mixes up his lizards at WUWT: hot vs cold climates, eggs vs live birth

David Middleton thinks he's hit gold at Australia's ABC (archived here). What he's hit is amber. He should have heeded the warning. David wrote about an article that describes how a team of scientists, led by Dr Emma Sherratt of UNE, looked at lizards fossilised  in amber, from the Caribbean.

Amber means "stop"
(and think)

The ABC article (not the WUWT article, so much!) is about a paper in PNAS, which has this to say:

An unresolved question in ecology is whether the structure of ecological communities can be stable over very long timescales. Here we describe a wealth of new amber fossils for an ancient radiation of Hispaniolan lizards that, until now, has had a very poor fossil record. These fossils provide an important and previously unavailable perspective on an ecologically well-studied group and indicate that anole lizard communities occurring on Hispaniola 20 Mya were made up of the same types of habitat specialists present in this group today. These data indicate that the ecological processes important in extant anole communities have been operative over long periods of time.

This video is from Emma Sherratt, showing her amber-fossilized lizards - beautiful. Something you won't see at WUWT:

David Middleton calls on denier consensus to deride scientific consensus

While Anthony Watts is taking a break he's handed over his blog to other deniers. One of these is a bloke called David Middleton, who has written two articles in the past few days. He's all over the place with no coherency, dredging up one denier meme after another.

Today his article is as scatty as any other (archived here). I gather that he's a greenhouse effect denier because he is madly trying to reject the fact that human emissions of greenhouse gases have caused the world to warm.

One thing that you'll notice if you bother to wade through his nonsense is that he objects to the fact that all the science points to the cause of the recent global warming. He complains a lot about scientific consensus. One of his main arguments against scientific consensus is that a lot of petroleum geologists and engineers (not climate scientists) from Alberta are climate science deniers. (I've written about that study before.) For example, he wrote:

So, it should come as little surprise that geoscientists have consistently been far more likely to think that modern climate changes have been driven by overwhelmingly natural processes…

He also called on the AMS survey I've also written about before, where a lot of US meteorologists - not researchers - basically weather announcers - rejected climate science.

In other words, David calls on consensus among deniers to refute consensus among scientists.

Did I say that climate science deniers are consistently inconsistent?

Incidentally, David Middleton misrepresented both studies, which is par for the course for deniers.

Murry Salby, plus Middleton Recycling memes at WUWT

Murry Salby and his strange ideas

There is nothing much on Anthony Watts' blog, WUWT to write about.  There was some initial swooning over Murry Salby (whose name Anthony got wrong).

According to Pierre Gosselin whose article Anthony Watts quoted: If anyone ever demolished the dubious CO2 AGW science, it’s Salby!  

If that's the best the fake skeptics can come up with then they'll be disappointed.



The presentation drew the usual gaggle of insightful comments such as:

• June 10, 2013 at 9:56 am  Go Murry!
• June 10, 2013 at 10:13 am Couldn’t have put it better myself :-)
• June 10, 2013 at 11:02 am A Man of science without a doubt.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:05 am Strong words of wisdom.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:10 am Great speaker, and impressive finale.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:24 am Brilliant.

I was a bit mystified by this question from Solomon Green.  I wonder what he's getting at here:

June 11, 2013 at 4:54 am ...why do so many commentators equate AGW with human release of CO2? Surely humans can increase temperatures, both locally and globally, without necessarily increasing CO2 levels? ...

Further down in the thread people started finding flaws in Salby's ideas.  I'm not going to waste any more space on Salby.  If you are curious about Salby and his odd notions, there is this article and more on SkepticalScience.com.

David Middleton resurrecting old Time magazine articles

And there was David Middleton, recycling the myth that "they said it was cooling in the 70s".  Which as far as I can gather may be another case of "the USA is the world world, nowhere else exists".

Here's the result of a 2008 study of the scientific literature, demonstrating the building up of the consensus on global warming and the fact that out of 71 scientific papers written between 1965 and 1979, there were only seven that "predicted, implied or provided supporting evidence" for global cooling compared to 44 for warming.

Source: Peterson et al (2008)

An Australian Perspective on Warming and Cooling

I've been looking at old newspaper clippings from Australia and have posted a few showing real concern about the possibility of global warming in the 1940s.  So much so that the first international collaboration of scientific experts was sent to Antarctica in 1949 to see if the warming trend seen in the Arctic was evident down there.

As for articles from Australia in the 1970s, there are a few.  They were a mixed bag.  Here is an excerpt from a much longer article in The Canberra Times on Tuesday 8 May 1973, right in the middle of the so-called cooling scare.  The main article was about the widespread droughts in Africa, India, Central America, Asia and Cyprus.  At the end of the article was some discussion of global temperature and climate.  Here is an excerpt (my bold):

Scientists agree that the droughts and freakish weather over many parts of the world might signal global changes in climate and some experts are even wondering if another ice age is on its way. 

The climatic situation is complicated by the largely unknown effects of man made pollution and there are contradictory theories. 

Heat pollution, as energy is consumed at an increasing rate, is sure to effect the weather to some extent by warming the upper atmosphere. But more dust in the atmosphere could balance this by reflecting the sun's rays back into space. 

Temperature 
Some American researchers have noted that in a five-year period the mean temperature of the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere fell by more than half a degree Celsius, but were careful to say that this was likely to be a short-term fluctuation. 

Some Soviet meteorologists maintain that the climate of Northern Europe, Asia and America will get "markedly warmer" by the year 2000 and link this with the known recession of the polar ice. 

In Australia during the 1970s there was very infrequent speculation in newspaper and magazine articles mentioning the possibility of an ice age but not much.  It looks as if the spate of articles that WUWT-ers remember were probably mostly in the USA.  I don't know about Europe.

Australian newspaper articles on global warming - 1957 and 1972

Of more interest are articles like this one from 1957 on global warming from CO2 emissions associated with industry.  That's a couple of years before Keeling started to measure atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa.  And this one from 1972 on fears about melting of the Arctic sea ice.

Watts is Whopping Mad (Crazy) after Marcott et al - Must be the Heat!

NOTE: The Marcott et al (2013) paper and supplementary material is available at Science and an FAQ is now available on RealClimate.


Comment: 1 April 2013: Marcott for Dummies is out.  However, Anthony Watts (in his seventeenth protest article) and the Auditor demonstrate that even after all this time and all their protests they still haven't even read the paper, claiming that Marcott et al "finally concede" something that was stated at the outset in the paper itself (page 1198).

The Auditor and his brigade are not at all grateful for the extra effort made by the researchers to explain their work to the layperson, and appear to be still trying to claim we are in the middle of the Little Ice Age and focusing on core tops instead of the core!

They obviously do not understand the connect between the modern record and the paleo record, even after years of nit-picking climate research.  And I wonder will the 8% Dismissives heed this part of the FAQ:

Just as it would not be reasonable to use the recent instrumental temperature history from Greenland (for example) as being representative of the planet as a whole...

The Auditor's cronies continue to make wild unfounded accusations. Conspiracy ideation most definitely (no wonder they don't like Lewandowsky and others showing them up in their true colours).

Click here for an expanded version of this comment.


Update 2+  So far there are now three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight WUWT protest articles not counting the sleazeball's (approaching this might even beat the number of protests against the Lewandowsky et al paper).  The first few are touched on in this article.

(Comment 20 March 2013: I have looked through the WUWT articles and a lot of the comments.  Anthony Watts, his guest posters and commenters provide an excellent illustration of warped mental models, ignorance, illogical thinking, dogmatism, conspiracy ideation, a preference for coloured pictures and avoidance of text, and the Dunning Kruger effect as well as the lynch mob mentality.  It is also apparent that he has successfully rid his blog of all but maybe one person who is willing to consider scientific research.  Watts' blog is aimed squarely at the bottom 8%.)

Of the rest, as with all the early protests, none of the protesters has indicated they understand the paper.  Neither are the protesters interested in the overall reconstruction.  It's the early part of the reconstruction that has filled in the gaps.  There are already several reconstructions of the last several centuries, some even going back 1500 to 2000 years.  In fact the protesters seem to be focusing not on the main substance of the paper but on the past 100 years or so.  Odd, don't you think?

Now they are focusing entirely on this century rather than the entirety of the Holocene.  If I understand Watts/McIntyre correctly, they are saying that there is an "error" in Marcott et al, which means earth hasn't been warming after all and we are actually still in the Little Ice Age.

• Protest 6 is almost identical to Protest Number 4. 
• In Protest Number 7, Willis Eschenbach wants the raw data in the published paper, not satisfied with it being provided as a supplement.  Steve McIntyre is, as usual, "baffled".  
• In Protest Number 8, Fred Singer misquotes Marcott so he can shoot him down.  Singer 'suspects what they did was' without appearing to be in the least interested in looking at the paper to see if what he 'suspects' was fact. 
• Watts returns with Protest Number 9. Watts cannot figure out how anyone could know that the world has got a lot hotter over the past few decades, forgetting about the thermometers that were giving him so much grief only a few weeks ago, the melting arctic and all the other signals of our warming world.  Neither can he understand how a paper jointly authored by four people and published in 2013 could differ in the slightest degree (sic) from the lead author's PhD thesis published two years earlier.
• Watts' Protest Number 10 is based on The Auditor's obsessive 'speculation' despite his being 'unable to replicate some of the recent features of the Marcott zonal reconstructions', though he admits it 'may be a difference in methodology'.
• In Watts' Protest Number 11, Anthony shows that The Auditor has been fiddling with numbers (ignoring the substance of the paper) and posits he has found a 'statistical processing error (selection bias)'.  Makes me think of the saying: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'!
• In Watts' Protest Number 12, Anthony proclaims that The Auditor has found an 'error'.  In fact he seems to be saying we have not yet emerged from the Little Ice Age!!!  (Fools rush in!)  Prof Peter Clark, co-author of the Marcott et al paper, has said they will prepare and provide an FAQ (a Marcott et al for dummies) which may (or may not) help McIntyre's 'bafflement'.

Near enough is good enough if it fools enough! (see below)

---

A paper published in the current issue of Science is getting some publicity.  According to this recent research, in just a few decades we have managed to extricate ourselves from one of the coldest periods since civilisation began to begin the hottest period.  And who knows when it will stop getting hotter.

The authors, Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark and Alan C. Mix have done a reconstruction of Holocene temperatures in a paper titled "A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years".  You can get the paper and supplementary data here (subs required).

Here are two diagrams from the paper, showing one of their analyses.  A shows the past 2,000 years compared with Mann et al (2008). B shows the same but going back 11,500 years before present (1950). (Click on any of the images in this article to see a larger version.)

Globally stacked temperature anomalies for the 5° × 5° area-weighted mean calculation (purple line) with its 1σ uncertainty (blue band) and Mann et al.'s global CRU-EIV composite mean temperature (dark gray line) with their uncertainty (light gray band).

The findings are not earth-shattering in that the research accords with what is already known.  It is a very valuable contribution because it adds to and greatly refines existing knowledge.  The beauty of the research is that it uses proxies from 73 sites around the globe, whereas previously much of what was known about temperatures in the early Holocene was based on ice cores or other more limited data.

What the Papers Say

Justin Gillis of the New York Times has a written short article on their findings.  Other articles can be found Dot Earth (NY Times), Mother Jones, New Scientist, CNN and the LA Times, among other places.

.

What Science says

From the Editor's Summary in Science:

Exceptional Now
The climate has been warming since the industrial revolution, but how warm is climate now compared with the rest of the Holocene? Marcott et al. (p. 1198) constructed a record of global mean surface temperature for more than the last 11,000 years, using a variety of land- and marine-based proxy data from all around the world. The pattern of temperatures shows a rise as the world emerged from the last deglaciation, warm conditions until the middle of the Holocene, and a cooling trend over the next 5000 years that culminated around 200 years ago in the Little Ice Age. Temperatures have risen steadily since then, leaving us now with a global temperature higher than those during 90% of the entire Holocene.

The paper's abstract:

Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

What Deniers Say

Deniers really don't like the Marcott et al paper.  Already Anthony Watts has posted five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one twenty-two twenty-three twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six twenty-seven twenty-eight articles in protest. (See update below).

Article 1: Watts is Wrong, Wrong and Wrong again!

Watts Wrong !

In Anthony's first article he scoffed at the Mother Jones headline then demonstrated he hadn't read either Mother Jones or the paper itself, writing:

Yes, be afraid, very afraid, of that “unprecedented” (there’s that word again in the abstract) 0.7C temperature rise is the message I suppose.

No Anthony, you suppose wrong.  The take away message of most people is two-fold.

1. The bigger message (for the general public) is the current rate of change is unprecedented in the Holocene (and probably in millions of years).  
2. The second message is that if it isn't already, the world will soon be hotter than at any time since the beginning of civilisation.

Watts Wrong 2

Then Anthony adds to his errors, writing:

...One potential problem is that the pollen data median sampling of 120 years, which is 4x the 30 year climate normals periods used today. That’s pretty low resolution for a study that is focusing on 2000 years and leaves lots of opportunity to miss data.

Wrong again, Anthony.  The study does not just focus on 2000 years, it looks at the entire Holocene.  It looks at 11,500 years.  (And what is he on about 'missing data'?  The data is what the data is and is discussed at length in the paper and supplementary materials.)

Watts Wrong 3

Anthony compounds his errors by getting it wrong once again (all these quotes are from a single paragraph, incidentally.)

Further, when they say the last 100 years was the warmest (with higher resolution data) they really aren’t comparing similar data sets when the other data has a 120 year median sampling.

No Anthony.  "they" didn't say the last 100 years was the warmest.  Marcott et al's research suggests that we may only now be approaching the highest temperatures, which according to their research occurred during the Holocene Optimum (between about 9,000 and 5,000 years ago).

Article 2: JustNotTheFactsWUWT

In his second article, guest poster (?) "justthefactswuwt" complains about something in the CNN report of the paper.  I was not able to work out the passage that justthefactswuwt was complaining about.  He said that CNN attributed warming pre-1950 to human causes, but didn't post any passage that actually said that. (In any case, there was undoubtedly some human influence on the temperature rise before 1950, given that CO2 rose from 280 prior to industrialisation to 316 in 1959.)

Article 3: Watts third strike - and he's out (with the fairies)!

Watts reverts to form in his third article.  Do you recall the comment he made in his first article?

...they really aren’t comparing similar data sets...

Not heeding his own "advice", Watts proceeds to tack Marcott's chart onto a denialist's clumsy (and faulty) drawing of past temperatures on Central Greenland's ice sheet:

Too wrong for words

• Is Watts really that ignorant, even after blogging on climate for several years? Does he really think that global temperatures fluctuated by more than 3 degrees Celsius in the past 9,000 years?  Does he really not know that he was trying to compare temperature trends on Central Greenland's ice sheet with a global reconstruction?
• How does he justify chopping off 9,500 years of the Marcott et al reconstruction of global surface temperature and superimposing what's left of it onto some denier's drawing of temperatures in Central Greenland?

Not only that, but he claims his drawing is from Alley (2000), which it most certainly is not.  The chart may be derived from GISP2 data, but is incorrectly labelled (before present = before 1950 not before 2000).  The data used is based on this - the temperature in Central Greenland - not global temperature.  

Here is a chart of the Central Greenland (GISP2) temperature for the full period covered by Watts' denialist drawing, based on this data accessed from this site, with the rectangle showing Watt's cutout period above:

For comparison, here is a chart of the full data set of Central Greenland temperatures from the same source as referred to by Alley (2000), with a rectangle showing the above time period:

Neither of the above can be used to indicate global temperatures.  They represent temperatures on the ice sheet in Central Greenland.

It must be the heat

Anthony Watts seems to be getting more and more erratic and silly as time goes by.  Must be the heat.

Update: Two more protest articles on WUWT

You could hear fake skeptic screeches zooming around cyberspace when Marcott et al compared their global reconstruction to the Mann et al global reconstruction.  So what do the fake skeptics do in "protest"?  At WUWT they turn around and say "we'll show you!" and proceed to:

• tack a single site arctic temperature series onto a global reconstruction and
• tack a single site modern land based record onto sea surface temperatures of a 15,000+ year paleo proxy series (single site).

Here are the gory details:

1. Don Easterbrook has effectively repeated Watts' third post, comparing a global reconstruction with a single location in the Arctic (using the same flawed drawing of the latter). (Update) Don is persisting with this silliness in yet another post, apparently arguing the average global surface temperature of earth is around minus 30 degrees Celsius /s.

2. David Middleton has selected a single proxy set, Marcott No.2 from Barron et al. 2003 N. Coastal California High Res. Holocene/Pleistocene Oceanographic Data - 41.682 N, 124.930 W, 980 m water depth.

David plots the published sea surface temperature (SST) for Marcott No. 2 (which starts about 210 years ago and goes back 15,000 years or so) and tacks on a temperature series from a land-based location, Grants Pass (42.4 N,123.3 W) which goes back to around 1890 (approx 120 years).  

Then David reduces the nearby land surface temperature record to a single data point for some reason (how/why he selected that temperature data point he didn't say - maybe he took the mid-point of the fast rising series). 

Near enough is good enough if it fools enough! 

David Middleton hasn't clarified why he did what he did, tacking on a single modern land-based surface temperature series to a single paleo series of sea surface temperatures. It could be the same reason that Don Easterbrook and Anthony Watts tacked the Marcott et al global reconstruction onto a reconstruction of temperatures in Central Greenland. A "near enough is good enough if it fools enough" philosophy not uncommon with fake skeptics.

The commenters seem to be concluding that Don and David have discovered 'flaws', but no-one has identified just what those supposed 'flaws' are. (Going by past WUWT performance, the mere fact of having an article on WUWT is enough for the throng to decide the author has proved "all the models are wrong"! Said article doesn't have to make any sense.)

Quick - We've Got to Hide the Incline

The WUWT folk are bending over backward trying to find a flaw in Marcott et al.  Why this study?  They don't like the fact that it's warming rapidly and are looking for ways to hide the incline.