Just remember this moment, Anthony Watts! Dunning Kruger in the Arctic.

Today, finally, Anthony Watts has written about the record low Arctic ice extent that is being observed in the Arctic (and Antarctic) (archived here). He copied and pasted a press release from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (with no link to the original, as usual). What I'm writing about is the weirdly ignorant comment he added at the top. Anthony wrote:

It’s weather folks, but do remember this moment the next time we get a record high Arctic sea ice extent, the same people that are caterwauling on Twitter right now about this will tell you that it doesn’t matter. 

Yep - just remember this moment

Oh my! Anthony won't see a record high in his lifetime. It's highly likely that no-one will -  for thousands of years at least. Even just going back over the satellite record, since October 1978, there hasn't been a high record in the average annual sea ice extent since 1982. (Data is here - and the spreadsheet is here) If you analyse the monthly records, most months have the record high recorded in the first year of observations - 1978 or 1979 - almost forty years ago. The exceptions are the months of: May (1985), July (1983), August (1983), and September (1980).

In other words, the most recent record high sea ice extent in the Arctic was in May 1985, more than 30 years ago! And that's just the satellite record. If you go back to 1953, except for January when the record high was in 1979, the latest monthly record highs were in 1971 or earlier - 45 years ago.

Climate science deniers at WUWT diversify into human health

Not only are climate science deniers climate experts they are also human health experts. They are equally good at not reading articles about human health as they are at not reading articles about climate science. That's how one becomes an expert in deniersville. (Cue Dunning and Kruger.)

An occasional blogger at Curry's place and WUWT, Kip Hansen (who revels in straw man fallacies in climate science), has picked up on an article in the New York Times. Gina Kollata has written about how some ailments have shown a marked decline in the USA. They are still prevalent, but emerging in people much later in life than previously. Kip finishes with another straw man anti-environment throwaway to prove he is a well-trained WUWT monkey:

Kolata’s coverage is a breath of fresh air in science reporting, where we are more usually subjected to yet-another alarming report of impending personal disaster .  [Cue music:  “It Ain’t Necessarily So”] caused by vague “chemicals and toxins” [sic] in our environment.

Anthony Watts gets more than the sun wrong at WUWT

Anthony Watts of WUWT mocks another scientific study, this time one that shows something that won't surprise too many people. (Archived here.)

The Schurer, Tett and Hegerl paper, published in Nature Geoscience, finds that changes in solar radiation resulted in only small changes in climate over the past 1,000 years.  Volcanic eruptions had a bigger impact on climate than changes in incoming solar radiation.  From the abstract:

We find that neither a high magnitude of solar forcing nor a strong climate effect of that forcing agree with the temperature reconstructions. We instead conclude that solar forcing probably had a minor effect on Northern Hemisphere climate over the past 1,000 years, while, volcanic eruptions and changes in greenhouse gas concentrations seem to be the most important influence over this period.

This seems to be consistent with a 2006 paper by Ammann et al - from the abstract:

Smaller, rather than larger, long-term trends in solar irradiance appear more plausible and produced modeled climates in better agreement with the range of Northern Hemisphere temperature proxy records both with respect to phase and magnitude. Despite the direct response of the model to solar forcing, even large solar irradiance change combined with realistic volcanic forcing over past centuries could not explain the late 20th century warming without inclusion of greenhouse gas forcing. Although solar and volcanic effects appear to dominate most of the slow climate variations within the past thousand years, the impacts of greenhouse gases have dominated since the second half of the last century.

Anthony Watts confused NERC with NRDC

You want to know one reason for Anthony bagging the paper?  It's because he confused UK's Natural Environment Research Council, which funded the study, with the USA's Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).  Anthony wrote:

Note the “…was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council.” at the end. That alone makes me suspicious of the science presented because it looks a lot like “science for hire” when a blatantly political group like NRDC funds the study. 

Only the NRDC didn't fund the study, did it.  The UK, like Australia, has a number of R&D Councils some of which are funded wholly by government and some of which would be jointly funded by government and industry (such as on a government dollar for industry dollar basis).

Update: Ha ha - it looks as if someone corrected Anthony because he's made a few changes to his article now (original archived here and updated version archived here). BUT although Anthony deleted the section above, in one spot he only made a minor correction which now looks plain silly:

...another one-paper syndrome in the making funded by an NGO with a political mission to grab a headline. 

An R&D Council's mission is to support R&D.  They don't have a "political mission to make a headline".  What a plonker!

Anthony Watts confuses weather and climate

Then poor old Anthony goes and confuses weather with climate, writing:

Then there is: “…climatic fingerprints of high and low solar forcing derived from model simulations…”. IPCC Models haven’t been able to reproduce the last ten years; what makes them think they are worth anything 100-200 years ago?

Climate models are designed for climate, for multi-decadal timescales not ten years or less.  In any case, observations are still in the realm of model simulations.  It's not that hard to compare models with observations going back 160 years so they'd be able to figure out how close the models are to observations.  And there are proxy temperature reconstructions to see how models fare against global surface temperatures going back 1,000 years.

Anthony Watts wouldn't know an expert if he tripped over one

Finally, Anthony has a go at the lead author, Andrew P Schurer, writing:

I’m not so sure this fellow is fully versed on climatology. His papers up to 2011 were all about cosmology, then all of the sudden he starts publishing on climatology issues. One wonders if his previous funding dried up to make such a dramatic shift in study. 

Actually, Andrew Schurer has been publishing climate papers since 2011.  Five of his eight listed publications are directly related to climate and this one makes six out of nine.  The first was published in 2011.  He's only published three papers on galaxies, the last one in 2011. And is it such a dramatic shift?  I don't know but what I would remark on is that for a presumably young researcher he is doing very well, with publications not just in Nature Geoscience but GRL and JGR.  He has to be a whole lot more qualified than the so-called "experts" that Anthony promotes, like the potty peer Christopher Monckton, David "funny sunny" Archibald, Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale and Wondering Willis Eschenbach and Anthony "UHI disease" Watts himself.

As for Andrew Schurer's co-authors, Professors Simon Tett and Gabriele Hegerl, they would be known to many HotWhopper readers by reputation at least.

From the WUWT comments

Steven Mosher says:

December 23, 2013 at 9:46 am
one paper wonder?
what was it Einstein said?

Anthony Watts reply shows he doesn't know anything at all about the work of Albert Einstein:

REPLY: I’ll remind you of what you said to me at AGU discussing Robert Rhode’s poster. “models aren’t proof of anything, they are simply best guesses”. So here we have modeled (not observed) solar activity being curve fit to observed surface temperatures. I’m pretty sure Einstein would not be impressed. – Anthony

Eyal Porat "wanders" but doesn't wander as far as here or here and says:

December 23, 2013 at 9:51 am
I wander what volcanoes caused the LIA.
That was a 150 years stretch of mighty volcano activity…

Rob wants to see scientists find a correlation between sun activity and housing?

December 23, 2013 at 9:56 am
I’m Rob M too and I was just about to say that.
They are “fitting” sun activity to models rather than finding correlation between sun activity and realty.

Richard M seems to think oceans can force climate all by their little selves.  I guess he doesn't accept there was a medieval climate anomaly or a little ice age and says:

December 23, 2013 at 10:20 am
Sadly they ignore the single most important factor in climate changes … the oceans. From what I can tell solar changes tend to be of shorter duration which is also true of volcanoes. They won’t find great correlations with either one..

---

Andrew P. Schurer, Simon F. B. Tett & Gabriele C. Hegerl, Small influence of solar variability on climate over the past millennium, Nature Geoscience, http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2040

Ammann, Caspar M., Fortunat Joos, David S. Schimel, Bette L. Otto-Bliesner, and Robert A. Tomas. "Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: Results from transient simulations with the NCAR Climate System Model." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104, no. 10 (2007): 3713-3718. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0605064103

Wondering Willis' Original Weather Hypotheses

Wondering Willis Eschenbach wonders some more at WUWT.  This time, as almost every other time, about the way energy moves through the Earth system.  Willis combines the known with the unreal and thinks he has come up with something new.  Instead he makes simple science complex and complex science overly simple and mixes it all up into a weird concoction of his own making. (Archived here.)

Willis is keen to let everyone know he has invented meteorology.  Here are some of his claimed "original" ideas:

However, the idea that the temperature-determined time of onset of tropical clouds and thunderstorms is a main regulator of the temperature of the globe is my own, as far as I know. I think the same is true for the idea that the PDO regulates the temperature by either impeding or encouraging polewards heat flow. Finally, I think that the idea that the El Nino / La Nina alteration functions to regulate the temperature by pumping warm tropical water to the poles when the tropics start to overheat is my own idea as well. (December 22, 2013 at 2:40 pm)

Willis Original: Clouds & thunderstorms are the main regulator

First Willis claims this as his own idea:

...the idea that the temperature-determined time of onset of tropical clouds and thunderstorms is a main regulator of the temperature of the globe is my own, as far as I know.

Willis, as some of you will remember, doesn't read science.  It would both spoil his claims of originality and show his ideas up as foolish. Probably more the latter than the former.  Go to any page about tropical storms and you'll probably find a sentence something like the one on this NOAA page:

Since tropical cyclones help regulate the earth's temperature, any decrease in tropical cyclone intensity means the oceans retain more heat. 

A two-second Google search would tell even the least informed person that Willis hasn't made any original discovery relating to diurnal cloud formation in the tropics.  But for fake sceptics Google is for the birds.  (Sorry, birds.  I meant no offence.)

Clouds are formed when warm air meets surface water and the water evaporates, rises and condenses. I don't imagine that Willis is claiming that as an original thought of his own.  So what is he claiming as his original thought? Is it the "main regulator of the temperature of the globe" bit?  Surely he's not trying to claim to be the first to recognise that the water cycle is one of the main temperature regulating mechanisms.

The image below is from the National Environment Agency in Singapore, where it states that "Thunderstorms tend to occur between 2 pm and 6 pm in the afternoon as diurnal heating and convection play an important role in thunderstorm development".  I guess they must have got the "original idea" from Wondering Willis :)

A mature thunderstorm cell is characterised by vigorous updrafts and downdrafts. Updrafts are associated with inflow of humid air from the base of the cloud. When a thunderstorm matures, the falling of raindrops drags and pushes air downwards causing downdrafts. These downdrafts eventually spread throughout the entire cloud, cutting off the feed of moisture by updrafts. The thunderstorm cell then enters the dissipating stage. Each individual thunderstorm cell typically has a lifespan of less than one hour and a horizontal extent of several kilometres. 

Credit: National Environment Agency, Singapore

I came across this graphic of a tropical cyclone, which I'll include because I like it and it's more interesting than Willis' wonderings.  Click to enlarge it.

Credit: BOM/NOAA/ABC Tim Madden

Willis Original: PDO regulates the temperature

The next "original" claim by Willis is this:

I think the same is true for the idea that the PDO regulates the temperature by either impeding or encouraging polewards heat flow. 

I don't know what Willis means by that.  Does anyone?  Maybe he is referring to the fact that if there is a steeper temperature gradient in the North Pacific then heat will "flow" more from the tropics to the Arctic. But surely he wouldn't try to claim that idea as his own original thought.

The PDO is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.  It is described in terms of sea surface temperature (SST). From my limited reading, the general view is that these changes are brought about by a confluence of factors. For example, a paper by Schneider and Cornuelle suggests that it is influenced by various effects (some of which I've only vaguely heard of) including ENSO, the Aleutian low and the Kuroshio–Oyashio Extension.  A more recent paper by Michael Alexander states that the PDO is not a "mode of the climate system" but more the result of several different mechanisms:

Unlike ENSO, the PDO does not appear to be a mode of the climate system, but rather it results from several different mechanisms including (1) stochastic heat flux forcing associated with random fluctuations in the Aleutian Low, (2) the atmospheric bridge augmented by the reemergence mechanism, and (3) wind-driven changes in the North Pacific gyres.

So it doesn't seem right to my way of thinking to say that the PDO regulates something.  It seems to me it is an expression of what is regulated rather than being a regulator.

Willis Original: ENSO pumping tropical water to the poles

Remember Willis wrote this:

Finally, I think that the idea that the El Nino / La Nina alteration functions to regulate the temperature by pumping warm tropical water to the poles when the tropics start to overheat is my own idea as well.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know ENSO doesn't "pump warm tropical water to the poles when the tropics start to overheat". ENSO events are associated with changes in the Walker Circulation, which is an east-west circulation of the atmosphere above the tropical Pacific, not a north-south circulation.  In the ocean, it is associated with a shift in the thermocline with upwelling in the eastern tropical Pacific during La Nina - bringing cooler water to the surface in the east and with warm water being concentrated in the west. And suppressed upwelling in El Nino, allowing warm water to pool over a larger area in the east warming the air and land surface.

The surface current goes east to west across the tropical Pacific.  It's deep currents that go north-south and south-north.  But they flow all the time and as far as I know don't change with the different phases of ENSO, which is what Willis is arguing.

The video below shows the main ocean currents of the world:

Credit: CSIRO, the Wealth from Oceans Flagship and the Australian Climate Change Science Program

Willis' Thermostat is Broken

What Willis maintains is that his tropical clouds and thunderstorms act as a "global thermostat".  There's nothing new about that notion, whatever Willis tries to tell people.  Willis goes further though and argues that clouds keeps temperature at a set point.  Well, it looks as if that thermostat is broken now, doesn't it.  Willis insists that "over the previous century the total variation in temperature was ≈ ± 0.3K".  I have no idea where he got that notion from.  It wasn't from a chart of temperature variations over the past 100 years.  As you can see below the temperature rose from -0.4 to +0.6 degrees.  It rose by 1 degree Celsius (or 1 degree Kelvin if you prefer) over that time.  That's a lot more than +/- 0.3 degrees.

Data Source: NASA

Willis Eschenbach and the Dunning-Kruger Effect 

Willis, who wouldn't have much of a clue about what climatologists and meteorologists know about climate and weather, goes full on Dunning Kruger when he writes:

I differ from the majority of current climate scientists by saying that the climate is not the linear slave of the forcing. I say it is a regulated system, where the temperature is kept within bounds by a variety of interlocking and overlapping thermoregulatory phenomena.

What does Willis mean by "the linear slave of forcing"?  Is he arguing that nothing can force climate or is he saying that climate forcings aren't linear?  If the former he's wrong. The main climate forcings operating today are increased greenhouse gases and, to a lesser extent, changes in solar radiation and volcanic eruptions.  If the latter then he's wrong too, because forcings are not simply linear.  Forcings lead to a complex set of feedbacks that operate on different time scales so that the net impact is not linear.

And what's that gobbledegook about "variety of interlocking and overlapping thermoregulatory phenomena"? Could that be his fancy way of talking about feedbacks?  If so, why doesn't he just use the common word: "feedback".  If he is arguing that the water cycle is a limiting mechanism then I say - duh! Everyone should know that. Water vapour condenses when it gets cold and precipitates.  That helps stop the world getting too hot.

Maybe Willis is trying to argue that nothing can force the climate.  Surely not.  How would he explain glacials and interglacials?  How would he explain the current warming?

How does weather work?

Personally, for a simple description of how "weather" works, I'd go for something like this page that discusses the "heat engine" in a more sensible manner than does Willis.  If you want to get stuck in the clouds, there's a fair bit written here to keep you going for a while.  Or for something simple, the video below, from the UK Met gives a thumbnail sketch of the global weather system.

.

Wondering Willis Eschenbach visits Dunning Kruger Land and adopts his own Gaia hypothesis

Update: There's still more from Willis in the comments - see below

As climate hawks know, every time there is a new report from the IPCC or other important event relating to climate change, the denialati go a bit crazy.  We've seen silliness from David Rose  - here and here, Matt Ridley, Anthony Watts and others.  Now Willis Eschenbach has joined the party exhibiting an advanced case of Dunning Kruger Effect. (Archived here with the latest update here, still more archived here.)

Wondering Willis (he who thinks that rare landings on a remote airstrip has caused global warming) sets the scene writing this:

You see, back around 1980, about 33 years ago, we got the first estimate from the computer models of the “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (ECS). This is the estimate of how much the world will warm if CO2 doubles. At that time, the range was said to be from 1.5° to 4.5°.

I think Willis is probably referring to what is known as Charney sensitivity which, according to Gavin Schmidt assumes the land surface, ice sheets and atmospheric composition (chemistry and aerosols) stay the same. (There are many different meanings to "climate sensitivity".)

Broadly speaking, regardless of what is being referred to, the ranges for climate sensitivity are fairly well accepted - depending on the context: the upper and lower limits for a doubling of CO2 are between about 1.5 degrees and 6 degrees and most likely between 2 and 4.5 degrees, although the upper limit is considerably less certain than the lower limit in regard to equilibrium climate sensitivity.  It's not thought to be, for example, from 20 to 25 degrees or from minus 10 to minus 20 degrees.

Deniers claim to want greater precision - but they really don't.  If there were greater precision it would have to be in a very specific context - and deniers would both disregard the context (it's a habit of theirs) and still complain it's not been specified to two decimal places.  Deniers (as opposed to disinformers) don't understand climate science or climate sensitivity - and I doubt that any greater precision would have any meaning for them.  (Many deniers, for example, think that an increase in global surface temperature of two degrees means only that the temperatures where they live will be two degrees warmer - and that's it! They cannot comprehend the notion of an average global surface temperature anomaly or what it signifies.)

Having said that the range of climate sensitivity hasn't changed much over the years, Willis goes on to write:

Can anyone name any other scientific field that has made so little progress in the last third of a century? Anyone? Because I can’t.

Making such a dumb statement goes to prove what any regular reader here knows already - Willis doesn't read science.  He thinks that climate science is only about narrowing the range of climate sensitivity.  (Wondering Willis, you might recall, also thought that excel spreadsheets should be included in papers published in Science.  No, he didn't mean published as supplementary information - he meant that it should form part of the published paper itself!)

To prove his ignorance, Willis writes this (my bold italics):

The wrong path is the ludicrous idea that the change in global temperature is a simple function of the change in the “forcings”, which is climatespeak for the amount of downward radiation at the top of the atmosphere. The canonical (incorrect) equation is: ∆T = lambda ∆F

Willis has taken a simplified equation and assumed that is what climate scientists use to model climate.  I have no idea where he got this notion from.  It's not from the literature.  Maybe he read, or should I say half-read, Wikipedia and decided "that'll do me. I'll adapt the equation for a simple energy model and mis-portray that as being what's used for earth system models."  (I mentioned a good general interest article on climate models in ArsTechnica.  Page one of that provides a conceptual diagram of earth system models.)
Willis wanders around a second hand car yard, talking about gas (petrol) and cruise control and arguing that when cruise control is on that there is no longer any relationship between the speed of the vehicle and petrol consumption.  (He doesn't know my car.)  After that, Willis wanders off onto his favourite topic of thunderstorms and ends up with something strikingly similar to the popularised concept of Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis (which deniers love to mock).

The exact same thing is going on with the climate. It is governed by a variety of emergent climate phenomena such as thunderstorms, the El Nino/La Lina warm water pump, and the PDO. And as a result, the change in global temperature is totally decoupled from the changes in forcings. This is why it is so hard to find traces of e.g. solar and volcano forcings in the temperature record. We know that both of those change the forcings … but the temperatures do not change correspondingly.

To me, that’s the Occam’s Razor explanation of why, after thirty years, millions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and millions of lines of code, the computer models have not improved the estimation of “climate sensitivity” in the slightest. They do not contain or model any of the emergent phenomena that govern the climate, the phenomena that decouple the temperature from the forcing and render the entire idea of “climate sensitivity” meaningless.

From the comments on WUWT

Does anyone take Wondering Willis seriously?  Here are some responses to his article (archived here, updated archive here, and here and here).  I notice that some of the commenters saw what I did - but I wrote the above before reading any of the comments.  I hope that doesn't mean I've been spending too much time in WUWT's Dunning Kruger Land :(

Update (16 Sept 13): I've added the latest archive.  Willis' article now has 275 comments and if anyone is studying cognitive science there are some great examples of the Dunning Kruger effect, cognitive bias, mental models etc in the thread.  Plus in layman's terms, Willis' reaction to critique is to bluff and bluster and get quite angry.  Given he doesn't have the necessary knowledge to properly respond to the arguments posed, that's not an abnormal reaction from certain types of characters.  His other choice would have been to acknowledge his lack of expertise and the greater expertise of others.  But that isn't Willis' style.  He's displays what I believe is termed passive-aggressive behaviour (as he did here).


RoyFOMR also thinks that speed and petrol consumption are unrelated and says:

September 15, 2013 at 4:17 am
Your cruise control analogy is excellent.

However Bloke down the pub doesn't accept Willis' cruise control analogy and says:

September 15, 2013 at 4:19 am
But suppose we turn on the governor, which in a car is called the cruise control. At that point, the relationship between speed and gas consumption disappears entirely—gas consumption goes up and down, but the speed basically doesn’t change.

I don’t think this is a suitable example Willis, as the cruise control controls the speed by controlling the flow of petrol. Admittedly an automatic gearbox would also play a part but that’s a separate issue.

Bob Young also saw similarities with Lovelock's Gaia, though he calls him "Lovelace" and says:

September 15, 2013 at 4:20 am
I seem to recall Jame Lovelace making the same point in his book ‘GAIA’ that the Earth’s climate is governed by a control system. This is a concept that is second nature to any engineer. A well designed process control system (using proportional, integral and derivative drivers) will tamp down any process upsets and adjust the process to maintain a consistent output from the process. When I read the book in the late 80′s/early 90′s, that one point was so obvious to me. In the absence of a massive process upset (asteroid strike, CME), the Earth will regulate itself with its own control system to maintain a consistent temperature.

Nick Stokes says:

September 15, 2013 at 4:27 am

“The wrong path is the ludicrous idea that the change in global temperature is a simple function of the change in the “forcings”, which is climatespeak for the amount of downward radiation at the top of the atmosphere. The canonical (incorrect) equation is:
Δ T = lambda ΔF
where T is temperature, F is forcing, lambda is the climate sensitivity, and Δ means “the change in”.”

You’ve said this before, but again not quoting anyone. Whose ludicrous idea is it? Whose canonical equation? What did they say?

There’s a proposition that if CO2 is doubled, then one can try to quantify the eventual rise in temperature. That’s very different from your “canonical” equation. And the range that you ridicule is partly a recognition that the relation is indeed complex.

Julian in Wales says:

September 15, 2013 at 4:46 am

“This is why it is so hard to find traces of e.g. solar and volcano forcings in the temperature record. We know that both of those change the forcings … but the temperatures do not change correspondingly.”

Does that mean that you are optimist that the present state of the sun will not produce another cold period like the ones we experienced during the Maunder and Dalton minimums. I fear another cooling period far more than warming, I would like to be optimistic that it will not re-occur in my lifetime. The thought of mass starvation and food shortages during my old age is something I do not want to see.

lemiere jacques hasn't ever read an IPCC report either, and "guesses":

September 15, 2013 at 4:48 am
well, computer speed or memory doesn’t help much, they are still unable to give an error bar… as a result you just don’t know if a “newer ” simulation with much greater number of cells and so on is closer to reality than an “older” one….It is newer, more complex may be more sexy but…you just don’t know if it is more “real”..

It may be possible estmate error bar can be estimated .but i guess that the complexity of the estimation of error bar is one order of magnitude greater than the complexity of simulation. But it is only a guessing.

KevinM says, of Willis' complaint that no progress has been made in climate science (in regard to climate sensitivity):

September 15, 2013 at 5:23 am
One would expect the same result if they were right the first time. A million variable monte carlo simulation of the apple and the tree would not have much effect on gravity.

AlecMM has probably lived in Dunning Kruger Land for many years and says:

September 15, 2013 at 5:42 am
Climate Alchemy is not a science because the models, based on wildly incorrect physics are the same as the old alchemists repeating an experiment time after time in the faint hope that they will find the philosopher’s stone. It’s lunacy on a gargantuan basis and corrupt politicians are paying them our money to do it.

Okay - that's enough.  The rest are pretty well all in the same vein.  If you want more, they are archived here, latest archive here and later still here and here.

There is more...

One last next to last comment to illustrate the extent of Willis' ignorance - which he's demonstrated in the past. He describes his "model" and how he mistakenly thinks "GCMs" are constructed (my bold italics):

It seems to me that you’ve missed the point of my model. It does not have any independent predictive values. It just shows the limitations of the GCMs, which turn out to be very simplistic. They just take the inputs, scale them, and lag them … bozo, huh? Millions of lines of code and the output can be totally emulated by a one-line equation. Go figure. September 15, 2013 at 8:50 am

I can't help myself, Willis keeps on giving.  Here is an exchange between Willis and Pamela Gray who, if I recall correctly, is another science denier.  In this instance she is acting more like a sceptic than a fake sceptic.

Pamela Gray directs Willis to specific sections of the IPCC AR4 report in which models are discussed and says:

September 15, 2013 at 10:01 am
Richard I draw your attention to AR4 chapter 8. Their description of climate models appears to differ from both yours and Willis’. It may be useful to read it and to speculate on what this section may look like in AR5.
http://ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-8-1.html
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter8.pdf

I'll point out that the Chapter 8 Pamela refers to is devoted to climate models.  It's called: Climate Models and Their Evaluation

Willis Eschenbach replies basically says that he can't be bothered following links to read the description - he says:

Huh? What is my “description of climate models”? Some specificity would be very useful, at present I haven’t a clue what “description” you’re talking about.
w.

PS—Citing an entire Chapter of an IPCC report? Is that your idea of a proper citation? My high-school chemistry teacher would have thumped me with her red pencil if I tried that nonsense. If you have a point you wish to back up, you need to cite chapter and verse.

As it stands, you’re no better than the Bible-thumpers of my childhood, who would stand up in the tent and when someone asked a question would hold up the Bible and shout “The answer’s right here” … perhaps the answer is somewhere in the entire chapter you just cited, but I’m not going to try to guess just which paragraph you’re talking about. September 15, 2013 at 10:13 am

So Anthony Watts isn't the only person with a bad memory.  I'll repeat Willis' description of climate models, since he's forgotten what he wrote in the same thread less than one and a half hours earlier (my bold italics):

It just shows the limitations of the GCMs, which turn out to be very simplistic. They just take the inputs, scale them, and lag them … bozo, huh? September 15, 2013 at 8:50 am

Appendix: Climate sensitivity

There are some good articles on realclimate.org on climate sensitivity - Part 1 and Part 2 and many more.  And here is just some of what is in the different IPCC reports:

From IPCC AR4

Progress since the TAR enables an assessment that climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values. {WGI 8.6, 9.6, Box 10.2, SPM}

And here:

Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range 2°C to 4.5°C with a most likely value of about 3°C, based upon multiple observational and modelling constraints. It is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. {8.6, 9.6, Box 10.2}

The transient climate response is better constrained than the equilibrium climate sensitivity. It is very likely larger than 1°C and very unlikely greater than 3°C. {10.5}

From IPCC TAR (Third Assessment Report)

Climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 1.5 to 4.5°C. This estimate is unchanged from the first IPCC Assessment Report in 1990 and the SAR. The climate sensitivity is the equilibrium response of global surface temperature to a doubling of equivalent CO2 concentration. The range of estimates arises from uncertainties in the climate models and their internal feedbacks, particularly those related to clouds and related processes. Used for the first time in this IPCC report is the Transient Climate Response (TCR). The TCR is defined as the globally averaged surface air temperature change, at the time of doubling of CO2, in a 1%/yr CO2-increase experiment. This rate of CO2 increase is assumed to represent the radiative forcing from all greenhouse gases. The TCR combines elements of model sensitivity and factors that affect response (e.g., ocean heat uptake). The range of the TCR for current AOGCMs is 1.1 to 3.1°C.

The negative bias of Anthony Watts, Hockey Sticks and the Dunning Kruger Effect

Another funny from Anthony Watts.  I won't dwell on the subject matter. Despite the fact that its undoubtedly a fascinating field, dendrochronology is a very specialised area in which I haven't the slightest bit of expertise.  But neither does Anthony Watts. (That's me fawning :))

He's come across a paper in his daily trawls of denialist websites (or via email or smoke signals or whatever).  It's a new paper by Cecile et al in the journal Climate of the Past: A likelihood perspective on tree-ring standardization: eliminating modern sample bias. The paper is discussing a new method to determine what is apparently widely known in dendrochronology circles as "modern sample bias".  I've seen the term in this 2008 chapter/paper by Keith R. Briffa and Thomas M. Melvin, for example.

Anyway Anthony is jumping up and down clapping his hands with excitement.  Why?  I think it's because the authors used the word "negative" and "bias" together.  He reckons it means the Hockey Stick is finally broken!  The five millionth nail he's tried to drive in the coffin - still the Hockey Stick lives on.

Here is his jubilant headline and the first line of his article:

And here are the tags - so he's not trying to be funny :)

Anthony highlights the bits of his copy and paste that he thinks are important - I've italicised Anthony's bolded bits:

Dendrochronologists observed that the older a tree was, the slower it tended to grow, even after controlling for age- and time-driven effects. The result is an artificial downward signal in the regional curve (as the older ages are only represented by the slower growing trees) and a similar artificial positive signal in the final chronology (as earlier years are only represented by the slow growing trees), an effect termed modern sample bias. When this biased chronology is used in climate reconstruction it then implies a relatively unsuitable historic climate. Obviously, the detection of long term 15 trends in tree growth, as might be caused by a changing climate or carbon fertilization, is also seriously compromised (Brienen et al., 2012b). More generally, modern sample bias can be viewed as a form of “differing-contemporaneous-growth-rate bias”, where changes in the magnitude of growth of the tree ring series included in the chronology over time (or age, in the case of the regional curve) skew the final curve, especially 20 near the ends of the chronology where series are rapidly added and removed (Briffa and Melvin, 2011)....

...Furthermore, modern sample bias produced a significant negative bias in estimated tree growth by time in 70.5% of chronologies and a significant positive bias in 29.5% of chronologies. This effect is largely concentrated in the last 300 yr of growth data, posing serious questions about the homogeneity of modern and ancient chronologies using traditional standardization techniques.

Looks as if Anthony's put two and two together and come up with two and two fifths.   Now I won't pretend to understand the details of the issue of "modern sample bias", but it seems clear enough that it's to do with deriving signals from aged trees and the application of statistical analysis.

In keeping with the tree theme and hockey themes, I'll stick my neck out and say that Anthony's got the wrong end of the stick.  If, as is stated in the excerpt Anthony quotes, the majority of chronologies (70.5%) have a "significant negative bias", that would mean they underestimate whatever the parameter is that is being measured (eg temperature) in the last "300 yr of growth data".  So if one was to apply that to the Hockey Stick chart as a stand-alone - it would surely mean that the hockey stick is even steeper in modern times!  In fact, had Anthony read the paper, he might have noticed this:

D’Arrigo et al. (2008) suggest that modern sample bias may be responsible for the “divergence problem” in dendroclimatology, the widespread reduction in temperature 10 sensitivity of tree-ring chronologies in recent decades

Not that I'm suggesting that the various published Hockey Stick charts are negatively biased in the recent end of the data.  These dendro scientists know their trees too well for that.  I also know that there are numerous temperature reconstructions that all show the Hockey Stick shape and use many more proxies than tree rings - as well as the obvious fact of having modern thermometers these days that show the sudden rise in temperature in recent decades. And all these different studies match each other fairly closely and, in the periods of overlap, are a close match with the instrumental data sets.

I'll stop here before I go all DuKE myself!  Professor Mann and all the other Hockey Stick producers who followed, would know a zillion times more about "modern sample bias" and dendrochronology than I (or Anthony Watts) will ever know.


It seems a nice little example of Dunning Kruger Effect in action at WUWT - don't you think?

Wondering Willis, Volcanoes and the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Update: I've added a chart below.


Wondering Willis Eschenbach is wondering again.  This time he has written a very long article on WUWT and concludes by writing:

A. Either the climate sensitivity is around half a degree per doubling of CO2, and the time constant is under a year, or

B. The current paradigm of climate sensitivity is wrong and forcings don’t determine surface temperature.

Based on the actual observations, I hold for the latter.

They don't make sense to me.  A. seems like gobbledook.  Can anyone explain what he means by 'the time constant is under a year'?  B. seems very odd because he is using a definition (climate sensitivity) to contradict that same definition.  That can't be done. Leaving aside the inexplicable meaning of them - on what does he base his conclusions?  On his strange analysis of the impact of volcanoes.  It looks to me that he has taken the short term impact of different volcanoes on global surface temperatures and drawn conclusions about the long term impact of all forcings, including the very long-lived forcing of carbon dioxide.  He writes:

Unlike the situation with say greenhouse gases, we actually can measure how much sunlight is lost when a volcano erupts.

Let's not wonder why Willis thinks sunlight is lost by greenhouse gases and focus on his wonderings about volcanoes.  He goes on to talk about:

...the huge reductions in global forcing that volcanoes cause, the global temperature has steadfastly refused to cooperate. The temperature hasn’t changed much even with the largest of modern volcanoes.

Well, that's not quite so.  But modern volcanoes have only had a very short term impact globally.  The cooling effect disappears in a matter of months to years, depending on the nature, composition and location of the eruption as well, one would imagine, as the prevailing weather conditions at least in regard to smaller eruptions.

Willis builds a strawman

Willis makes a logical fallacy known as the strawman fallacy here, when he says:

The current climate paradigm says that the surface air temperature is a linear function of the “forcing”...Change in Temperature (∆T) = Change in Forcing (∆F) times Climate Sensitivity

What he seems to have done is taking an equation relating to a simple energy balance model (probably from this Wikipedia entry) and applied it to the much more complex climate system.  Dunning and Kruger at work.

What is climate sensitivity?

Climate sensitivity is the term used to denote a change in temperature for a given forcing, generally used to describe the expected rise in global surface temperature to a doubling of CO2.  That does not imply a linear function of the forcing.  Does this seem "linear" to you?

The climate sensitivity depends on the type of forcing agents applied to the climate system and on their geographical and vertical distributions (Allen and Ingram, 2002; Sausen et al., 2002; Joshi et al., 2003). As it is influenced by the nature and the magnitude of the feedbacks at work in the climate response, it also depends on the mean climate state (Boer and Yu, 2003). Some differences in climate sensitivity will also result simply from differences in the particular radiative forcing calculated by different radiation codes (see Sections 10.2.1 and 8.6.2.3). The global annual mean surface temperature change thus presents limitations regarding the description and the understanding of the climate response to an external forcing. Indeed, the regional temperature response to a uniform forcing (and even more to a vertically or geographically distributed forcing) is highly inhomogeneous. In addition, climate sensitivity only considers the surface mean temperature and gives no indication of the occurrence of abrupt changes or extreme events.

What about this:

Note, however, that because of the inherently nonlinear nature of the response to feedbacks, the final impact on sensitivity is not simply the sum of these responses. The effect of multiple positive feedbacks is that they mutually amplify each other’s impact on climate sensitivity.

The very fact that some feedbacks act more quickly than others plus the fact that feedbacks act on each other should be sufficient to demonstrate that surface air temperature is not a linear function of forcing. After building his strawman, Wondering Willis proceeds to chop it down, writing:

In lieu of a more colorful term, let me say that’s highly unlikely. In my experience, complex natural systems are rarely that simply coupled from input to output.

By demolishing his own strawman, he's starting to sound more reasonable.

Willis invokes Gaia

It doesn't last.  Willis quickly shifts back to the unreasonable when he writes:

I say that after an eruption, the climate system actively responds to reductions in the incoming sunlight by altering various parts of the climate system to increase the amount of heat absorbed by other means. This rapidly brings the system back into equilibrium.

If I've understood him correctly than that's just plain weird.  Where is the extra heat coming from?  As Willis has already said, the aerosols from the volcanic eruption have temporarily reduced the amount of incoming radiation.  There is no other source of 'heat' for the climate system to absorb.

Applying a long term equilibrium sensitivity to short lived event

Willis does some number crunching and draws some coloured charts and says:

To properly judge the response, however, we need to compare it to the expected response under various scenarios. Figure 3 shows the same records, with the addition of the results from the average models from the Forster study, the results that the models were calculated to have on average, and the results if we assume a climate sensitivity of 3.0 W/m2 per doubling of CO2. Note that in all cases I’m referring the equilibrium climate sensitivity, not the transient climate response, which is smaller.

Why would he use the equilibrium climate sensitivity of an assumed 3° Celsius on a transient effect lasting only a few months or years at most and apply it in the same way to eruptions at different locations and of different magnitudes and chemical composition? The equilibrium climate sensitivity of 3° Celsius refers to the temperature after a doubling of CO2, all other feedbacks have run their course and the climate is at a new equilibrium.  Willis does not appear to have calculated just how much incoming radiation was reflected back out by any of the volcanoes, so it doesn't seem to me that he's showing anything of value at all.

Leaving out inconvenient data

Willis leaves out inconvenient data.  First to get the chop is El Chichon eruption, which Willis calls an 'outlier' - but not giving any reason for doing so.  Later on he drops Krakatoa as another 'outlier'.  That's two out of six dropped from his analysis or one third.  Did they spoil his yarn?

Not considering differing impacts of different volcanoes

Willis seems to assume that each eruption will have the same impact on incoming solar radiation.  Consider this - the top three were part of Willis' analysis, the bottom one was a real beauty, but earlier in time:

El Chichon - released an unusually large volume of aerosols (7 Mt of SO2 compared to 1.0 for Mount St. Helens).  El Chichon produced some climate effects. The temperature of the stratosphere increased by 4 degrees C. ...Impact on ground temperatures is harder to quantify but temperatures in the Northern hemisphere may have been 0.2 degree C less about 2 months after the eruption.

Pinatubo - produced the greatest volume of SO2 ever measured, 20 Mt, about three times more than El Chichon (McCormick, 1992). It is estimated that the gases caused a global temperature decrease of 0.5 degree C for about 2 to 4 years after the eruption.

Krakatau - Although Krakatau erupted a large volume, the magma was relative poor in sulfur, and the eruption had less climate impact compared to some small volume eruptions that were sulfur rich (e.g., Agung in Indonesia). ...Rampino and Self (1982) estimated that the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere decreased 0.3 C due to the eruption.

Toba - The eruption of 2,800 cubic km of magma at Toba caldera 75,000 years ago was the largest eruption in the last 2 million years. The eruption may have release as much as 10E12 kg of sulfuric acid, an order of magnitude more than Laki in 1783 and Tambora in 1815, two of the greatest Holocene eruptions. The Toba eruption may have caused about 3 to 4 degree C cooling at the surface but this impact is hard to detect because of concurrent glacial conditions (Sigurdsson, 1990).

This is from NASA, which suggests that Willis might need to dig a bit deeper: 

With a single volcano it may be hard to identify a climate "signal" among the large amount of weather and climate "noise", that is, the unforced chaotic fluctuations of the atmosphere and ocean. So the Pinatubo team first looked at the average climate response after the five largest volcanos this century. They found (Figure 1) that there was a small cooling, about 1/4°C (1/2°F), which peaked 1-2 years after the eruption. This tends to confirm that volcanos do cause a small global cooling.

It's not the sun?

I've just picked up this in the midst of Willis' article.  If you take what he writes to it's logical conclusion, he seems to be arguing "it's not the sun".  That is, if there is a drop in temperature as a result of less incoming radiation (either because it's reflected back by volcanic aerosols or because of a reduction in incoming solar), it will be offset by thunderstorms, clouds and oceans deciding to oppose it and heat the world back up again by ...magic?  What do you think?  It doesn't seem consistent with theories relating to energy.

I say that the temperature is regulated, not by the forcing, but by a host of overlapping natural emergent temperature control mechanisms, e.g. thunderstorms, the El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the timing of the onset of tropical clouds, and others. Changes in these and other natural regulatory phenomena quickly oppose any unusual rise or fall in temperature, and they work together to maintain the temperature very stably regardless of the differences in forcing.

More on volcanoes

Willis put up some charts saying, "look see no impact".  I can't tell what he did, so I plotted GIStemp and marked the volcanic eruptions.  Click the chart to enlarge it.

They all seem to show the drop in temperature that has been associated with them (see above).  Of course you can't tell just from a chart.  You'd have to account for other things that affect surface temperature, like ENSO.  (Further up I've added a quote from a NASA website, which also emphasises this point.)

Anyway, the standout is Novarupta, which is in the Arctic.  The others are closer to the equator and their impact was spread through both hemispheres.  Click here for a discussion of Novarupta and how its impact was contained because of where it is located.

Willis' magical ocean

While I'm here, I'll add a comment that caught my eye.  It's about Willis saying how the oceans and clouds and thunderstorms all gang up and win a war against the laws of physics to offset a change in climate forcing - my bold and italics for emphasis:

David Longinotti says: May 25, 2013 at 4:17 am  I think this is a strong challenge to the orthodoxy regarding climate sensitivity, but the posited correction mechanism doesn’t appear to cohere with the data shown. The claim is that “When the reduction in sunlight occurs following an eruption, the Pacific starts storing up more energy.” But the timing seems to challenge this assertion – in Figure 6 the change in the slope of the cumulative Best Index occurs about 20 months BEFORE the eruptions, and there is no change in slope around the time of the eruption. Is the implication that the Pacific starts storing energy in anticipation of the eruption, or have I misunderstood the proposed correction phenomenon (or its measurement)?

Good to see it's not just me who wonders what prompts the Pacific to start 'storing up more energy' and where that energy could possibly come from, given there is less incoming energy.  I hadn't bothered to check just when the ocean took it into it's head to 'store up more energy' to make up for the lack of incoming.  Seems it can not only decide to create energy out of nothing, it can do so in advance of the event that prompts it to do so.  What a clever little ocean, eh?

Update: In the comments Ashby alerted me to the fact that Willis is basing his assertion for oceans storing energy on an apparent association with El Nino.  Problem is the ocean releases heat in its El Nino phase, it doesn't store it.  So bang goes another bit of Willis' wonderings.

My conclusions

1. Willis has read very little climate science and understands less.
2. Willis suffers from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
3. Willis enjoys holding the floor.
4. Willis has a veneer of 'hail fellow well met' but it's very thin. He can't take criticism or even polite questions from real sceptics and loses his cool easily - in fact he gets downright nasty.  Supported by his patron when the going gets tough. 

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Update

Here's a chart from the AR4 IPCC report that shows the then current state of understanding (2007) of different forcings over the past 1,000 years and the temperature response for the northern hemisphere. Note the different scale for the volcanic forcing.  Click the chart to enlarge.

Figure 6.14. Simulated temperatures during the last 1 kyr with and without anthropogenic forcing, and also with weak or strong solar irradiance variations. Global mean radiative forcing (W m–2) used to drive climate model simulations due to (a) volcanic activity, (b) strong (blue) and weak (brown) solar irradiance variations, and (c) all other forcings, including greenhouse gases and tropospheric sulphate aerosols (the thin flat line after 1765 indicates the fixed anthropogenic forcing used in the ‘Nat’ simulations). (d) Annual mean NH temperature (°C) simulated by three climate models under the forcings shown in (a) to (c), compared with the concentration of overlapping NH temperature reconstructions (shown by grey shading, modified from Figure 6.10c to account for the 1500 to 1899 reference period used here). ‘All’ (thick lines) used anthropogenic and natural forcings; ‘Nat’ (thin lines) used only natural forcings. All forcings and temperatures are expressed as anomalies from their 1500 to 1899 means; the temperatures were then smoothed with a Gaussian-weighted filter to remove fluctuations on time scales less than 30 years. Note the different vertical scale used for the volcanic forcing compared with the other forcings. The individual series are identified in Table 6.3.

Meteoric Research at Lake E and The DuKEs™** Feeble Battle

Meteoric Research at Lake El'gygytgyn: the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands

There has been some "meteoric research" done at Lake El'gygytgyn (bit of a tongue-twister), which is in the Arctic in Russia.  Looks to be a wealth of information and I can't wait to read this second paper on the sediment core from Lake E in Science next Friday (?).  (The first one is here.) For those of you who can access it, it's pre-released in Science Express.  Otherwise, you can read about it in the Guardian and ScienceDaily and probably elsewhere.

The paper is called: Pliocene Warmth, Polar Amplification, and Stepped Pleistocene Cooling Recorded in NE Arctic Russia.

There were 16 authors of the paper, led by Julie Brigham-Grette, Professor of Quaternary/ Glacial Geology and Arctic Paleoenvironments in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Like reading a detective novel: the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands - from ScienceDaily:

"While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there," says
Brigham-Grette.

A huge meteorite, perhaps a kilometer in diameter! Telling a story going back more than 3 million years...

"Lake E" (that's easier) was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite, perhaps a kilometer in diameter, hit the Earth and blasted out an 11-mile (18 km) wide crater. It has been collecting sediment layers ever since. Luckily for geoscientists, it lies in one of the few Arctic areas not eroded by continental ice sheets during ice ages, so a thick, continuous sediment record was left remarkably undisturbed. Cores from Lake E reach back in geologic time nearly 25 times farther than Greenland ice cores that span only the past 140,000 years.

The Arctic was very warm way back in time, when CO2 was not much higher than those of today...a sign of things to come:

"One of our major findings is that the Arctic was very warm in the middle Pliocene and Early Pleistocene [~ 3.6 to 2.2 million years ago] when others have suggested atmospheric CO2 was not much higher than levels we see today. This could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier climate models," the authors state.

The research doesn't just provide answers it raises some intriguing new questions, the answers to which will add to knowledge about past climatic events:

The sediment core also reveals that even during the first major "cold snap" to show up in the record 3.3 Million years ago, temperatures in the western Arctic were similar to recent averages of the past 12,000 years. "Most importantly, conditions were not 'glacial,' raising new questions as to the timing of the first appearance of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere," the authors add.

An Incredible Achievement, Phenomenal and Difficult

The Guardian article gives a glimpse into the difficulties faced by the scientists (my bold):

"It's a phenomenal record," said Prof Peter Sammonds, at University College London. "It is also an incredible achievement [the study's work], given the remoteness of the lake." Sixteen shipping containers of equipment had to be hauled 90km over snow by bulldozers from the nearest ice road, used by gold miners.

But this incredible achievement, this phenomenal, difficult and dangerous work was all for nothing if you follow the deniosaurs.  They could have just asked Tony!

DuKE™ 1: Anthony Watts Dimly DuKEs** it Out

Anthony draws on his years of anti-science blogging and solid paleo research (not!) and decides that the "researcher" (he doesn't say which of the 16 researchers) forgot about the Isthmus of Panama. (Read together with Lunt et al (2008) here.)  This researcher, according to Anthony "simply skipped over this important detail is pushing the idea that CO2 was the only issue."  

Scientists "don't know nuffin'" - if only they'd asked Tony

I expect Anthony's trying to say that not only all the specialists conducting this research, but the editors of Science and the paper's reviewers "don't know nuffin'".  Oh my! If only they'd remembered (or just asked Tony). It would have saved them years of work.

Warning: The Auditor is on the warpath

Anthony goes on to issue this dire warning that The Auditor is On the Warpath, which will no doubt leave all the scientists quaking in their boots and wishing they'd never embarked on such a foolish venture:

I’m sure Steve McIntyre will be interested in getting a look at the sediments and the dating methods to see if there are errors there.

 He finishes by telling his rabble that scientists should do what he does, ignore all prior knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology and instead make up stuff out of thin (but CO2-enriched) air (my bold).

Lately, it seems that paleo research has made some very broad assumptions, and almost always in the favor of the theory.

Duh!

DuKE™ 2: The Australian Raises the White Flag

On another front, Graham Readfearn has devoted some space to pointing out how Graham Lloyd of/and The Australian are so far into science denial that they are now "too fringe for Monckton".  Earlier this week Lloyd wrote a piece regurgitating some idiocy promoted five years ago by the Dragon Slayers (who don't 'believe in' greenhouse gases).  He reckons we might be "heading for an ice age". Wow!

Can they fall any lower?

Tim Lambert kept up with The Australian's War on Science for many years.  Seems to me The Australian has raised the white flag and signalled it has lost its war.  Now they are reduced to pushing fantasies that are even too much for the potty peer.

Time for Barry Bickmore to come up with the First and Second Laws of Graham Lloyd and The Australian.

---

**DuKE™ - Collective noun for science deniers suffering from the Dunning Kruger Effect.

Dunning and Kruger at WUWT

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

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

The Dunning Kruger Effect in Action 

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

For more of Mr Butina's errors click here.

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

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

Two questions:

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

Is this the answer to question 2?

The Rabett Chimes In

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

Nancy's Spikes of Fancy (and Anthony's gone and done it again!)

Anthony Watts has posted an 'article' by WUWT reader Nancy Green and added some notes of his own.

Watts: you "really aren’t comparing similar data sets"

First - what has Anthony done again?

He just can't help himself.  Anthony decided to ignore the caution from the scientists and has gone ahead once again comparing local with global temperatures.  This time he used the Vostok ice core from Antarctica, which is only one of the proxies used by Marcott et al in their Holocene reconstruction.  And this time he put in a disclaimer: but this image is solely for entertainment purposes in the context of this article, then blew it by adding: and does make the point visually.

Looks like Anthony decided to ignore the scientists' jibe as well as his very own own caution.

Nancy's Spikes of Fancy

Now let's see what Nancy's flight of fancy is.  She's grabbed hold of the idea that because the Marcott et al's Holocene reconstruction resolves only to a couple of hundred years, it could be missing temperature 'spikes' of shorter duration.

So far so good.  Indeed it could.  The question is, how likely is that?

Nancy bounced off this idea into a real flight of fancy.  First she tried it out with informed readers at RealClimate.org, who were able to help her out - though she ignored their efforts.  Here is an excerpt from one of her excursions into the domain of climate scientists.  

Nancy Green says: 1 Apr 2013 at 10:09 AM

...it must be concluded that what Marcott is showing is only the natural variability in temperature and if any weight is to be given to the uptick, it shows that at higher resolutions there may be significant temperature spikes due to natural causes.

Gavin Schmidt helps her out with an inline comment:

[Response: Of the size and magnitude of the 20th Century - unlikely. Even the 8.2kyr event which is the biggest thing in the Holocene records in the North Atlantic is small comparatively. It would definitely be good to get more high resolution well-dated data included though, and Marcott's work is good basis for that to be built from. - gavin]

What about the Younger Dryas?

Nancy continues on this theme, this time referring to the Younger Dryas (which preceded the Holocene):

Nancy Green says:
1 Apr 2013 at 10:47 AM
...When one looks at long duration events we have the Younger Dryas event, with a temperature change of approximately 15C as compared to 2oth century warming of less than 0.7C....

Now that's a mistake any non-scientist and beginner climate science amateur could make, confusing local temperature fluctuations (Nancy's 15ºC) with global temperature fluctuations.  Gavin Schmidt helped set her straight, with an inline comment:

[Response: This is becoming a habit - the YD change of '15ºC' is a Greenland signal. It is not in phase with (much smaller) changes in the high Southern Latitudes, and in ocean cores, even in the N. Atlantic, it is much smaller. An estimate of the impact of the YD on global mean temperatures is found in the Shakun et al (2012) paper, and is likely less than a degree. Note that the whole glacial to interglacial change is only about 5ºC in total! - gavin]

The Younger Dryas is largely a northern hemisphere phenomenon as any reader of WUWT should know by now (they refer to Richard Alley's work describing the Younger Dryas in Central Greenland often, but no-one at WUWT seems to have read it or understood it).  It had particular effect in parts of the arctic. Nancy pushes the point, again confusing local temperature fluctuations with global temperatures:

Nancy Green says:
1 Apr 2013 at 11:03 AM.....Once cannot conclude from Marcott that there have been no short term events of similar magnitude to the Younger Dryas (approx 15C) within the period covered by Marcott. Such events would be hidden by the lack of resolution so long as they were shorter than 1/2 the sampling rate as per Nyquist.

And once more Gavin Schmidt helps her out, trying again to get the message through another way.  He didn't repeat himself that the global temperature didn't change by 15ºC (he's already told her that but she's ignored it.)  This time he reminds her that the reason we know about the Younger Dryas is because of ice cores.  If there had been a similar event it would show up in the ice cores - and it doesn't:

[Response: These are the same core that show the YD! You can't claim that a YD like event wouldn't be shown in the same cores. Please, you can do better than this. - gavin]

Spiking to the Stars

Nancy meanders off hither and thither pursuing her fantasy. The tone and content of this contribution, plus the fact that she hasn't learnt anything from the expert help she's been offered, is a great example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  Her post was long and even travelled through the galaxy.  This post of Nancy's is pretty much the same as what she wrote at WUWT. I'll just give an excerpt where she tells climate scientists what they 'should' consider:

Nancy Green says:1 Apr 2013 at 10:53 PM

Thus, what Marcott is telling us is that we should expect to find a 20th century type spike in many high resolution paleo series. Rather than being an anomaly, the 20th century spike should appear in many places as we improve the resolution of the paleo temperature series. This is the message of Marcott and it is an important message that the researchers need to consider.

Nancy elicits responses from a few other people.

The_J says: 2 Apr 2013 at 6:40 AM 

You claimed that the Younger Dryas was a 15C swing in temperatures, and that the Younger Dryas isn’t detectable in the proxies. But both of those claims are wildly, absurdly wrong. I think you may have been confused by a statement on Wikipedia that the summit area on Greenland was 15C colder during YD than it is today. But that’s not a global-scale change of 15C! As discussed here, the entirety of the change from last glacial maximum to the Holocene was approximately 5C, and the Younger Dryas was approximately 0.6C. And of course the Younger Dryas is readily detectable in climate proxies … that’s how we know about it.

Ray Ladbury made some points relevant to Nancy's notions, and says: 3 Apr 2013 at 8:57 AM
...Dude, the planet is really, really big. It isn’t easy to pump that much energy in in a decade or two. We’ve only managed to do so by liberating most of the carbon sequestered since the Jurassic! The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum failed to achieve such rates of growth despite (probably) burning up the Deccan coal field!

dhogaza says: 2 Apr 2013 at 11:10 PM
:”PhysicsGuy @102 — Follow the links from comment #100 to discover why no such global spikes exist. There are plenty of other proxies in which such spikes would show up; none found.:’

And, of course, arguing that the paper’s analysis can’t capture such excursions is proof that they exist is just …
kinky.
Even without the fact that other proxies don’t show such spikes.

And here are two substantive comments from real climate scientists. I've broken raypierre's response into paragraphs for easier reading, and bolded what I believe to be the crucial points:

[Response: What a lot of this discussion of "spikes" is missing is that the point isn't whether the Holocene had any sudden rises with a cause analogous to the present. As many people have pointed out, that couldn't be, because the present rise is due to CO2, and is hence "durable," as many people have pointed out; it would show up in a record like Marcott's. But also, as others have pointed out, we already know from ice cores that CO2 fluctuated very little in the pre-industrial Holocene, so that isn't in the cards anyway.

What is at issue is whether there are any other mechanisms of centennial-scale variability that could cause a 1C or even a .5C spike. We know that the AMO can go a smallish fraction of that distance, and it's hard to rule out on first principles that some kind of ocean variability might not be able to do something bigger in amplitude if you wait long enough. There's no evidence that it can, and I myself find it hard to see how you could make the ocean do a centenniel scale uptick (a centennial scale downtick is easier, since there's all that cold water you could conceivably bring to the surface). 

But the Marcott analysis has no bearing on that question. I don't think the paper ever claimed it did, but the comparision with the instrumental era rise may have confused some people into thinking so. 

To repeat my earlier comment, it is useful to compare the instrumental era rise and the forecast of further rise to the Marcott record because we know the rise is durable and will last millennia. Thus, we know we are bringing about a durable increase that is huge compared to any long-duration variation over the Holocene. That's a big, big deal. --raypierre ]

[Response: To add to Raypierre: it would have to be ocean variability causing a spike in global-mean temperature without causing a spike in the high-resolution proxies from the ice cores. That is exceedingly unlikely; the ocean's deep-water formation sites near Greenland and Antarctica would surely experience major change during such a spike. 
Think of the 8k-event: the biggest in the Greenland ice cores over the entire Holocene, yet minor impact on global-mean temperature. -Stefan]

From a statistical viewpoint

This has turned out to be quite a long article already. But it would be very remiss of me to leave out an excellent piece of analysis by Tamino on this very topic.  Tamino shows that if a rise in global temperature anything like that of the past century had occurred  it would have shown up in the data.

You can read his analysis in his article "Smearing Climate Data".

A final word

So there you have it.  This current rise in temperature is 'durable' and caused by CO2 and is a big, big deal. It is well known from various sources that throughout the Holocene there has never been a rise in CO2 anything like the magnitude we've seen over the past century.  It is also virtually certain that during the Holocene, since human civilisation, there has never been a short term 'spike' in global surface temperature of the magnitude we are now facing with certainty (2ºC or more).

Nancy's post on WUWT brings up the number of Marcott Protest articles there to at least twenty four. The deniers have tried to argue from lots of different angles: from Nancy's invisible spikes to upticks to dating of core-tops to comparisons with temperatures on a summit high in Central Greenland and in Antarctica and even tacking centuries of temperatures in one single ocean location to a land-based modern instrumental record in another single location, with a gap of about a century from the tail of one to the beginning of the other.

Not one of their 'arguments' has come anywhere close to finding the slightest flaw in the Marcott Holocene reconstruction.  In fact, despite looking for impossible 'spikes' and obviously not understanding the paper itself, Nancy appears to largely support the paper, which will likely cause pandemonium among the DuKE (TM) of deniers.