Sides - to fry or not to fry, or covfefe? WUWT is a haven of climate science denial

Anthony Watts is running another poll on his blog wattsupwiththat, to see how many of his readers accept science and want to mitigate global warming. He's done this before. A few years ago he found that 98.1% of his readers declared themselves as "skeptics", meaning they are conspiracy theorising climate science deniers. Today he wants to test his readership again, to make sure he's still got what it takes among the dimwit dismissives. He wrote about "sides":

Since WUWT is read by both sides of the issue, I thought I’d run a poll to ask, so here goes.

More WUWT denier weirdness:- Monckton's 8% Dismissives plus another glimpse into "mad, mad, mad" Steve Goreham's world

Today at Anthony Watts' denier blog, wattsupwiththat (WUWT), Anthony provides two more examples of denier weirdness.

Monckton highlights the 8% Dismissives

Christopher Monckton doesn't like the scientific consensus that humans are warming the world.  He's taken a particular dislike to Cook et al (2013), which is the most recent of several papers that demonstrate how great is the consensus. (97% of papers that attribute a cause to global warming attribute it to human activity.)

So he's decided to write a letter to the editor of the journal that published Cook13 - ERL.  Then he had another idea and has now decided to send a copy to every member of the editorial board of the journal. (See Christopher's original version archived here, and his later version archived here.)

Christopher's said he wants to "crowd-source" signatories so has asked for the help of the readers at Anthony Watts denier blog - wattsupwiththat.com (WUWT).  I was interested in seeing who put their names to the letter.  I reckon what he's done is highlight the difference between the denier commenters.  The couple of hundred people who want their names on Christopher's silly letter are the 8% Dismissives.  People like "shouty" Richardscourtney, "holy moly" crawler Janice Moore and sock-puppet dbstealey (AKA Smokey). There are a number of prolific WUWT  commenters who are conspicuous by their absence - so far at any rate (eg Greg Goodman, Pamela Gray and M Courtney). These are people who tend towards being "lukewarmer" deniers - plus of course the one or two real sceptics who Anthony Watts hasn't banned yet.

If anyone ever does any research on categorising the different types of deniers at wattsupwiththat, this thread of Christopher Monckton's is worth noting. (By the way, the article is just another rehash of Christopher's nonsensical arithmetical failures.)

Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham fazed by rising seas

Anthony Watts has posted another article by Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham at WUWT.  The last one was about the Not the IPCC report.  This one is about sea level (archived here).

Steve's article is a good example of the logical fallacy of personal incredulity.  He doesn't "believe" that there are scientific instruments and analytic techniques that can measure sea level with the accuracy and precision reported by scientists.  Because he doesn't "believe" it, he reckons it can't be true.

Just like deniers often go to SkepticalScience.com's list of most common denier myths to decide what they'll try on today, it looks as if Steve went to U Colorado's FAQ on sea level to try on his "I don't believe it" rubbish.  Some examples of Steve's "personal incredulity" argument:

Steve: they claim to be able to measure ocean level to a high degree of accuracy. But a look at natural ocean variation shows that official sea level measurements are nonsense. 

From the FAQ:

The satellite altimeter estimate of interest is the distance between the sea surface illuminated by the radar altimeter and the center of the Earth (geocentric sea surface height or SSH). This distance is estimated by subtracting the measured distance between the satellite and sea surface (after correcting for many effects on the radar signal) from the very precise orbit of the satellite. At any location, the SSH changes over time due to many well understood factors (ocean tides, atmospheric pressure, glacial isostatic adjustment, etc.). By subtracting from the measured SSH an a priori mean sea surface (MSS), such as the CLS01 mean sea surface, and these known time-varying effects, we compute the sea surface height anomalies (SSHA). Each point in the global mean sea level (GMSL) time series plots is the area-weighted mean of all of the sea surface height anomalies measured by the altimeter in a single, 10-day satellite track repeat cycle (time for the satellite to begin repeating the same ground track). 

Another "I don't believe it" from Steve:

Steve: But three millimeters is about the thickness of two dimes. Can scientists really measure a change in sea level over the course of a year, averaged across the world, which is two dimes thick?

From the FAQ, - yes they can.  The FAQ states that the estimated error is just 0.4 mm/yr.  If you're a fanatical fact checker, you'll notice that Steve isn't very precise himself.  A dime is 1.35 mm thick.  Two dimes are 2.7 mm thick.  The current sea level trend is 3.2 mm +/- 0.4 mm a year.


Steve wonders how the accuracy can be as stated when a single measurement is only accurate to to the nearest centimetre.  What he is missing is that there are lots and lots (and lots!) of measurements taken so the error is hugely reduced.  The higher the number of measurements the lower the measurement error.  Overs and unders cancel out.  From the FAQ:

Each point in the global mean sea level (GMSL) time series plots is the area-weighted mean of all of the sea surface height anomalies measured by the altimeter in a single, 10-day satellite track repeat cycle (time for the satellite to begin repeating the same ground track).  

Steve concludes that the number that the scientists come up with isn't from scientific analysis and mathematics, it's from what he calls "group think".  Which is another way of saying that Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham doesn't understand scientific measurement.  (There are different sources of error other than measurement error, which the scientists attempt to address, and they touch on how they do this in the FAQ.)

Spot the fallacy and the error

Steve commits many logical fallacies in his article but this next one is a beauty:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2007, “Global average sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year over 1961 to 2003. The rate was faster over 1993 to 2003: about 3.1 mm per year.” This translates to a 100-year rise of only 7 inches and 12 inches, far below the dire predictions of the climate alarmists.

He's saying that because the actual sea level rise to date isn't as big as projections to 2100 (as ice sheets melt more), the future projections are wrong!  That's like saying - it was cold in Chicago last December so it couldn't possibly be hot in Chicago in July.

Seas are rising about as fast as projected back in 1990

I will point out that Steve Goreham is not correct in regard to near term being "far below dire predictions", if you look at the chapter on sea level in the first IPCC report (1990) - in which there is a lot of discussion of uncertainty - it summarises the known science at the time making projections for the near term (see p 275 here):

In general, most of the studies in Table 9.9 foresee a sea level rise of somewhere between 10cm and 30cm over the next four decades.  

These projections from the 1990 IPCC report are within the ballpark of the observed trend since 1993 of 3.2 cm a decade which, if sustained, would mean 12.8 cm over four decades. There are still almost two decades to go though.

Source: U Colorado

Note: I've corrected this section from the original - where my own arithmetic was flawed!!

Climate Wars Linger: Anthony Rallies the Lynch Mob Again to Attack Michael Mann and Global Warming

Update: Anthony advises that it wasn't him who took a swipe at creationists, it was an emailer called Robert Scheaffer.  Anthony just provided links to his Marcott protests etc (which I've improved upon by linking to better articles).  Anthony says he is off at a "conference" organised by the fake oregon petition crowd.  The meeting has a very mixed up line-up of speakers and topics, ranging from climate science denial to silicosis denial and lots in between - mostly the crank end of right wing ideology from the look of it.



Anthony Watts went away for a couple of days and all he left his audience was an open thread that fizzled out slowly along with one of their new/past heroes, ending up with a few posts about "energy can be made out of nothing" (aka the E-Cat hoax).  Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale wrote an article about current sea surface temperatures, in which he said nothing except the ocean warms by magic and there's a colder than normal patch somewhere.  WUWT was so slow that even Bob's article has earned him 43 45 comments.  Wondering Willis tried to do his bit with a third or is it his fourth post in as many days complaining about the carbon tax in British Columbia and showing that the 6.67 cents/litre carbon tax on petrol (around 5%) hasn't prevented British Columbians from driving their motor cars altogether.  Though it does seem to be helping reduce carbon emissions.

Bash the Mann

Time to get the mob stirred up, thought Anthony.  There has only been one this week and few this month, so maybe I'll give the lynch mob a bit of a lift by having another Mann-bashing session.

He knew he didn't have to do any more than write the name "Mann", but probably because it had been such a fizzer of a week, he added this (I amended some of his hyperlinks to point to better information sources):

The Amazing Mann just told TAM (The Amazing Meeting of the Skeptics Society) that there has been no pause in Global Warming, and says claims that there has been are just ‘Cherry Picking’.

Also he used Marcott et al. as proof that his Hockey Stick is valid.

Surely he must know that the authors themselves disavow that conclusion!! Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.

Anthony is wrong, of course, as usual, as ever.  The hockey stick is valid and was further validated by numerous other reconstructions including Marcott et al, and the modern record - and every new reconstruction continues to confirm it.

Anthony manages to take a swipe at the intellectual capability of attendees at this year's The Amaz!ng Meeting as well as get in a thirty-something'th protest at Marcott et al, (along the way implying he also doesn't accept any of the modern datasets that use the instrumental record of global surface temperatures).

Marcott et al (2013) 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).

About that so-called "pause" in global warming, the evidence shows the world is still warming.  Here are some indicators in an animated gif:

Data sources: NASA GISTemp, NODC/NOAA Ocean Heat, U Colorado sea level, PIOMAS Arctic Ice 

And to put the recent warming in perspective, here is my adaptation of Jos Hagelaars' composite showing where we've been and where we are heading:

Source: Jos Hagelaars

However, back on WUWT the world's 8% Dismissives gather to deny all the signs of global warming. Anthony gets the reaction he's looking for, with words like "delusional", "lying", "fiction", "fantasy" and some rather ugly terms that are allowed on WUWT but only if you are a science denier.  His thread brings out the diversity of his followers - ranging from right-wing extremists, Christian fundamentalists, run-of-the-mill illiterati, "Ice Age Cometh"-ers through to "I don't understand it but I know what I (don't) like" ordinary old science deniers - who at least know how to toss out ad homs when Anthony tells them to.

Anthony in his own small way is proving what Professor Mann describes in his book:

The lynch mob rallies to the call

Eric Worrall says:

July 13, 2013 at 4:14 pm  Is he deliberately lying? Or is he delusional?... (blah blah blah)...

Eric Worrall was really worked up because he immediately follows up his first comment with this:

July 13, 2013 at 4:15 pm  What is going through his head when he says things like that? Does he think the pause is a temporary blip, that all he has to do is bluff it out until it ends?

Chuck L says:

July 13, 2013 at 4:35 pm  It is remarkable that he sticks to his fiction/fantasy in the face of facts and data. I guess he’ll be the last one left on AGW ship.

GlynnMhor uses a denier analogy, and impolitely writes:

July 13, 2013 at 4:36 pm If we don’t feed the monkey, won’t it just throw feces at us?

Mike Jowsey says:

July 13, 2013 at 4:49 pm  With fingers in ears, shouting “Nya nya nya, I can’t hear you”, he denies the reality. Would this classify him as an evildoer denier?

GeoLurking says:

July 13, 2013 at 4:30 pm  He’s a buffoon… nothing more, nothing less. He leaps and squeals for a banana. Don’t feed him, you’ll just encourage him.

DR objects to any entity that investigates facts:

July 13, 2013 at 8:23 pm The Randi Forum is anything but skeptics…..it is basically Media Matters for global warming fanatics.

Eliza has something wrong twixt the keyboard and brain and writes:

July 13, 2013 at 9:12 pm This can only ,eran that Mann universityinvented the Hockey Stick nThe guy is a looney how dare he be allowed withinnthe confines of a

Eliza says: July 13, 2013 at 9:12 pm a university my bad

Per Strandberg (@LittleIceAge) says:

July 14, 2013 at 6:20 am  Two famous makeup artists of fakery, Mann & Randi together on the same picture, Coo!

beng says:

July 14, 2013 at 7:48 am Funny how Randi loses his skepticism right when he needs it. Like Phil_dot, Carl Sagan & others.

beng says:

July 14, 2013 at 8:41 am  Is it just me? Every time I see that Mann-mug, I want to punch the crap out of it.

Reed Coray says:

July 14, 2013 at 9:46 am  beng: It’s not just you.

It's all a nefarious plot involving long-dead Hitler?  Who runs a hate group called the EPA? If anyone can make head or tail of what Chad Wozniak says:

July 13, 2013 at 5:58 pm  @Larry Hamlin - And don’t forget the land temps are all UHI-affected and therefore falsely ovewrstated. As for Mann being the last one on the sinking ship, let’s don’t forget that hatemonger der Fuehrer and his satraps at the hate-group EPA can do a lot of damage yet before they are brought down. And no matter who else deserts the ship, der Fuehrer can’t leave it because it is the entire basis for his campaign to destroy the economy and along with it civil liberties.

Mike Buzz-Senior Busby is oblivious to irony:

July 13, 2013 at 4:24 pm  Tap dancing waiting for proof which never comes. The sign of some one desperate to have his dogma accepted as proof which flies in the face of empirical evidence. Pretty sad that he continues to discount real world evidence and instead demands that his belief in a failed set of models is all that is needed to change the entire worlds opinion. – Sir Boab Tree.

as is sonicfrog1:

July 13, 2013 at 5:32 pm  Yep. I really enjoy some of the podcasts from many of the TAM’ers, including Brian Dunning and the Skeptics Guide To The Universe crew. But, yeah, when they turn to the subject of global warming…. Mann oh Mann…. That IS a huge blind spot. They were glowing over the Cook / Lewdowski (whatever his name is – if correct statistical methodologies are not important to him…. his name is not important to me) studies without really digging in to examine what the problems with the studies are. They bought the “Skeptical Science spiel hook, line, and stinker. It’s sad, because there used to be one guy on the Skeptics Guide panel, Perry, who was very skeptical of the alarmist side of AGW. But, unfortunately, he passed away several years ago. he is sorely missed.

A lone fact checker emerges, but it's a dismal attempt

Andres Valencia is the first commenter to attempt to back up what he says and links to an NOAA chart.  He manages to squeeze out a tiny downward sloping black line on the very top of a global surface temperature chart.  Needless to say he ignores all the other signs of ongoing global warming as illustrated in the gif animation above.  (Nor does he point out that 2010 was the hottest year on record or equal to 2005 as such.)

July 13, 2013 at 4:49 pm  Even the NCDC shows a -0.02°C/Decade trend since 2001 to 2012.  11 years of very slight cooling.

Put on your denier specs, squint really hard and you'll see the little black line
Source: NOAA

The creationists rally to defend their doctrine

Don objects to being compared to a climate scientist:

July 13, 2013 at 5:00 pm  “Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.” Anthony, I must protest. Any creationist in particular? Any argument in particular? This seems an overgeneralization and, well, a cheap shot.

Alvin says:

July 13, 2013 at 5:13 pm  Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.
Umm, people of faith can also believe in properly researched science. Many support your endeavors. Maybe a poor analogy.

GlennD objects:

July 13, 2013 at 5:20 pm  Um, Anthony, I find references to creationism in posts and comments inappropriate. Taking the ‘science’ side of Darwinism shows ignorance of that debate and opens a topic this website should not be concerned with. Those more familiar with the debate find the same groupthink, gatekeeping, arrogance, career railroading and denying of contrary evidence among Darwinism as is found in climate science (don’t forget whose side the NCSE is on in both cases). Those trying to debate Darwinists on scientific terms are dismissed as ‘creationists’ (whether they are or not).....

juan slayton says:

July 13, 2013 at 5:23 pm  Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.Painting with a broad brush, there, friend. : > )

D Caldwell says:

July 13, 2013 at 7:55 pm  Agree with Don and Alvin. Was your creationist jab really necessary?

Jeff C warns Anthony that he needs to hang onto whatever "friends" he can still get.  It's okay to set the lynch mob onto real scientists, but quite another thing to slag off creationists:

July 13, 2013 at 8:04 pm  I’m not a creationist but was taken aback by Anthony’s stereotype as it seemed so out of character. My first reaction was to recheck the byline to ensure the post was from Anthony and sure enough it was. What gives? Bad habit to fall into, my friend.

Sun Spot says:

July 13, 2013 at 7:56 pm  We all know “Climate Change” happens (the climate is always changing) and we all know “Creation” happened (we’re here aren’t we), we also know both were/are highly chaotic un-modelable events.  @Don says: July 13, 2013 at 5:00 pm, I’m a creationist like Don.

JimF says:

July 13, 2013 at 7:17 pm  I’m a geologist. I think Mann is a cheat and a fraud and a disgrace to the profession (he wears one or two geology degrees). And since no one else can explain it, I believe the Bible account of the formation of everything at the outset. No one will ever disprove it. The rocks don’t go back that far.

Don't worry - it's only the land that's warming?

Larry Hamlin explains the trick:

July 13, 2013 at 5:42 pm  Climate alarmists like Mann use only the land surface temperature record and ignore sea surface temperatures which when both are combined represent the global surface temperature record. The global surface temperature record shows the pause. The land surface record continues increase and that’s all the alarmists need. Alarmists also frequently site the Berkeley Earth project land temperature record as further proof there is no global temperature pause. This is how the ignore the pause game is played.

While another commenter is under the misapprehension that it hasn't warmed for 17 years.  Bruce Cobb says:

July 14, 2013 at 11:04 am  Mann’s “cherrypicking” claim regarding the warming pause (now 17+ years) is of course just another one of his multitude of lies he tells. But hey, he’s got to make a living somehow.

Neither Larry nor Bruce offer any evidence, so I will.  Here is a chart showing land only surface temperatures and land and ocean surface temperatures, with arrows indicating how much it's warmed since 17 years ago:

Data Source: NASA

As Willis once Wondered, the land surface warms faster than the sea surface.  Both are warming because of increasing atmospheric CO2.  Most of us live on the land and rely on it for our food, shelter and clothing among other things.  And there are many more signs that global warming progresses.

The "An Ice Age Cometh" brigade

Andres Valencia says:

July 13, 2013 at 6:27 pm  I think our planet is always warming or cooling, always seeking but never attaining equilibrium. This present stasis seems to indicate a lack of net input for the self-regulated planet to react against. I watch for next El Niño or La NIña to emerge with some push, one way or the other. Afterwards, around a new level, some overshoot followed by dampening oscillations. This until the next plunge into an ice age.

Bill H reckons it's going to get cold:

July 13, 2013 at 5:12 pm  This “pause” in upward trend can be one of two things…A real pause that just lasted to long or; It shows the fact we have peaked in the larger cycle (thus the longer period) and we are now headed in the reveres trend… the top of a large sign wave is always longer in time period.  The fact we have long since left the normal short cycle trend lines would lead me to believe we are going to get much cooler as we have begun the downward trend to the low part of the larger natural cycle.

One challenger to the WUWT groupthink remains

Ryan wonders if Anthony's relationship Roy Spencer will suffer (I don't know about Denning):

July 13, 2013 at 5:04 pm  “Surely he must know that the authors themselves disavow that conclusion!! Like a creationist, he uses arguments he knows to be false, but the audience doesn’t.”
The authors of M. et al actually said that their reconstruction was indistinguishable from some of Mann’s, and there are many other modern-reaching reconstructions that have confirmed the hockey stick. If you want to throw out the relative uniqueness of the modern temperature spike, you have to do stupid things like assuming CET is representative of global temps.

I do appreciate your acknowledgment of creationists as the bottom-feeders of even the pseudoscientist community, but how do you think Denning and Spencer are going to take that?

Even the Central England Temperature wouldn't help very much, Ryan:

Data Source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

The 8% Dismissives at WUWT

As we've seen from the above, Anthony Watts and his motley lynch mob linger on as a disparate rabble of creationists, "Ice Age Cometh"-ers, right wing extremists and scientific illiterati, continuing to deny and rail against global warming.

Is there such a person as a reasonable "fake skeptic"?

One lone "skeptic" goes against the mob but shows he is quite unfamiliar with the norm at WUWT.  Mike McMillan says:

July 14, 2013 at 10:21 am  A good bit more ad hominem than I’m used to seeing on this site. Unfortunate.

He was immediately admonished by members of the WUWT anti-science lynch mob, including Justthinkin:

July 14, 2013 at 10:57 am  Mike….calling a pathological liar and con man just that is not ad hominem.

Shameful Behaviour at WUWT - Not Asking the Right Question

Update below.

My heart goes out to everyone in Oklahoma and to people everywhere who have lost loved ones and homes in weather disasters.

I wasn't going to write about weather disasters today, out of respect for the people who died and those who have lost everything in Oklahoma.  However I changed my mind when I saw the way Anthony Watts was using the disaster to push his barrow of science denial and rant against doing anything to ameliorate climate change.  Like many readers, I know people who've lost their lives and homes in recent weather-related disasters.  People very close to me and family members lost their father, grandfather and friends.  There is a point to standing up against those who deny what is happening to the world.

So please forgive me if you find this disrespectul, but in my view, something needs to be said.

Anthony Asks the Wrong Question

Anthony Watts is busy stirring up the mob over at WUWT with no less than three shameful posts on the subject.  He really hates it when extreme events happen.  He know that every time a weather-related disaster occurs, people think again of climate change.

What Anthony does know is that if we don't rein in carbon emissions, there will be more droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves and other weather extremes and disasters.  That's why he insists on asking the wrong questions, like:

Tell us, what could any tax, law, edict, or protest have done to stop yesterday’s tornado outbreak?

If they had a shred of human decency, what Anthony and his mob of Dismissives would be asking is:

Tell us, what can we do to limit future weather disasters and prevent the worst excesses of climate change?

Update:

It gets more abominable.  I won't waste my time on a separate post (IdiotTracker says it all) - these appallingly pathetic excuses for human beings don't deserve it.  Many lives were undoubtedly saved in Oklahoma because the tornado warning was able to be issued a few minutes earlier - because of weather monitoring systems.  Yet Roger Pielke Sr wants to take money away from such important science to spend it on shelters.  (I don't believe for a minute that Roger is offering up his own government-funded job as a climate scientist to build a shelter.)  Yes, shelters are a must, but not at the expense of disaster warnings.  And in a revolting display of acrimony against science, Anthony Watts agrees making the following tweet his 'Quote of the Week'.

Spending millions of dollar on no skill climate projections is poor policy compared with grants to communities for school tornado shelters.
— Roger A. Pielke Sr (@RogerAPielkeSr) May 22, 2013

 Someone tell them that all the shelters in the world won't save a soul if they don't know a tornado is coming.

Rajendra Pauchari: Pinning the Oklahoma tornado on climate change is wrong-headed, un-scientific

Dr Pauchari points out what is often emphasised by other scientists, that from a scientific standpoint it's just not possible to relate a single event like the Oklahoma tornado, Superstorm Sandy, Katrina or Cyclone Yasi to human-induced climate change. From The Times of India:

Pinning the deadly tornado in the US state of Oklahoma on climate change is wrongheaded, even though the world is set to see a rise in high-profile weather disasters due to global warming, the leader of a UN body said on Tuesday.

Almost every scientists will tell you the same.  What they can and continue to investigate is the extent to which the world will see more and worse events of various types, such as tropical cyclones, hurricanes, extreme droughts, catastrophic bushfires, paralyzing blizzards and massive floods.

Michael E Mann: The wild-card is the shear

On tornadoes in particular, this is how Professor Mann responded when asked, from Take Part:

“As far as climate change is concerned, there will likely be a greater clashing of cold air masses from the north with even warmer, even more humid air masses coming off the Gulf of Mexico—conditions that are favorable for breeding destructive storms,” says Michael Mann, climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

“The wildcard is the sheer—we don’t know with certainty whether that will increase or not in the key regions for tornado formation as a result of climate change,” Mann continues. “But if one factor is likely to be favorable, and the other is a wildcard, it’s still more likely that the product of the two factors will be favorable. Thus, if you’re a betting person—or the insurance or reinsurance industry for that matter—you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.

Kevin Trenberth: Chance Effect of Weather - The climate change effect is up to 32% in terms of damage

Professor Trenberth is reported by The Brad Blog as responding to a question from Peter Sinclair, saying:

Of course tornadoes are very much a weather phenomenon. They come from certain thunderstorms, usually super-cell thunderstorms that are in a wind shear environment that promotes rotation. The main climate change connection is via the basic instability of the low level air that creates the convection and thunderstorms in the first place.

Warmer and moister conditions are the key for unstable air.

The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10% effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 32% effect in terms of damage. (It is highly nonlinear).

So there is a chain of events and climate change mainly affects the first link: the basic buoyancy of the air is increased. Whether that translates into a super-cell storm and one with a tornado is largely chance weather.

What can we do?

We don't have to go and live in a cave.  That would do no good at all.  What we can do is change our own behaviour and lead by example.  Where possible we can use energy from renewable sources not fossil fuels. We can favour energy efficient appliances.  We can vote for representation by people who will put policies in place to hasten the shift to clean energy.  And we can urge others to do the same.

PAGES-2K arrives and barely a whimper from the deniosphere

See update below for some comments on Bob Tisdale's protest (4th WUWT article).

With paleo studies coming thick and fast the deniosphere is finding it hard to keep up.  A paper from PAGES-2k came out in Nature Geosciences only a day ago.  So far WUWT has written three four articles, but with barely a protest (except for a suggestion that Europe = the entire world - and now Tisdale's weak and silly protest below).  Nothing like the furious pace of protest articles and downright silliness that the Marcott study brought out.  I suppose there's time for that. Maybe Anthony is thinking that if he doesn't make too much fuss about scientific evidence it will all just go away and leave him to deny in peace.

Meanwhile the Auditor has bunkered down, obsessing with little details of individual proxies, ignoring the whole picture as usual.  Probably trying to figure out which of the dozens of collaborating institutions he'll pick for his next barrage of vexatious FOIs.  He can mutter in his beard all he wants, but it won't change the past or reverse global warming.

Continental temperatures of the past 2000 years

Now for people who are actually interested in regional and continental temperatures over the past 2000 years:

• The paper itself - Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia (subs req'd)
• RealClimate.org article on the paper by Darrell Kaufman (lead? author)
• SkepticalScience article by Dana
• Columbia University
• Joe Romm at Climate Progress
• From the Border Morning Mail (my local rag)
• The ABC (Australia)
• Nick Stokes has a neat interactive tool so you can play around with the data.

Study background

Some background from the FAQ: PAGES was formed in 1991 through the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP).  It allowed teams all around the world to join forces and do research on climatic and environmental dynamics by studying the past.  In 2006, the PAGES 2k network was set up to look particularly at the last 2,000 years of data.

There were 78 people from around the world who collaborated in the study, a vast undertaking.  The result is a detailed picture of temperature changes at a regional / continental level all around the world.

From the abstract - a recent reversal of long term cooling:

The most coherent feature in nearly all of the regional temperature reconstructions is a long-term cooling trend, which ended late in the nineteenth century.

At multi-decadal to centennial scales, temperature variability shows distinctly different regional patterns, with more similarity within each hemisphere than between them. There were no globally synchronous multi-decadal warm or cold intervals that define a worldwide Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age, but all reconstructions show generally cold conditions between AD 1580 and 1880, punctuated in some regions by warm decades during the eighteenth century. The transition to these colder conditions occurred earlier in the Arctic, Europe and Asia than in North America or the Southern Hemisphere regions.

Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

It's getting hot (and the MWP wasn't global)

The issue deniers are zoning in on is the confirmation from more and more scientific sources that periods of warming in medieval times were not synchronous around the world.  The world as a whole didn't get hotter.  Different regions warmed and cooled at different times.  The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) in northern Europe was local not global.

Even though it would be foolish in the extreme to say "the world's got warmer before therefore this time around it's not CO2" - that's precisely what some deniers used to say.  With this and other recent studies they no longer have a leg to stand on in that regard.  That doesn't stop deniers still regurgitating drivel of various different kinds, as seen by these comments from WUWT.

First there's disbelief that it's at least as hot now as at any time since civilisation and a denial that it's the atmosphere that keeps earth warm (how does he think it happens I wonder?):

E.M.Smith says:
April 23, 2013 at 12:56 am So if they show it was clearly warmer in the past, and we didn’t “tip” into a disaster, doesn’t that kind of put a hole in that whole “tipping point” idea…It also seems that they can’t quite accept that natural variation which worked in the past can continue to work today, and have to embrace a new cause (CO2) for modern temperatures. Just a tiny bit tacky…

While Tom tries to downplay the problem:

Tom Harley says:
April 23, 2013 at 1:10 am It’s still just ‘weather’.

And the appropriately name Village Idiot** gets it completely wrong, saying - b..b..b..but what about potatoes in Greenland? Isn't Greenland the whole world?  Didn't the Vikings sail to Greenland via Peru?:

April 23, 2013 at 1:17 am  Of course, it’s an established and accepted scientific fact that the MWP was a worldwide warm period; warmer than the present. We don’t need doubtful proxies, flawed studies or so called climate experts to tell us that. The Vikings grew potatoes on Greenland, for goodness sake!

This chap has his head buried deep in the sand and doesn't seem to 'believe' anything in evidence of past climates, presumably including any MWP:

RCSaumarez says:
April 22, 2013 at 3:52 pm  Who believes proxy studies?

The last sentence sums up the typical denier.  Show them the instrumental record and they'll say "who believes thermometers".  Show them proxy evidence and they'll say "who believes proxies".   Show them bits of the moon brought back by astronauts and they'll say "it's just cheese".  Well, you get the picture.

Luckily for humanity, only about  8% of people are so "dismissive".

Update 1 

(10:30 pm 23 April 2013)
Bob Tisdale, in the fourth WUWT article about the study puts up a few different figures and, after giving us his usual silly spiel about the oceans causing global warming (they don't, it's mostly our waste CO2), writes:

Now, hasn’t this been one of the arguments by climate skeptics since the hockey stick was introduced—that the hockey-stick appearance is a regional phenomenon? That regional reconstructions show current temperatures have been exceeded in the past in many parts of the globe?

Lets break this down.  Has it been 'one of the arguments of climate skeptics'?  Well, it might have been, who am I to judge.  Fake climate skeptics come up with a zillion silly 'arguments' on a daily basis.  You can see a whole list of them here on SkepticalScience.com (174 and counting).

Have regional reconstructions shown some regions have been hotter in the past?  Umm, probably.  The big worry now is that on average, the entire world is heating up.  That's why it's called "global warming".  (That doesn't mean that every place on earth is getting hotter.  It means the earth as a whole is getting hotter.)

What's happening now is not just one or two warmer regions, with other regions getting cooler and balancing out, so there isn't much change in global average temperature.  What's happening now is that the global average temperature is rising, reversing a global cooling trend.

This is what the authors say in the abstract:

Recent warming reversed the long-term cooling; during the period AD 1971–2000, the area-weighted average reconstructed temperature was higher than any other time in nearly 1,400 years.

Their study can't say more than that because it doesn't provide the data for all regions going back 2,000 years.  Other studies do that.

Anyway, look below and judge for yourself how many places are heating up.  About the only place that was much warmer for any length of time was Antarctica. The Arctic was much cooler than now.  Asia, North America, South America and Australasia show up the recent heating as a new trend.  Europe had a few warmish spells of shorter duration - maybe as hot as it is now or even for a short time, warmer. Everywhere looks poised to keep on heating up.  And nothing below negates what the paper's authors stated:  The period from 1971 to 2000 was higher than at any time going back nearly 1400 years (at least).  And bear in mind that the temperature rise has continued into the 2000s!  There's no going back now.  The best we can do is slow the heating and hopefully help future generations stop it.

Here is a chart from the supplementary information. (Click image to enlarge.)

**I call Poe.