Don Easterbrook asks a question about global surface temperature

Remember Don Easterbrook? He's the retired geology professor who knows less than nothing about climate science. He is the one who falsely claims the temperature on the summit of Greenland is a proxy for the temperature of the entire world.

Today at WUWT he posed a question in response to an article about recent global temperatures. Don Easterbrook wrote:

August 20, 2017 at 5:15 pm
And where do 1936 and 1934 fit in these ‘record temps?’ Before blatant tampering by NOAA and NASA, they were easily the hottest years (and probably still are!)

Denier Don Easterbrook and his 30 year periods

There's another silly article by someone called Andy May at WUWT, claiming that because the slope of a temperature chart went up in the early twentieth century, and has been going up again and again and again, CO2 can't be causing global warming. Andy May wrote:

It is very hard to claim that mostly natural forces caused the warming from 1910 to 1945 and mostly man-made forces caused the similar warming from 1975 to 2009. The simplest explanation, given the data before us, is that the natural forces were the same in the two periods. That being said and accepting that man does have some influence on climate today with his CO2 and methane emissions, it seems more likely that our influence is in the 22% to 25% range. “More than half” is not credible to this observer.

No, it's not hard to claim that at all.

Andy's committed a logical fallacy of personal incredulity. The temperature goes up when there's a positive forcing or when a negative forcing disappears. The forcings can be different yet still have the same effect. In the early 20th century the negative forcing from volcanic activity disappeared, and the solar forcing got a bit stronger. In the second half of the twentieth century it was virtually all human forcing, primarily CO2.

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):

A Doozy Denier Don from Anthony Watts: Medieval Warming was 11,500 years ago!

If anyone is under the wrong impression that Anthony Watts knows something about climate science, this will set you straight. He doesn't. You might have thought that he doesn't "believe" a lot of what he posts. It seems he does. Even the silliest nonsense. I used to think that he didn't read anything he posted, but it appears that he does. Only sometimes. But mostly not. And I was wondering the other day when we were going to get another article from him. He writes so rarely these days, leaving it all up to other people that I was beginning to think that he had quit altogether.

Today he's written a short piece (archived here). What he has called a Quote of the Week. It's not a bad quote I suppose, but there's no reason for a denier to pull it out as a quote of the week unless they are a hard core denier.

Now I've said before that when Anthony Watts decides to write something himself, he usually gets things dreadfully wrong. Today is no exception. He's done a doozy. And he's proven that he does read some of what he posts. He must have read some Denier Don Easterbrook. Or maybe this is a homage to Don.

Ignorant WUWT-ers suffer CO2 phobia going back 900,000 years

Today Anthony Watts (archived here) copied and pasted the press release from a study I wrote about last week. It was about the paper by Leopoldo Pena and Steven Goldstein on what caused the ice ages to change around a million years ago. The paper was presenting an explanation of the 100,000 year glacial cycle. You can read about it here or at ScienceDaily.com.

I was struck by the intense CO2 phobia that commenters at WUWT suffer from. They obviously don't understand the carbon cycle or the role of carbon dioxide in climate. Nor do they understand the CO2/ocean interaction. A lot of them have never heard of Milanković cycles (and extensions to his theory). Not that I claim expertise or specialist knowledge, but the basics of all these are straightforward and not all that difficult to comprehend. (I did a search at WUWT for Milanković cycles and it's pretty clear why the people who don't venture beyond WUWT don't know anything about the subject.)

(If you're on the home page, click "read more" to find out more about the paper and see the reaction at WUWT.)

Denier Don Easterbrook and his mate Dismal David Deming are Delusional at WUWT

There are two articles up at WUWT today that falsely claim "it's cooling", when in fact the Earth continues to heat up.  One by Denier Don Easterbrook and one by David Deming.

Deluded Denier Don Easterbrook

Denier Don put up a few of his wonky charts (archived here), including this one that has appeared on HotWhopper before. Click to enlarge.

I don't know why he resurrected this old chart of his.  It clearly shows that all his predictions have been a dismal failure.  Observed temperatures are not that far from his "IPCC projected warming".  And I don't know where he got his "IPCC projected warming" from either.  Since he said he did the chart in 1999 or 2000, it should be from the Second Assessment Report (SAR).  But I saw nothing like that chart in SAR.

Anyway, look at Don's projections.  According to him global surface temperatures should have taken a big dive fourteen years ago.  Instead, look at what has happened.

Data sources: JISAO and NASA

Like Don, I've compared global surface temperatures to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from Nate Mantua's website.  Don reckons temperatures should be back at those of around 1980 now and heading for colder.

Denier Don wrote:

So the question now becomes how could my predictions be validated? Certainly not by any computer climate models, which had proven to be essentially worthless. The obvious answer is to check my predictions against what the climate does over several decades. We’ve been within my predicted cooling cycle for more than a decade, so what has happened? We’ve now experienced 17 years with no global warming (in fact, slight cooling) despite the IPCC prediction that we should now be ~1° F warmer (Figs. 6, 7, 8). So far my 1999 prediction seems to be on track and should last for another 20-25 years.

On track?  Just who does Don think he's kidding?  In 1999 he predicted that by 2014, global surface temperature would be back to around that in 1980.  Instead they are about 0.5 degrees warmer than 1980!

So Don, your predictions have already proven to be worthless.

 Dismal David Deming is a big fat liar!

David Deming wrote a short article complaining about winter weather in the USA and asking where global warming has gone (archived here).  Remember he's a mate of Denier Don. David's article was stuffed with as much nonsense as Don's.  For example, David Deming wrote:

Global warming is nowhere to be found. The mean global temperature has not risen in 17 years and has been slowly falling for approximately the past 10 years. In 2013, there were more record-low temperatures than record-high temperatures in the United States.

Look again at the chart above.  Where is his supposed cooling?  Nowhere to be seen.  Sure, the USA has been a bit cool the last few weeks.  But no cooler than it was twenty years ago, going back only to the early 1990s.  And in 2012 it had the hottest year ever on record.  Other places are warming up too, obviously - looking at the surface temperature chart above.  Here we I live we've been sweltering through another extreme heat wave with temperatures in the low 40s for almost a full week. And we've just had the hottest year on record plus broken a heap of other similar records all over the place.  And it can't be blamed on ENSO - it's been neutral.

From the WUWT comments

From Denier Don's article (archived here):

Bob Tisdale tears strips off Denier Don over a few comments, for example he says (excerpt):

January 17, 2014 at 8:47 pm
There are no long-term global surface temperature reconstructions where the dip during the 1998-10 La Niña came close to reaching the values in the 1940s. Did you splice TLT data onto HADCRUT data? That’s what it looks like. Whatever it is, it’s bogus!

But many WUWT-ers are like Txomin who says:

January 17, 2014 at 6:18 pm
If this prediction holds, it will be difficult for the climadrama to keep the show on the road. I find it curious that something as erratic as climate will end up saving out arses from ourselves.Too much of a close call. Just imagine if, by chance, warming had continued to increase…

Jimbo comes out with his usual guff and says:

January 18, 2014 at 4:58 am
• The IPCC was established in 1988.
• The PDO was discovered in 1996.
• The Vostok ice cores (1998?) showed co2 rise followed temperature rise.

Would we have had this huge global warming scare if the IPCC had been established several years after the discovery of the PDO and the Vostok results? Are they really now so confident that co2 was responsible for most of the warming since mid 1970s? They may have doubts but will never openly come out and say it as it would ruin the game plan.

Here are a couple from David Deming's article (archived here)

Otter (ClimateOtter on Twitter) says:

January 18, 2014 at 2:31 am
One of the sad things is, we will never get an apology from any of these people. They will move on to the next scare, the next ‘theory,’ and find some way to blame skeptics for the failure of AGW. Reality is ‘liberal’ in their minds, after all. It will always be about them being right and us being wrong. Oh, and we should be silenced. And demonized. And ridiculed. And….

Well, he's right about them being ridiculed, that's for sure!


PaulC wins the comment of the day:

January 18, 2014 at 2:25 am
Every 11,500 years this world we live on has an Ice Age. It has been nearly 12,000 years since the last Ice Age.

All the talk is about a mini ice age coming. The lack of comment on a full blown Ice Age is very conspicuous in its absence.

The latest Polar Vortex dropped temps in exactly the same areas that had a couple of km’s of ice over it 12,000 years ago.

Coincidence – I think not

JJM Gommers is completely nuts, but quite typical of other commenters in the thread with a substance-free quote complaining that all the world's scientists who study any part of the earth system, along with all the weather bureaux, scientific journal staff etc are "criminals":

January 18, 2014 at 4:45 am
Once the time is there they don’t get away with an apology. The least is in court at the Hague for crime against humanity. I become fed up with these criminals

List of scientists "respected in their field" - only @wattsupwiththat - take on the EPA

This made me laugh.  Anthony Watts is all excited because a bunch of clowns have filed a brief supporting a whole mob of litigants to the US Supreme Court, who want to stop the EPA from regulating CO2 emissions.  This isn't the first time and probably won't be the last.

What caught my eye was this mob that Anthony Watts is promoting (archived here) are trying to pass themselves off as:

...highly regarded scientists and economists [who] have expertise in a wide array of fields implicated by this rulemaking, including climate research, weather modeling, physics, geology, statistical analysis, engineering, and economics. One or more of these scientists and economists has the relevant expertise to support every statement made in this brief. These scientists and economists all have publications in peer reviewed journals and are respected in their fields of expertise by their peers.

Look at the list, six of them have already graced the pages of HotWhopper, some several times.  I guess you could call that regarded, though not at all highly.  The list is below.  It reads like an excerpt from who's who of the extreme right wing of the denial machine.

• Joseph S. D’Aleo - who fails Meteorology 101 at WUWT and is one of Cato Institute's 100 deniers
• Dr. Harold H. Doiron is one of the 49 retired NASA science deniers (they couldn't even get to 50 out of all the thousands of retired NASA employees!)
• Dr. Don J. Easterbrook - AKA Denier Don who pretends that the ice sheet on the top of a summit in Greenland is a good proxy for global surface temperatures, but can't even get the chart of Greenland temperatures right!
• Dr. Theodore R. Eck - unknown, described as Fulbright Professor of International Economics, Former Chief Economist of Amoco Corp. and Exxon Venezuela Advisory Board of the Gas Technology Institute and Energy Intelligence Group
• Dr. Gordon J. Fulks is an ordinary run of the mill denier who writes crank opinion pieces for any newspaper dumb enough to print them and is also one of the infamous Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. William M. Gray - who thinks the water vapour feedback loop is "weakly negative" and that although global surface temperatures have already gone up by 0.8 degrees, a doubling of CO2 should be expected to cause a global warming of no more than about 0.2-0.4oC.  (I can't wait for global temperatures to drop by 0.4 to 0.6 degrees!).  William is also one of the Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. Craig D. Idso - co-author of the really dumb "CO2 is plant food" and "it's the sun" Not the IPCC report. Craig is also one of the Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. Anthony R. Lupo - according to DesmogBlog, Anthony is on the payroll of the Heartland Institute.  Despite his rejection of science, he seems to have managed to retain his job and even managed a Chair at the University of Missouri. Anthony is also one of the Cato Institute 100 science deniers
• Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt - who has a habit of anthropomorphising carbon dioxide
• Dr. Thomas P. Sheahen - whose name is spelt in myriad ways all over the internet and who is one of Cato Institute's 100 science deniers
• Dr. James P. Wallace III - unknown.  Described in the writ as an engineer.
• Dr. George T. Wolff - unknown.  He managed a reference in SourceWatch. He was Chair of the EPA Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee for a period back in the 1990s.
   

EPA Endangerment Finding

What this motley lot are trying to argue in their writ is that greenhouse gases don't cause the greenhouse effect.  And they claim to be "respected"!  They take issue with the Endangerment Finding of the EPA and try to refute the lines of evidence described on page 66518 of the Rules and Regulations:

The attribution of observed climate change to anthropogenic activities is based on multiple lines of evidence. The first line of evidence arises from our basic physical understanding of the effects of changing concentrations of greenhouse gases, natural factors, and other human impacts on the climate system. The second line of evidence arises from indirect, historical estimates of past climate changes that suggest that the changes in global surface temperature over the last several decades are unusual. The third line of evidence arises from the use of computer-based climate models to simulate the likely patterns of response of the climate system to different forcing mechanisms (both natural and anthropogenic).

The tropospheric hotspot is a feature of warming from any forcing

First these fake sceptics go on and on about the tropospheric hot spot, which they wrongly characterise as evidence of greenhouse gas warming.  (It's not.  It's a feature of warming from any forcing, not just greenhouse gases, as explained at SkepticalScience and by Bart Verheggen).  Who knows why they pick on that and ignore the expanding oceans, the melting ice and all the other signs of global warming.  It's a strange point with which to lead off their argument.

Earth is heating up

Then they do make a switch to discussing surface temperature, arguing that because not everywhere on earth has heated up at the same rate it's not global warming.  Did I say they are nutters?  They get quite cheeky when they claim:

These data thus demonstrate that EPA’s second line of evidence—the claim that there has been unusual warming on a global, that is, worldwide, basis over the past several decades—is invalid.

Let's see about that:

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

Observations are not inconsistent with climate model projections

They also try to argue that the models are "wrong".  In their writ they include a very weird chart describing it as:

Figure 5 contrasts the forecasts through 2025 with the actual trend line of global average surface temperature (GAST) data from the Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia (CRU) for 2000-2012 (identified as “HadCRUT4 Trend/Forecast” on the chart).:

Data source: the writ from the not respected

HadCRUT4 is observations not a forecast.  Maybe they meant with HadGEM or HadCM, in which case they couldn't argue that observations are out of kilter.  Either that or they are arguing that they've made observations of the future three years and this future they've already observed doesn't match their version of climate models.

Thing is, observations are within the range of modeled climate projections:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Here is a chart of a CMIP3 model run, showing that periods of hiatus do show up in some runs - from realclimate.org.

Source: realclimate.org

CO2 is a waste by-product of burning fossil fuels

This mob surely can't be serious when they claim that CO2 isn't an "unwanted by-product" by arguing that it is indeed a waste by-product.  They make it sound as if they want to add CO2 to the atmosphere:

CO2 is not in any sense an unwanted by-product of the production of useful energy. Rather, the combustion of carbon based fuels to produce CO2, and the capture of the energy released by that process, is the whole idea....

And they can't do their case any good by arguing that 82% of energy production still emits CO2!

While a modest portion of energy production in the United States (and other countries in general) comes from non-carbon sources (nuclear, wind, solar, hydro), the proportion that comes from fossil fuels in the U.S. is approximately 82 percent (sic).

From the WUWT comments

Not too many fake sceptics at WUWT are as excited as Anthony Watts about this silly writ.  (Archived here.)

Bloke down the pub says:

December 17, 2013 at 9:49 am
They won’t be allowed to win that.

GoneWithTheWind says:

December 17, 2013 at 9:49 am
I wish them luck but I have no faith in the Supreme court as it is now staffed.

LT confusingly or confusedly calls for more regulation, not less:

December 17, 2013 at 9:55 am
That is good news, the EPA is a burden to society they need tighter regulations placed on them than even a BP refinery.

AleaJactaEst says:

December 17, 2013 at 10:02 am
pi**ing in the wind, snowball in Hell’s, US winning the World Cup, not a prayer, the Arctic will be ice free in our lifetime. You get the message about how much chance this has of succeeding.

NeedleFactory says:

December 17, 2013 at 10:03 am
SCOTUS accepts for hearing only about 5% of the requests for Writ of Certiorari.
Don’t get your hopes up.

pokerguy says:

December 17, 2013 at 10:35 am
“snowballs chance etc.”
Negative defeatists many of you. There are people out there fighting your battles. What are you guys doing, except whining?

Roger Sowell puts the writ in perspective and says:

December 17, 2013 at 1:05 pm
This is one of at least eight briefs filed in this case. This amicus brief is only advisory to the Court. The Court will consider the question or questions raised in the petitioners’ briefs.
More later, hopefully tonight 12-17-13.

Anthony Watts promotes Denier Don Easterbrook's bad "science" and conspiracy ideation

I see that Anthony Watts has hauled out Denier Don Easterbrook to dust the cobwebs off his flawed Greenland ice core charts and make more allegations of nefarious intent against real scientists.

If you're wondering what Don's latest idiocy is all about, it's the recent Miller et al paper.  Although I was sent a copy of the paper by a reader (many thanks!), Richard Telford tells it better than I could.  There are two three short articles at Richard Telford's excellent blog, Musings on Quantitative Palaeoecology, which cover the Miller paper very well and are easy to read (and have nice pictures!):

• “Unprecedented” – skeptic flypaper
• More on Mosses (Miller et al 2013)
• Man with one graph declares war on mosses (more on Miller et al 2013)

Denier Don dismisses on-site observations from his armchair arguing if what happened in far eastern Canada didn't happen on the summit of the ice sheet in Central Greenland then it can't have happened at all (or some such nonsense).  He also writes:

Even if the conclusions in the paper were correct, they wouldn’t prove anything about CO2 as the cause of climatic warming, so this statement suggests that the real purpose of the paper was to push CO2 at the expense of objective science.

Denier Don assumes nefarious intent - a classic hallmark of the conspiracy theorist.

If you read the archived WUWT article, you'll see that Denier Don Easterbrook is claiming that ice can move over artic moss that's 120,000 years old without harming the moss at all and without even disturbing the roots of the moss.  He's not strong on logical thinking is Denier Don.

I notice Anthony Watts is still letting Don put up his flawed charts of GISP2, claiming that a temperature series that actually starts in 1855 began in 1945.   This is after lots of his readers over the years have told him it's wrong.  Even justthefactswuwt agrees it's wrong.  But what do Anthony Watts or Denier Don care?  Anything goes at WUWT as long as it denies the science.

You'll also note with relief that Anthony Watts finds nothing wrong with the weather station labelled "Clyde NWT", though I don't think it is one of these new ones.  One problem with the record Anthony and Don used, which neither of them will tell you, is that the GISTemp records for that location only go up to November 2010. And there are lots of gaps in what records there are.  Also, it's a bit of a distance from the research site.

The scientists themselves have given an indication in their report of how the local weather has changed.  The ice cap is melting and mosses emerging after 120,000 years under ice, so that says something!

From the WUWT comments

Most of the WUWT readers aren't crash hot on logic and subsribe to Denier Don's conspiracy theory (archived here).

Ron House talks about the "recent few 1,000 years' warming" (is he a closet warmist?):

November 2, 2013 at 10:48 pm
This isn’t the end of the nonsense. They tell us the moss is quickly destroyed when it thaws, which is why they know it hadn’t thawed before. Okay, but what if we had done their survey 50 ya, 100ya, during the LIA, the MWP, the dark ages? Would we have found freshly exposed moss then? By logical deduction from their own claims, we cannot now know what would have been found. Perhaps old moss would have been found at all these times? Or at least the warmer ones? And that would prove that the recent few 1,000 years’ warming had nothing to do with AGW. Since by their own claims the disproving experiment cannot be done, their uniqueness claims are not scientific, just guesswork.

Pippen Kool is on the ball, though and replies to Ron:

November 2, 2013 at 11:06 pm
perhaps. but it wouldn’t be the moss was found in this study …that moss was buried then.

jorgekafkazar doesn't bother with the study itself, he agrees with Denier Don that it must be part of the "CAGW" conspiracy and says:

November 2, 2013 at 10:31 pm
” One wonders how this bad logic got past peer review. ”
This one doesn’t wonder. The process has been corrupted for political reasons and financial gain.
Nice post, Don.

 George McFly.....I'm your density is another conspiracy theorist and says:

November 2, 2013 at 11:07 pm
The last line says it all: “the real purpose of the paper was to push CO2 at the expense of objective science”

phlogiston says - Hey, I'm a conspiracy crank too - don't forget me!:

November 2, 2013 at 11:57 pm
This is a perfect example of politically driven pseudo-science: to jump from a single small, flawed study to a political concluding message, totally ignoring the existing body of scientific data on the subject. The paper is aimed straight at the media and politicians, over the heads of the scientific community.
Mann, Marcott, Miller … who will be the next mendacious machiavellian?

HotWhopper Fodder: Denier Don Easterbrook tells more lies, damned lies and statistics at WUWT

Psst - A kind horse racing fan from downunder might tell oneonesit  about this HotWhopper article or any of these :) 16 October 2013

---

Anti-science blogger, Anthony Watts has put up another article by Denier Don Easterbrook (archived here). Denier Don is always good fodder for HotWhopper, where we demolish disinformation :)

I don't think that Don Easterbrook told the truth once in his entire, very long article.  It's just one big lie from beginning to end.  And it's so easy to disprove his claims.

Don starts off his article with this:

Mark Twain popularized the saying “There are liars, damn liars, and statisticians.” 

Denier Don couldn't even get that right.  I believe the quote is:

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Don accuses the IPCC of telling lies but as HotWhopper readers know, Denier Don could barely write a sentence without telling a lie.  Don writes:

When compared to the also recently published NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) 1000+-page volume of data on climate change with thousands of peer-reviewed references, the inescapable conclusion is that the IPCC report must be considered the grossest misrepresentation of data ever published.

Yeah, right.  The Heartland Institute paid a few deniers (not proper climate scientists) to put together a pack of climate disinformation and Don reckons it's the IPCC that "misrepresents" data!

Don's magical Little Ice Age bounce

Don writes this:-

After all these years, IPCC still doesn’t get it—we’ve been thawing out from the Little Ice Age for several hundred years but still are not yet back to pre-Little Ice Age temperatures that prevailed for 90% of the past 10,000 years. Warming and cooling has been going on for millions of years, long before CO2 could have had anything to do with it, so warming in itself certainly doesn’t prove that it was caused by CO2.

As well as implying that the climate is a bouncing magical ball, Don claims that the earth is not yet back to pre-little ice age temperatures.  And he thinks the Little Ice Age finished "several hundred years ago"?

On what does he base this particular set of lies? Well, nothing as it turns out.  He doesn't provide one skerrick of evidence that the global surface temperature was hotter than now for "90% of the past 10,000 years".  Why?  Because there is none.  The longest record of temperatures for the Holocene is that provided by the Marcott et al study.  Here is the data from that research:

Data Sources: Marcott et al (2013) and NASA GISTemp

Even allowing for uncertainty ranges in Marcott et al, the current surface temperature is likely to be at or above any previously seen in the entire Holocene or any time in more than 20,000 years, looking at the chart below (including Shakun et al (2012).

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

Satellite temperatures in 1908?

Denier Don goes onto deny global warming, writing:

Their misrepresentation of data is ridiculous. In Fig. 1, the IPCC report purports to show warming of 0.5°C (0.9°F) since 1980, yet surface temperature measurements indicate no warming over the past 17 years (Fig. 2) and satellite temperature data shows the August 13 temperature only 0.12°C (0.21°F) above the 1908 temperature (Spencer, 2013). IPCC shows a decadal warming of 0.6°C (1°F) since 1980 but the temperature over the past decade has actually cooled, not warmed.

Denier Don is barmy! He refers to 1980, which is 33 years ago and says "no warming over the past 17 years".  And what's he going on about with his satellite temperature data from 1908?  Is he completely nuts, or maybe it's a typo and he meant 1980.  Even so, in referring to UAH temperature, he's wrong!  He's also obviously very wrong when he says that earth has cooled.  It hasn't cooled at all over the past decade, or over the past century!

Here's both 1980 and 17 years ago:

Data Source: NASA GISTemp

Here is Roy Spencer's UAH data of the temperature of the lower troposphere.  Unlike what Don implies, the temeperature of the lower troposphere has risen quite a lot since 1980:

Data Source: UAH

The fact that Denier Don puts up charts from Christopher "not a climate scientist" Monckton doesn't help Don's credibility.  He'd be better off doing what I do and go to the source directly.

Denier Don goes to Icy Greenland Again

Then Don goes completely bonkers and, quoting this statement from the Summary for Policy Makers (page SPM-3):

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. 

...Denier Don accuses the IPCC of telling "an outright lie", claiming that

A vast published literature exists showing that recent warming is not only not unusual, but more intense warming has occurred many times in the past centuries and millennia. As a reviewer of the IPCC report, I called this to their attention, so they cannot have been unaware of it. For example, more than 20 periods of warming in the past five centuries can be found in the Greenland GISP2 ice core (Fig. 3) (Easterbrook, 2011), the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods were warmer than recent warming (Fig. 4), and about 90% of the past 10,000 years were warmer than present (Fig. 5).

Thing is, the IPCC was writing about "global" warming, not warming of an ice sheet on the top of a summit in Central Greenland.  Don has put up this shonky chart as his "proof"!  Don doesn't say, but I am guessing it is his usual favourite chart of temperatures in Central Greenland!  The earth as a whole is a whole lot hotter than minus 36 degrees Celsius. (Click image for larger version.)

Don Easterbrook's Shonky Chart of Central Greenland (presumably) - from WUWT

Denier Don also puts up a chart from Ljungqvist (2010), showing a temperature reconstruction of part of the Northern Hemisphere - from Latitude 30 to 90 North only.  Even when Don selects a part of the world that was quite warm in the recent past, it is still warmer today than it was in times past!  I've done an animation so you can compare the actual chart with Don's version (click to enlarge):

Don, however, doesn't appear to "believe" Dr Ljungqvist himself, even though he borrows his chart.  The Ljungqvist paper states that even in that part of the world it's now hotter than than it was back in the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period (my bold italics):

Substantial parts of the Roman Warm Period, from the first to the third centuries, and the Medieval Warm Period, from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, seem to have equalled or exceeded the AD 1961–1990 mean temperature level in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere. Since AD 1990, though, average temperatures in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere exceed those of any other warm decades the last two millennia, even the peak of the Medieval Warm Period, if we look at the instrumental temperature data spliced to the proxy reconstruction. However, this sharp rise in temperature compared to the magnitude of warmth in previous warm periods should be cautiously interpreted since it is not visible in the proxy reconstruction itself.

I'm surprised someone as deep in denial as Don could bring himself to open the Ljungqvist paper, given the very next sentence in it refers (favourably) to Michael Mann's 2008 temperature reconstruction:

Although partly different data and methods have been used in our reconstruction than in Moberg et al. (2005) and Mann et al. (2008), the result is surprisingly similar. The inclusion of additional records would probably not substantially change the overall picture of the temperature variability.

Denier Don spends Winter in the Snow

Do I need to go on?  There is more of the same where all that came from.  Oh, okay.  I'll just show one more deception from Denier Don.  He claims that the IPCC is wrong when it writes about Northern Hemisphere snow cover:

The statement that Northern Hemisphere snow cover has “continued to decrease in extent extent” is false (despite the IPCC claim of ‘high confidence’ is false. Snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere shows no decline since 1967 and five of the six snowiest winters have occurred since 2003 (Fig. 7).

This time, unlike with every other lie he's told, Don doesn't quote directly from the IPCC report, because it would spoil his story.  This is what was written in the IPCC report (my bold italics):

Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent (high confidence) (see Figure SPM.3). {4.2–4.7}

No wonder Don didn't quote the IPCC.  It doesn't say what he wants to deny!  Don puts up a chart of winter snow cover, whereas the IPCC statement was about spring snow cover!  Here is Figure SPM-3 from the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers

Denier Don denies CO2

And a footnote - Don says that CO2 only started to rise after 1945!  What a nutter.

What was Anthony Watts Thinking?

Anthony Watts is playing his part in denying climate science.  To put up an article like that one shows that the sole purpose of his little blog is to publish disinformation propaganda.  No standards are too low for Anthony.  He exists to throw bones to his 8% dismissives.  Kenji is probably missing out today.

From the WUWT comments

Anthony Watts' Right Wing Authoritarians and 8% Dismissives love Denier Don and his lies.  Here is a sample of comments, most from people who probably don't have a clue about what Don has written, they agree with him just the same (archived here).

Larry Hamlin says:

October 3, 2013 at 5:31 pm
Excellent article. It will probably take months if not years to expose the outright lies and distortions that U.N. IPCC AR5 report contains. What is astounding is that this obvious propaganda is never uncovered by the main stream media who are so blinded by their clear bias in climate alarmist beliefs that they are a actually a major part of this global wide scientific scandal. The deapth of this scandal is reflected in that it is supported actively by the President of the U.S.

David talks about minutia wonders if the "alarmists" will claim that Don has made up stuff! (excerpt):

October 3, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Brilliant summation. It’s a good idea to address the big flaws in the claims and theories of the alarmists. Too often people are drawn into technical minutia regarding localised precipitation events or obscure papers full of maths and measurements trying to reveal small anomalies and get confused by the barrage of information coming out.

I’m wondering if it’s possible to have links to all the graphs provided tracing them back to the measurement source because if you show one of these graphs the alarmists will claim it’s made up.

philjourdan says:

October 3, 2013 at 5:51 pm
Outstanding point by point rebuttal!

Fabi says:

October 3, 2013 at 7:01 pm
Thank you, Dr. Easterbrook, for labeling their outright lies as such. Refreshing…

john piccirilli hasn't heard of the Marcott paper or probably any other climate science paper, but he knows for sure that wuwt is right and that climate science is b.s!:

October 3, 2013 at 8:01 pm
Pippen tell us, what is marcott paper, and give evidence it is proven . I believe the blogs and posts
On wuwt . The ipcc’s report is total b.s. agw is total b.s.

BW2013 is going to support the US postal service and send spam to politicians, he says:

October 3, 2013 at 8:05 pm
This needs to be sent to every politician in every country.
I am sending it to the folks in Washington Stte, USA. We have some of the loudest climate screamers in the world….

Don finds science quite perplexing.  He call it "gibberish" and writes:

October 3, 2013 at 8:35 pm
Professor, thank you for an outstanding rebuttal of the IPCC gibberish. Very glad you hail from Bellingham, WA. Go Vikings!

richardscourtney restrains himself from shouting, but not from chastising as "trolls" anyone who criticises Don for telling big fat lies.  He says (excerpt):

October 4, 2013 at 2:00 am
Friends:
Easterbrook provides a clear, powerful and cogent scientific destruction of the latest piece of political propaganda from the IPCC.
The effectiveness and clarity of that destruction is demonstrated by the rapidity of trolls running to fill ‘the breach’.

There is the occasional rational comment which gets howled down by the WUWT illiterati, for example, Jeff Alberts (who AFAIK is himself a science denier) says:

October 3, 2013 at 6:59 pm

In Fig. 1, the IPCC report purports to show warming of 0.5°C (0.9°F) since 1980, yet surface temperature measurements indicate no warming over the past 17 years (Fig. 2) and satellite temperature data shows the August 13 temperature only 0.12°C (0.21°F) above the 1908 temperature (Spencer, 2013).

Whether or not there has been warming [of] .5c since 1980 is not answered by “yet surface temperature measurements indicate no warming over the past 17 years”. And you’re comparing the temp of a single day (august 13th) against some non-specific 1908 temperature? Very weak argument. Perhaps you meant to write this differently, but as a skeptic, it’s laughable.

Nick Kermode picks up on the snow deception and says:

October 3, 2013 at 11:18 pmMr Easterbrook, you do realise you are debunking the IPCC’s spring ice claim with the winter ice record? And very smugly too. Well that just makes you look even more foolish I’m afraid. Epic fail, but you will probably get hundreds of comments cheering you on from the sceptics so keep it up.

Denier Don Easterbrook gets it all wrong in his absurd fairytale on WUWT

Denier Don Easterbrook is America's answer to the potty peer from the UK, Christopher Monckton.  He's written an article on WUWT (archived here) in which it's hard to find half a sentence of his that might have a grain of truth to it.  The exceptions would be his direct quotes from an article in National Geographic.

A few weeks ago Anthony Watts told his readers not to be alarmed because ice can't melt when it gets hotter, therefore seas can't rise any faster and New York can't get any wetter.  He didn't phrase it quite like that but that's what his article all boiled down to.  He was referring to this same National Geographic article.

Today Anthony Watts has gone even further and put up an article by denier Don Easterbrook (more of his deceptions here) that rivals his various claims like "the average surface temperature of earth equals minus 30 degrees Celsius as shown by my temperature chart for Central Greenland".

Denier Don is (still) an Emeritus Professor from a University that he's continually embarrassing.  They don't withdraw titles too easily and I guess that he's not the first professor to have "gone emeritus" and won't be the last.

Some of Denier Don's Wrongs

Here are some of Denier Don's wrongs just from today's single article alone (archived here):

Denier Don Gets it Wrong

The Facts	Denier Don's Wrong Claims
If you consider the steady state of earth's atmosphere (not rising CO2), the net effect on radiative forcing by absorption of long wave radiation is: carbon dioxide 19%, water vapour 50%, clouds 25%, all other forcings 7%. For clear sky forcings (no clouds) the long wave absorption (greenhouse effect) is: water vapour 67%, CO2 24% and other forcings 9%. Source: Schmidt, G. A., R. A. Ruedy, R. L. Miller, and A. A. Lacis (2010), Attribution of the present‐day total greenhouse effect, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D20106, doi:10.1029/2010JD014287	Denier Don writes: Carbon dioxide accounts for only 3.6% of the greenhouse effect - Denier Don is wrong. Even including clouds, 19% of the greenhouse effect is attributed to carbon dioxide. That's normal conditions.  It doesn't describe the impact of rising CO2, which causes water vapour to rise and ice to melt, which add further to global warming.
Even without factoring in feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels will heat earth by one degree Celsius. Carbon dioxide can be viewed as the "control knob". As CO2 changes it affects the amount of long wave radiation leaving earth. As CO2 increases, less long wave radiation escapes to space and earth warms up. This causes feedbacks. As earth heats up more water evaporates resulting in more water vapour, itself an even stronger greenhouse gas. There is less ice and snow so less short wave radiation is reflected and more is absorbed. The net (medium term) effect for a doubling of CO2 is most likely between 2 and 4.5 degrees Celsius. The long term effect (earth system sensitivity) would be greater.	Denier Don writes: By itself, it (CO2) is incapable of warming the climate by more than a fraction of a degree.  Denier Don is wrong. A doubling of CO2 amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m2 or about 1.1 degree Celsius. Taking account of feedbacks means that the full impact in the near term would most likely be between two and 4.5 degrees Celsius.
All the physical evidence shows that CO2 causes significant atmospheric warming. Tyndall first measured this back in the mid 1800s. There is a vast amount of knowledge of climates of the past that demonstrate the role of CO2 in controlling climate.	Denier Don writes: With no physical evidence that CO2 causes significant atmospheric warming ... Denier Don is wrong. Physical evidence demonstrates CO2 causes the earth to shift from ice ages to interglacials for example, because it rose as a feedback after changes to earth's tilt etc caused a small rise in the amount of solar energy absorbed on earth. Denier Don writes: ...the IPCC rely solely on computer models, ... Denier Don is wrong. The IPCC reports describe observations of past climates with direct physical evidence of the role of CO2 in controlling the climate. Denier Don writes: ...but because the effect of CO2 is so small,  Denier Don is wrong, even on its own without allowing for feedbacks, CO2 accounts for 24% (clear sky) or 19% (including clouds) of the greenhouse effect.  That's not what CO2 contributes to global warming - it's what it contributes generally, compared to water vapour etc. Denier Don writes: ...they introduce an increase in water vapor (which is responsible for 95% of greenhouse warming), claiming that as CO2 goes up so does water vapor.  Denier Don is wrong. Water vapour accounts for 67% (clear sky) or 50% (including clouds) of the greenhouse effect. Don is implying that more water can't evaporate as it gets hotter? That's ridiculous. Of course as it gets hotter more water evaporates and this has been measured in observations.

Denier Don writes: The National Geographic claims that CO2 has caused 1º F of warming this century. But CO2 didn’t begin to rise sharply until after 1945 so cannot have been a factor before then. 

Denier Don is wrong. What Don writes about it "cannot have been a factor" is a logical fallacy. Earth has been warming since CO2 started rising. Early last century it was not the sole contributor to global warming. There was also a contribution from an increase in solar radiation. Since about the mid-1950s, most of the increase in global surfact temperature is because of the increase in greenhouse gases, particularly CO2.

Denier Don writes: Temperature data shows that 0.7° C of wrming occurred from 1900 to 1945, before CO2 could have been the cause and while CO2 emissions soared from 1945 to 1977, global temperatures declined (just the opposite of what should have occurred if CO2 causes warming), and only 0.5°C warming from 1978 to present coincided with rising CO2 (and that is very likely coincidental).

Denier Don is wrong: If you look at the chart below you'll see that the temperature fell from the 1880s and rose between 1900 and the mid-1940s then flattened a bit before rising very sharply.  If you add Don's 0.7 and 0.5 degrees you get 1.2 degrees, which is 50% more than the actual warming of 0.8 degrees.  What he is doing is picking start points and end points rather than longer term trends.  Even so, what he writes is illogical. CO2 has been rising since the industrial revolution, so of course it has contributed to global warming since that time.  Early last century other factors also contributed, particularly the increase in solar radiation.  Since the middle of last century CO2 is likely responsible for pretty well all of the warming - around 0.6 degrees.

Data Source: NASA

Frankly, I can find almost nothing that Don claims to be true.   It's just one big lie from beginning to end.  Denier Don even tries to claim that the world has cooled in the past 15 years, which is false, as the above chart shows.

The geology professor fails geology

As well as the above, Denier Don makes the ridiculous claim that ice hasn't melted in the past.  He writes:

That this (ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will melt) is not going to happen is shown by (1) there is no evidence that this has ever happened in the past and several factors insure that it won’t happen any time soon, (2) Antarctic glaciers are frozen to their base and move by internal flowage of ice, not by basal sliding, (3) these ice sheets lie in basins, and (4) the Greenland ice sheet is behaving just as it has in the geologic past and there is nothing unusual happening to it now.

Crikey, Denier Don is supposed to have been a geology professor.  He knows nothing about geology.  This United States Geological Survey fact sheet describes how sea levels have been much higher in the past (my bold italics):

Sea levels during several previous interglacials were about 3 to as much as 20 meters higher than current sea level. The evidence comes from two different but complementary types of studies. One line of evidence is provided by old shoreline features (fig. 2). Wave-cut terraces and beach deposits from regions as separate as the Caribbean and the North Slope of Alaska suggest higher sea levels during past interglacial times. A second line of evidence comes from sediments cored from below the existing Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The fossils and chemical signals in the sediment cores indicate that both major ice sheets were greatly reduced from their current size or even completely melted one or more times in the recent geologic past. The precise timing and details of past sea-level history are still being debated, but there is clear evidence for past sea levels significantly higher than current sea level.

Here's a NASA video about Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica and the ice shelf that's holding it back.

Denier Don fails arithmetic

Not only doesn't he know geology, Denier Don fails arithmetic.  He writes:

Carbon dioxide is a trace gas that makes up only 0.039% of the atmosphere, accounts for only 3.6% of the greenhouse effect, and has increased by only 0.009% since 1950. 

Before the industrial revolution, CO2 was around 285 parts per million.  Now it is around 400 ppm.  Denier Don can't do his sums.  400-285 equals 115 ppm.  115 divided by 285 equals 0.41 or 41%.  That's how much CO2 has increased.  It's increased a lot more than 0.009%!!  If he was trying to say it went up by 90 ppm since 1950, that would be a 28% rise since 1950 not a 0.009% rise!

Denier Don fakes a chart

Denier Don even goes to the extent of faking the actual sea level charts to pretend that the rise in sea level has slowed down.  Correction: SCM in the comments points out that Don's chart is based on a chart of sea level rise without removing the seasonal signal, and with Don deleting the most recent months' data.  Because Don has hidden data and because he has drawn his own "trend", I maintain it's still a faked chart.  I've updated the animation to show this:

Data sources: U Colorado (actual) and WUWT (faked chart)

Denier Don quotes Christopher Monckton

It gets even worse.  Don puts up a chart of what he claims to be temperatures of the past ten years to try to claim the world is cooling.  He labels the chart as "modified from Monckton, 2013".  He quotes the potty peer as an authority - ROTFL!

Denier Don Challenge

I challenge anyone to find, say, three claims out of the dozens that Denier Don makes in his pack of lies that are supported by the evidence.  Here's the archived WUWT article.  Have at it, folks!

From the WUWT comments

I just noticed this comment from John Franco who says:

September 25, 2013 at 1:57 pm
First of all, thanks for the article. Here are some things I have been wondering as an amateur scientist.

Figure 4 shows the hadcrut temperature data. First, isn’t the hadcrut data just the north american ground based weather station data? I don’t understand how this is a proxy for global temperature. Second, Hasn’t Anthony Watt’s paper demonstrated that hadcrut is seriously flawed? Why do I keep seeing that temperature set in articles written by skeptics, when the real temperature would show that the temperatures at the end of this century were lower than in the 1940′s?

Breaking News: Christopher Monckton writes some facts about climate

The potty peer Lord Monckton has drafted an alternative to the new position statement on climate change recently announced by the American Geophysical Union, for the benefit of WUWT science deniers. Surprisingly it includes some factual bits, for example:

Human activities are changing Earth’s climate...The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased ... caused by burning fossil fuels.  The world has warmed by 0.8 Cº.  Some (but not all) mountain glaciers have receded.  Arctic sea ice has declined since 1979, but Antarctic sea ice has increased.  

Climate models predict that global temperatures will continue to rise, with the amount of warming primarily determined by the level of emissions; that higher emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to larger warming and greater risks to society and ecosystems; and that some additional warming is unavoidable owing to past emissions. 

Climate change is not expected to be uniform over space or time. Deforestation, urbanization, and particulate pollution can have complex geographical, seasonal, and longer-term effects ... on temperature, precipitation, and cloud properties. In the current climate, weather experienced at a given location or region varies from year to year; in a changing climate, both the nature of that variability and the basic patterns of weather experienced can change, sometimes in counter-intuitive ways – some areas may experience cooling, for instance.

Apart from the above, the rest is just another rehash of Monckton's normal nonsense, lies and disinformation so I won't say any more about it other than to selectively quote three WUWT readers.


Justthinkin says (cherry-picked excerpt):

August 7, 2013 at 7:03 am  ...I would only add this quote…
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. Albert Einstein

Eric Worrall says (cherry-picked excerpt):

August 7, 2013 at 3:44 am  Dear Lord Monckton, if only the world were a little saner. 

 
stan stendera is overwhelmed by being in the presence of "royalty" and writes:

August 7, 2013 at 3:42 am I bow again to you M’Lord.

There is one more comment I'll mention, from the "gone emeritus" professor Don Easterbrook.  Denier Don is as woeful at arithmetic as he is at climate science. Don Easterbrook says:

August 7, 2013 at 7:20 am  The atmospheric CO2 in 1958 was 0.0315% and has risen to 0.0395 in 2013, a rise of 0.008%. Isn’t it amazing that an increase of 0.008% in a gas that accounts for only 3.5% of the greenhouse effect is supposed to cause global warming of 6-10 degrees F by 2100? Even more amazing is that while CO2 rose from 0.0315% to 0.0338 from 1958 to 1980, global temperatures cooled, rather than increased, and the warmest decade of the century, the 1930s (unless you tamper with the data), occurred BEFORE atmospheric CO2 began to soar after 1945! But perhaps most amazing of all is how people who call themselves scientists (AGU) are willing to accept failed model predictions over real-time data.

The arithmetic error:  Denier Don talks of an increase as a percentage.  0.0395% minus 0.0315% divided by 0.0315% equals a 25% increase in the amount of atmospheric CO2 since 1958, not a 0.008% increase.  The increase in atmospheric CO2 since industrialisation is now around 40% or more.


Denier Don's climate science errors:

1. Carbon dioxide accounts for around 20% of the greenhouse effect (not 3.5%) - that is, the greenhouse effect itself, not global warming.  From Schmidt et al (2010):

With a straightforward scheme for allocating overlaps, we find that water vapor is the dominant contributor (∼50% of the effect), followed by clouds (∼25%) and then CO2 with ∼20%. All other absorbers play only minor roles. In a doubled CO2 scenario, this allocation is essentially unchanged, even though the magnitude of the total greenhouse effect is significantly larger than the initial radiative forcing, underscoring the importance of feedbacks from water vapor and clouds to climate sensitivity.

2. Global temperatures did not "cool" between 1958 and 1980.  2010 was the hottest year on record to date, the decade of the 1930s was a lot cooler.

Data Source: NASA

More Denier Don's Deception at WUWT: Updated

Update: I've added an animation and one of Don's charts to illustrate the depth of his deception.


Denier Don (aka Emeritus Professor Don Easterbrook) is at it again on WUWT, confusing polar temperature swings with global temperature swings.  He puts up gaudy drawings of ice core data and tells his big fat lies.  He is telling the mob that global temperatures fluctuations are the same as those at the poles.

Not so fast, Don.  You might fool the 8% Dismissives with your tricks but it's too, too easy to show you up for the disinformation merchant that you are.  Remember how your faculty outed your deceit and deception?

Here is the record of global surface temperatures of the past forty thousand years or so, with projected temperatures added:

Source: Adapted from Jos Hagelaars, based on Shakun et al (2012) and Marcott et al (2013)

See?  Although in any particular location, especially in the Arctic where there is "polar amplification", the temperatures can rise and fall by large amounts, the surface temperature fluctuations, averaged over the earth as a whole, are much more moderate.  Even going back twenty thousand years, about ten thousand years before the Holocene, surface temperatures were only four degrees or so less than now.

Compare the actual global surface temperature anomaly with Don's Deception in this animation (click to enlarge):

Sources: Alley (2000) and Shakun (2012)

The two charts compare global surface temperature anomaly with the actual temperatures on top of Greenland ice sheet for a period from 10,000 years ago to 22,000 years ago.

One thing you'll notice is that at the beginning of the Holocene (to the right of the charts), the temperature on the top of Central Greenland is around minus 30 degrees Celsius, much like today.  Considerably colder than the average temperature of earth.

Another thing you'll notice is that the temperature on the top of the ice sheet fluctuates a heck of a lot more than the average surface temperature of the entire world.  On top of the ice sheet temperatures can rise and fall between minus thirty degrees and minus 50 degrees even over a couple of centuries.  In the world as a whole, on the other hand, as you'd expect, it normally takes a few thousand years for the temperature to rise by a mere 3.58 degrees.  Ten thousand years to be more precise.  And to think that we are probably going to cause a temperature increase of a whole four degrees over less than two hundred years.  What the hell are we doing to ourselves!

Compare this to what Deceiver Don will try to have you believe.  He plots global surface temperatures on the same chart as temperatures on Central Greenland, would you believe (see far right).

Don compounds his deception, writing:

Magnitudes of the largest warming/cooling events over the past 25,000 years. Temperatures on the vertical axis are rise or fall of temperatures in about a century. Event number 1 is about 24,000 years ago and event number 15 is about 11,000 years old. At least three warming events were 20 to 24 times the magnitude of warming over the past century and four were 6 to 9 times the magnitude of warming over the past century. The magnitude of the only modern warming which might possibly have been caused by CO2. (1978-1998) is insignificant compared to the earlier periods of warming. (Plotted from data in Cuffy and Clow, 1997 and Alley, 2000)

Deceiver Don is actually expecting you to believe that global temperatures are the same as temperatures on the top of the ice sheet in Greenland!  It's a favourite trick of his.  Not only that, but Don minimises what he says is the 'warming by CO2'. Anthony Watts is complicit in the deception by posting this rubbish.

What Don doesn't tell you is that past major warmings and coolings were also 'caused' by CO2 - in the past acting as a feedback to other forcings.  It doesn't take much of a change in CO2 to result in a change in earth's surface temperature over time.  Don is triumphant in proclaiming that humans didn't cause past glacials and interglacials.  Well, whoopy doo! Even a fool like him could tell you that.  What past climate change does tell us is the role of carbon dioxide in climate control - past and present.

Check out this excellent video from Richard Alley and he'll explain it to you.

Remember, Anthony Watts favours lies over truth and disinformation over facts - and is utterly inconsistent in his nuttery.

PS Tamino is back, with a timely post on Honesty.

PPS The first denier comment shows how silly most of them are.  John Tillman says CO2 has a negligible effect but is beneficial.  A beneficial negligible effect? No effect but a good effect?  Someone help me out here:

June 2, 2013 at 11:10 am  To anyone with an open mind, these data would be dispositive. The effect of CO2 is negligible, and at least so far during recent decades, beneficial.

...I guess John's mind was so open that his brains fell out.

PPPS I notice that in the comments, Denier Don is still linking to one of his wrong charts, which Anthony Watts posted in his third of 28+ protests at Marcott et al.  Even justthefactswuwt has rejected that chart as 'disputed'. Is Denier Don desperately dumb or just a dogged deceiver?