WUWT round-up: Chris Horner's Email Withdrawal and a New Denier Don

I'm a bit flat chat at the minute so will just do a quick round-up of denier nonsense from WUWT.

Climate science is a hoax because Chris Horner has no emails

First of all, Chris Horner of ATI, who gets his kicks from reading emails between scientists, when he can get them, is running out of emails to read (archived here).  He's suffering email withdrawal symptoms.  Chris doesn't understand science but he reckons that if he could only get his hand on some emails he'd be bound to find something nefarious in them.  Like "regards".  Now what hidden code could that be?  "Regards" would obviously be shorthand for "no regards" which would mean that scientists have "no regards" for the likes of Chris Horner.  As for "cheers".  Why would a scientists be cheery if they seriously believed the earth was heading for catastrophe.  The word "cheers" in an email would signify that climate science is a hoax.

Cheers to Andrew Dessler, I say.

Another Professor "Gone Emeritus" who lists denier memes

Climate science denier Donald C Morton has declared that he's given up astrophysics and gone emeritus.  He has posed a number of questions and outlined some difficulties he has with climate science (archived here).  For the most part these are answered in the literature but Donald C Morton is no longer capable of understanding or doesn't want to understand.  Donald has decided to embark on a new career of climate science denial.

Here are his questions.  Well, they aren't questions for the most part.  They are a random collections of tired denier memes drawn from SkepticalScience.com.  Perhaps a reader will help him out further.

His first question isn't a question it's a statement that global surface temperatures haven't gone up lately.  He doesn't explore this in any depth, like looking at what's happened in the earth system overall.  For example:

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His next question isn't a question either.  He says he thinks that water vapour isn't a greenhouse gas any more, or something like that.  He also doesn't appear to understand the first thing about climate models. Here is what he wrote - you can see if you can figure it out.

Without justification the model makers ignored possible natural causes and assumed the rise was caused primarily by anthropogenic CO2 with reflections by clouds and other aerosols approximately cancelling absorption by the other gases noted above. Consequently they postulated a positive feedback due to hotter air holding more water vapor, which increased the absorption of radiation and the backwarming. The computer simulations represented this process and many other effects by adjustable parameters chosen to match the observations. As stated on p. 9-9 of IPCC2013, “The complexity of each process representation is constrained by observations, computational resources, and current knowledge.” Models that did not show a temperature rise would have been omitted from any ensemble so the observed rise effectively determined the feedback parameter. [Sou: Huh? What models were 'omitted'?]

Now that the temperature has stopped increasing we see that this parameter is not valid. It even could be negative. CO2 absorption without the presumed feedback will still happen but its effect will not be alarming. The modest warming possibly could be a net benefit with increased crop production and fewer deaths due to cold weather.

In the above you'll notice that he's managed to squeeze in "CO2 is plant food", "people die in the cold" and "water vapour feedback might be negative".

Don's next question isn't a question, it's a speculation.  He's invoked the denier meme "it's the sun" and speculates that climate scientists don't know how the sun works.

The sun has entered a phase of low activity. Fig. 5 shows that previous times of very low activity were the Dalton Minimum from about 1800 to 1820 and the Maunder Minimum from about 1645 to 1715 when very few spots were seen. Since these minima occurred during the Little Ice Age when glaciers were advancing in both Northern and Southern Hemispheres, it is possible that we are entering another cooling period. Without a physical understanding of the cause of such cool periods, we cannot be more specific. Temperatures as cold as the Little Ice Age may not happen, but there must be some cooling to compensate the heating that is present from the increasing CO2 absorption.

Regrettably the IPCC reports scarcely mention these solar effects and the uncertainties they add to any prediction.

He could try reading some science about the impact on climate of changes in solar radiation.

Someone told Don to mention the dumb writings of Essex, McKitrick and Andresen (2007) and Essex and McKitrick (2007). So he did.  He reckons that because a bunch of denialists don't see the relevance of temperature to global warming or global cooling or climatology, that it can't be much use as a gauge.  Don thinks that it's quite meaningless to claim that summer is generally warmer than winter.  And it would be especially foolish to try to work out the average temperature difference between a summer's day and a winter's night in the desert.

Finally Don does come up with a question.  It's about chaos.  Don, like so many at WUWT, can't understand why weather forecasts are short term because of chaos but climate can be projected.  Maybe someone will point him towards Lorenz and explain the difference between initial value problems and boundary conditions. Don asks:

Why do the climate models in the IPCC reports not show these instabilities? Have they been selectively tuned to avoid them or are the chaotic physical processes not properly included? Why should we think that long-term climate predictions are possible when they are not for weather?

Once more, Don probably can't figure out how people are so sure that winter will generally be colder than summer.  I bet he has a really hard time with figuring out how anyone can be so certain that Florida has a different climate to that of McMurdo Sound, given the chaotic property of weather.  Here's a tip for him from Gavin Schmidt:

Weather concerns an initial value problem: Given today's situation, what will tomorrow bring? Weather is chaotic; imperceptible differences in the initial state of the atmosphere lead to radically different conditions in a week or so. Climate is instead a boundary value problem — a statistical description of the mean state and variability of a system, not an individual path through phase space. 

Next Don both protests the consensus and complains that those who reject science are described as denying science.  He asks: "Why do some proponents of climate alarm dismiss critics by implying they are like Holocaust deniers?" Don is a classic example of a climate science denier.

Don summarises his denial as follows - I've reformatted them as a list for your convenience:

At least six serious problems confront the climate predictions presented in the last IPCC Report.

1. The models do not predict the observed temperature plateau since 1998,
2. the models adopted a feedback parameter based on the unjustified assumption that the warming prior to 1998 was primarily caused by anthopogenic CO2,
3. the IPCC ignored possible affects of reduced solar activity during the past decade,
4. the temperature anomaly has no physical significance,
5. the models attempt to predict the future of a chaotic system, and
6. there is an appeal to consensus to establish climate science.

His second item demonstrates he doesn't understand climate science.  His first and third item could be regarded as cancelling each other out to some extent.  His fourth item is plain silly. His fifth item shows he doesn't understand the difference between climate and weather.

I haven't checked, but one wonders, going by his sixth and last item, whether he wrote all his astrophysics papers from first principles with no need for references to published literature of science that went before.  His papers would have been very long. It's amazing he was still able to get published.

There you go.  Another physicist bites the dust.  Still, he does demonstrate he's not proud.  He's not so arrogant as to disdain association with an ex-television weather announcer and anti-science advocating blogger.

From the WUWT comments

Just one, belatedly added for the record (archived here).

Greig says:

February 17, 2014 at 8:19 pm
Hi Don,
The knaves over at HotWhopper are “twisting the truth you have spoken”, here. Whilst you say critical comments are welcome, deliberate misinterpretation perhaps deserves to be challenged.