Denier weirdness: The weight of the atmosphere is pressure cooking Ferd Berple at WUWT

For you to ponder - seen at WUWT, in the comments to an article in which Anthony Watts was downplaying the current extreme drought in California. (Arguing it was worse 700 years ago so why worry?).

ferd berple says (quoting someone or other):

August 18, 2014 at 12:02 pm
the effect of increasing the concentration of the two main GHGs, water vapor and carbon dioxide, from about 303 to 304 molecules per 10,000 molecules of dry air would not be measurable.
=========
due to partial pressure law, increasing CO2 by 1 molecule will tend to reduce H2O by 2.4 molecules, all else remaining equal. Otherwise the increased CO2 would increase the mass of the atmosphere, increasing the surface pressure, making it harder to evaporate water, until such time as the same weight of water failed to evaporate, bringing the weight of the atmosphere back into equilibrium.

Since the molecular weight of CO2 is 44, and the molecular weight of H2O is 18, it takes (44/18) = 2.44 molecules of H2O to equal the weight of 1 CO2 molecule. What is interesting is that this would yield a negative H2O feedback of 2.4, which almost exactly balances the 3 time positive water feedback assumed by climate science. Since the H2O will tend to come out of the atmosphere more rapidly than temps will rise, it could well be that partial pressure law causes a net negative feedback.

Which would explain why the models are running hot. They fail to allow for partial pressure law to reduce H2O in their calculations, as CO2 increases.

Usually deniers talk about CO2 being so small it can't have any effect. Ferd takes a different tack. He's run this argument before, that CO2 pressure is so great that it presses on the sky's walls and floor and ceiling and stops water evaporating :) (Shades of our friend, Mack!)

A skilful counterstrike? John Holdren speaks and Roger Pielke Jr squirms

Roger Pielke Jr on John Holdren - 13 December 2012

@jameswilsdon @alicebell Since becoming sci advisor Holdren has always stayed on safe (boring) ground in his public remarks
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) December 13, 2012

Roger Pielke Jr on John Holdren - 14 February 2014

@andersbolling That's right, thanks. The zombies will always be with us. But it is brazen for zombie science to show up in the White House!
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) February 14, 2014

Roger Pielke Jr agrees with John Holdren - 1 March 2014

Just so it is clear - Holdren's 6 pp. rant did not critique any science, we both appear to fully accept CCSP 2008, IPCC 2012, IPCC 2013.
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) March 1, 2014

John Holdren steps away from "safe (boring) ground"

John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has upset Roger Pielke Jr.  Now this is being presented, by Roger Pielke Jr, as being all about him and to some extent it is about him.

What it is really all about is the impact of global warming on drought, particularly in the USA. (Science suggests that drought in Australia continues to be exacerbated by global warming - see here.)

It started last week, on 25 February 2014, when a US Senator, Jeff Sessions, apparently accused John Holdren of misleading the American people in statements reported by the press on February 13 this year.

You may recall this little episode, when John Holdren was misquoted by The Hill and the misquote was broadcast all over the deniosphere.  Anyway, according to John Holdren, the republican senator didn't like it when John Holdren linked "recent severe droughts in the American West to global climate change".  That's what started this climate battle between Roger Pielke Jr and John Holdren (who Roger refers to as a "colleague" for some reason, though Roger doesn't even work for the White House, let alone hold a position on par with that of John Holdren).

As "evidence" the good senator quoted from Roger Pielke Jr's testimony to a Senate Committee last July.

You can read John Holdren's account here at Peter Sinclair's website.  In summary, he referred to some of the literature and to Roger's testimony.  John Holdren didn't get everything right but I reckon he comes out of this looking better than Roger Pielke Jr and Jeff Sessions.

How Senator Sessions overlooked a footnote

Now Roger Pielke on his blog, pointed out that he did bury a little statement in a footnote, which Senator Sessions overlooked.

Oops.  No. That's not what Roger did.  Roger didn't point out that Senator Sessions was wrong and that he overlooked the footnote.  That's what he could have done and should have done and that might have been enough to end the matter.  Roger could have simply said: "John Holdren makes a good point that I de-emphasised the link between drought in the USA and global warming and only mentioned it in a footnote, which Senator Sessions and John Holdren missed seeing."

But he didn't.

Instead Roger posted a long article saying how it was John Holdren who was wrong because in fact Roger did mention the link between drought in the USA and global warming.  See it's right there, in a tiny footnote.

Yes - it might be an idea to go back and read those three paragraphs again :)

Or you can read this: Rather than say that the Republican Senator Sessions didn't tell the whole story, Roger Pielke Jr instead accused John Holdren of not telling the whole story.  What John Holdren missed was that Roger Pielke wrote a footnote that Senator Sessions missed.

Got it now?  Good.

A fine distraction, worthy of any fake sceptic

Of course, Roger has been successful in distracting attention from the main point.  By faking umbrage at what John Holdren wrote, he's distracted the dumb deniers from the main point.  The main point being that west and south western USA has been in the grip of a dreadful drought that has been exacerbated by global warming.

Does Roger Pielke agree with that?  Well, is Roger pretending to be an "honest broker"?  He hides in a footnote the bits that he doesn't want people to read.  That doesn't strike me as being either honest or brokering information.  When he's called on his omissions he points to his footnote and claims that he didn't omit it (he just buried it).  That doesn't strike me as being open and honest either.

So let's look at Roger's testimony back in July last year and the reaction to it by the denialati.

Claim: Roger Pielke rebutting claims?

Here is how Pielke Jr was reported by WUWT at the time:

Pielke gave an excellent seven point summary rebutting the claims that recent extreme events are unusual, more frequent, and causing greater losses than the historic record shows. He went on to say that the humans influence climate, including by emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), but many claims cannot be substantiated. False claims about extreme weather events can lead to poor decisions and it may take decades, or more, before the human influence can be substantiated.

Roger Pielke's "take home points"

Here are Roger's "take home points" from his testimony (my bold italics):

• It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.

• It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases. 

• Globally, weather-related losses ($) have not increased since 1990 as a proportion of GDP (they have actually decreased by about 25%) and insured catastrophe losses have not increased as a proportion of GDP since 1960. 

• Hurricanes have not increased in the US in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900. The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970 (when data allows for a global perspective). 

• Floods have not increased in the US in frequency or intensity since at least 1950. Flood losses as a percentage of US GDP have dropped by about 75% since 1940. 

• Tornadoes have not increased in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since 1950, and there is some evidence to suggest that they have actually declined. 

• Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.”

• Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

• The absolute costs of disasters will increase significantly in coming years due to greater wealth and populations in locations exposed to extremes. Consequent, disasters will continue to be an important focus of policy, irrespective of the exact future course of climate change. 

Notice his "take home points" about drought!  (I won't even start on his other "take home points".)

"Um, hello?" The KEY STATEMENT is right there, in the small print, in a footnote in the small print, you dummy!

Now, following John Holdren's testimony, Roger Pielke Jr has changed his tune.  Now he is pointing out that if you look past his "take away points" and look past the body of his testimony he makes a very important point to the US Senate.  It's just that he relegated this very important point to a footnote (my bold italics):

What is that sentence in question from the CCSP 2008 report that Holdren thinks I should have included in my testimony? He says it is this one:

"The main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends."

Readers (not even careful readers) can easily see Footnote 21 from my testimony, which states:
CCSP (2008) notes that “the main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends.”

Um, hello? Is this really coming from the president's science advisor?

Holdren is flat-out wrong to accuse me of omitting a key statement from my testimony. Again, remarkable, inexcusable sloppiness.

See that?  Roger is now calling it a "key statement".  So why did he bury this "key statement" in a footnote?  Why didn't he include it in his "take home points"?

Finally, Roger is making much of the fact that a report from the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), "Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate" (2008), states that "increased temperature has led to rising drought trends" in Southwest and parts of the interior of the West of the USA.

Roger didn't exactly make this "key statement" a big point of this in his testimony on drought? Did he make a "point" at all? See for yourself - and note what Roger emphasised, versus what he relegated to a footnote:

Seeing Roger Pielke seemed to rely on CCSP (2008) quite a bit, I thought it might be useful to see what it said, remembering that since it was written back in 2008, the US Southwest has experienced a whopper of a drought (my bold):

Averaged over the continental U.S. and southern Canada the most severe droughts occurred in the 1930s and there is no indication of an overall trend in the observational record, which dates back to 1895. However, it is more meaningful to consider drought at a regional scale, because as one area of the continent is dry, often another is wet. In Mexico and the U.S. Southwest, the 1950s were the driest period, though droughts in the past 10 years now rival the 1950s drought. There are also recent regional tendencies toward more severe droughts in parts of Canada and Alaska (Chapter 2, section 2.2.2.1).

There's more. This 2008 prediction seems to be on track:

It is likely that droughts will continue to be exacerbated by earlier and possibly lower spring snowmelt run-off in the mountainous West, which results in less water available in late summer (Chapter 3, section 3.3.4 and 3.3.7). 

Thing is, that much of western and south western USA is prone to drought.  And it looks as if that tendency could emerge more strongly as global warming kicks in this century.  It is important that governments in the USA recognise that, particularly for heavily-populated, highly productive regions like California.  It was wrong for Roger Pielke Jr to relegate his comment to a footnote, while highlighting in bold, and making this his "take home message" that 'Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century.'

Roger pouts and protests at an imagined grievance.  But he's the one who is downplaying the impact of climate change on the USA.

Here's the link again to John Holdren's article at Peter Sinclair's website.

Update:

I've found out there are a few other places covering this small episode, which is hopefully not prefacing the climate wars, including Greg Laden's blog and SkepticalScience. Sou.

And now Eli at Rabbett Run, who provides a transcript of Senator Sessions' questions accusations.

And now Joe Romm at ClimateProgress (with thanks, Joe.) Odd that while HotWhopper was worthy of a special mention, ClimateProgress refuses to let me comment. I blame Facebook :(

From WUWT - A skilful butt-covering "counterstrike"???

Anthony Watts reckons that Roger Pielke Jr responded "with a skillfull counterstrike" (sic).

So what was the "skillfull counterstrike"?

What it boiled down to is that Roger squeaked that he did include a statement (albeit in a footnote), that in regard to drought in the USA: "The main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends."

Some skill. Some counterstrike.  Roger is saying that John Holdren is correct, not incorrect.  Roger is trying to cover his butt.

As for what the crowd at WUWT are saying in the comments.  Almost all of the commenters missed the point that whereas John Holdren was pointing out deficiencies in Roger's testimony, Roger's "skillfull counterstrike" is that he agrees with John Holdren about global warming and drought.  Roger admits that the science points to increased temperature leading to rising drought trends in parts of the USA.  Global warming is pointed to as the culprit!

Some of the WUWT-ers don't have a clue who Roger Pielke Jr is, for example:

rob m. says:

March 1, 2014 at 11:44 am
” the previous July by Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado political scientist.”
Political huh?

Udar says:

March 1, 2014 at 12:04 pm
Why is Holdren calling Roger Pielke Jr, “a University of Colorado political scientist”? 

Perhaps because Roger Pielke Jr is a political scientist from the University of Colorado?


hunter says:

March 1, 2014 at 11:16 am
Holdren is part of the Ehrlich/Schneider school of science that is
1- proven to be wrong
2-over many decades
3- is willing to make the message achieve the societal goal, even at the risk of misrepresenting the science
Holdren is holding true to form.

john says:

March 1, 2014 at 11:20 am
It appears typical of this administration to employ individuals who care less about the truth and more about the party line.

ferdberple, referring to the Daily Caller, probably upset a few ardent right-wingers as well as Anthony Watts (who relies on Alexa) when he refers to the Daily Caller as an "obscure web-page" and says:

March 1, 2014 at 11:22 am
Why would the Presidents Scientific Adviser quote an obscure web-page unrelated to Dr Pielke as evidence of Dr Pielke’s views? This appears to be a political smear campaign much like the McCarthy era of American Politics.

Except it wasn't "unrelated to Dr Pielke" was it - not here and not here.


Lou invokes Joe Stalin and says:

March 1, 2014 at 11:23 am
Yikes. That wasn’t much difference than what Stalin’s “science adviser” did… Except for the killing part though but warmists did call for similar actions against skeptics. Scary times….

pokerguy says it's "libel" (and you thought all WUWT-ers were all in favour of free speech no matter what):

March 1, 2014 at 11:40 am
Clear case of damaging libel. He’s probably immune from lawsuits though in his current public capacity. Too bad.

Ric Werme thinks John Holdren taking three days to respond to Senator Jeff Sessions is way too long. Or maybe he didn't read what John Holdren wrote. Take your pick.:

March 1, 2014 at 11:42 am
It’s interesting that Holdren took so much time to write a response. I think he’s feeling threatened that someone he’d rather have outside of mainstream science is being taken seriously by the legislature.

rob m. is a dumb denier.  He didn't twig that Roger made so much of his footnote and seems to think that Roger Pielke Jr rejects human caused global warming.  He's wrong of course.  Roger accepts it but downplays it.

March 1, 2014 at 11:57 am
David: The facts don’t support global warming as they define it. All they have left to do is smear and discredit those who oppose their agenda.

Wondering Aloud seems to think it should rain everywhere all the time, and doesn't know that all that water can come down in buckets at once, and not where it's needed, and says:

March 1, 2014 at 11:58 am
Since the entire premise of the CO2 caused climate change requires an increase in evaporation; how can anyone rationally try to pretend that increased drought is a likely consequence? More water vapor =increased drought? Just plain dumb. Unless they really don’t believe their premise at all?

This was the only comment I found where the writer got the point, out of 118 WUWT comments (so far).  It's a shame he didn't write it more clearly.  DMA says:

March 1, 2014 at 12:56 pm
So Holdren is finding fault for Pielke putting in a footnote instead of the testimony body the sentence Holdren picked to support his point while excluding the meat of the paragraph that underpinned Pielke’s testimony. This seams to be a very pot to kettle type argument to me. I would say that his quote of the salient part in his rebuttal says more about his own bias for not including it in his Senate testimony than anything else. 

When will fake sceptics become extinct? Will their fate be sealed by climate change?

There was an article yesterday at WUWT by Dr. David Stockwell (archived here).  I'm stretching a bit because the article is about ecology, which I know little about.  I'll do my best to avoid the Dunning Kruger Effect.

David Stockwell writes about a book review that was written back in May this year by Dr Daniel Botkin.  I didn't know of David Botkin but his blog lists considerable credentials in ecology.  He's written a couple of books, the latest one seems to be an attempt at drawing together ecology and human mythology or folklore.  But that's just from reading the first few pages.  It could be about something completely different.  He's been retired since 1992 and doesn't do much more than write book reviews these days, plus that book I mentioned.  Based on some of his writings, he definitely accepts the world is warming and it's caused by human activity.  However he only seems to accept some of the science. Going by this article in the Wall Street Journal he is a science denier because he cannot accept that global warming will have the consequences that science predicts it will bring.

The book Daniel was reviewing is called Saving a Million Species: Extinction Risk from Climate Change and is edited by Lee Hannah.  It is described on the CSIRO website as:

The research paper 'Extinction Risk from Climate Change' published in the journal Nature in 2004 created front-page headlines around the world. The notion that climate change could drive more than a million species to extinction captured both the popular imagination and the attention of policy-makers, and provoked an unprecedented round of scientific critique.
Saving a Million Species reconsiders the central question of that paper: How many species may perish as a result of climate change and associated threats? Leaders from a range of disciplines synthesise the literature, refine the original estimates, and elaborate the conservation and policy implications.

Saving a Million Species offers a clear explanation of the science behind the headline-grabbing estimates for conservationists, researchers, teachers, students, and policy-makers. It is a critical resource for helping those working to conserve biodiversity take on the rapidly advancing and evolving global stressor of climate change – the most important issue in conservation biology today, and the one for which we are least prepared.

Daniel applauds some of the book but not all of it.  Because he's been away from his field for more than 20 years now, and because he seems to reject the latest science about climate, I'll take Daniel Botkin's belated book review with a grain of salt.  Bear in mind, though, that I'm no ecologist.

I'm on firmer ground rejecting David Stockwell's article.  Dr David Stockwell is writing for the anti-science blog WUWT, I'll take a very large pinch of salt with his WUWT article.  I don't particularly care that David Stockwell is himself an ecological modeler. I'll still reject outright some of his WUWT article.  For example, David Stockwell wrote about a quote from the August 2013 Introduction to a special issue on climate change:

The starting point of any objective analysis is to examine one’s assumptions, and the trajectory of global warming is surely the most central.  The IPCC’s projections are the typical starting points for any scientific study of climate change’s effects on species. Science provides an example:

“Even the most optimistic estimates of the effects of contemporary fossil fuel use suggest that mean global temperature will rise by a minimum of 2°C before the end of this century and that CO2 emissions will affect climate for tens of thousands of years. ”

Yet climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 has been downgraded in the latest IPCC report, and so should the forward projections.  The observed rate of warming is less than 0.2C per decade, and so below 2°C, and well below the minimum warming scenario of 1.25C by 2050 or 0.25C per decade used in Thomas et al 2004.

David Stockwell is wrong, of course.  For starters, Thomas' minimum warming scenario (see the supplement) was SRESB1 and a rise of 0.9 degrees Celsius by 2050, not 1.25 degrees. He's also wrong about the IPCC.  The IPCC has widened the estimate of climate sensitivity.  It has dropped the lower end - though I believe it is wrong to do so but it hasn't specified an actual number - only a range.  So it can't be described as "downgraded" IMO.  It's kept the upper end of the range the same.  Also, the IPCC indicates that mean global surface temperature will indeed be at least 2 degrees higher than the turn of the twentieth century under any realistic emissions trajectory.  From the Summary for Policy Makers page SPM-15:

Global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is likely to exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850 to 1900 for all RCP scenarios except RCP2.6. It is likely to exceed 2°C for RCP6.0 and RCP8.5, and more likely than not to exceed 2°C for RCP4.5. Warming will continue beyond 2100 under all RCP scenarios except RCP2.6. Warming will continue to exhibit interannual-to-decadal variability and will not be regionally uniform.

All that is a red herring when it comes to extinctions.  Although they are probably happening all the time, we only notice them when they are species we already know about.  In regard to biodiversity and ecology, David Stockwell drops a few different notions, such as neutral theory - which is described here as being that most genetic variation in populations is from genetic drift and mutation, not adaptation.  That doesn't sound implausible.  But that doesn't mean that more species won't become extinct with climate change.  If a population isn't able to adapt to a changed environment and can't relocate to another environment that does suit them, then they won't survive.  Simple really.

One of David's arguments is:

Expected species’ extinctions from climate change are derived from Species Area Relationships (or SARs), which is an empirical relationship between an area of habitat, such as forest or grassland, and the number of species it contains. A statistical method called Niche Modelling is used to extrapolate the area of suitable habitat of a species before and after climate change. The species with reduced area are selected (I would say ‘cherry-picked’) and then the average areal loss is plugged into the SAR relationship to give the number of species lost in a given climate change.

The problem of ‘circular reasoning’ with the SAR method was raised here and in Botkin’s“Forecasting the effects of global warming on biodiversity”, and stems from the accentuation of the losers and deprecation of the winners.  Due to the cherry-picking of species with areal reductions, any change at all increases extinctions, and so the outcome is predetermined. The circular fallacy can be further illustrated by imaging what would happen in a global cooling scenario.  SAR-based methods would cherry-pick the species that lose habitat due to cooling and so again predict an increase in extinctions. The SAR method is biased and decidedly anti-change.

Maybe I'm being slow, but I don't know why he calls this circular.  Thing is that species reduction will occur with a large rapid warming and a large rapid cooling.  There's nothing circular about that.  It takes a long time to recover after major changes and particularly after rapid changes, like we're bringing about.

As an aside, here is an article describing species area relationships. Here are some slides describing niche modeling. And here is a paper by Jane Elith et al (2010) exploring an approach to modelling future distributions of species, given the pressures from species invasions and climate change.  I don't see why David is so dismissive of efforts to predict biodiversity and species distribution and extinctions and the rate of same.

David finishes up with a typical denier strawman question and statement:

How can a scientific assessment be objective when the methods themselves are of dubious validity, and still highly contentious? A balanced appraisal would highlight the ecological theory, paleo-evidence and respected opinion that suggests it is plausible, and even likely, that moderate climate change is not harmful to species diversity and may even be beneficial.

First of all, David isn't one to talk about being "objective".  He's got his own agenda.  Thing is that it's almost impossible for anyone to be purely objective about anything (there's almost always some subjectivity involved).  Secondly, he seems to think that "respected opinion" suggest that moderate climate change may be beneficial.  Who knows, it might indeed, particularly if humans were to reduce in numbers.  However the world is going through immoderate climate change, it is on pace to heat up ten times faster than it has in 65 million years, and that will certainly hasten the sixth major extinction.

Lists of extinctions and endangered species

Wikipedia list of extinct animals
IUCN Red List
Committee on Recently Extinct Organisms


Thomas, Chris D., Alison Cameron, Rhys E. Green, Michel Bakkenes, Linda J. Beaumont, Yvonne C. Collingham, Barend FN Erasmus et al. "Extinction risk from climate change." Nature 427, no. 6970 (2004): 145-148. doi:10.1038/nature02121

From the WUWT comments

laterite thinks that habitats just pick up and shuffle off when it suits them and says (excerpt):

December 6, 2013 at 1:32 am
Peter Miller: Hotter generally means more species except in deserts, so there are exceptions. The thing about climate change is that as a process, no habitat is destroyed – it moves – that’s all. 

james griffin mysteriously talks about the "last six Holocene's" (sic) and says (excerpt):

December 6, 2013 at 3:32 am
The empirical data from the last six Holocene’s including our own all show temperatures warmer than today and therefore the premise that a degree or two of warming would wipe out many species is nonsense. 

mkelly seems to be confusing discovery of species with evolution of new species and is mistaken when saying:

December 6, 2013 at 6:38 am
The new species found in the past 500 years far exceeds the ones gone extinct. Just recently a small jungle cat species was found.

ferd berple has his own weird and nonsensical "theory" as he often does and says:

December 6, 2013 at 7:27 am
after every mass extinction event in the earth’s history there has been an explosion of new species. death is not a mistake by nature, it is an invention of nature to ensure that species can adapt over time. unless the present generation dies they will consume the food required by the next generation, making the next generation less successful and less likely to survive. as it is with generations, so it is with species.

Craig Loehle is, believe it or not, boasting that he's publishing a paper in the "journal" Energy and Environment and says:

December 6, 2013 at 7:51 am
I have a paper coming out in early 2014 in Energy & Environment showing that cold climate trees are very tolerant of warming and unlikely to suffer at all.

There's a recent PNAS paper about how trees can protect cold climate plants from global warming to some extent.


Jim G says "science is too hard, why bother":

December 6, 2013 at 8:13 am
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” – Albert Einstein. Science should attempt to avoid delving into fiction as much as possible. We do not even know all the species which are, let alone those that are no longer. At least these analyses should be noted as what they are, pure speculation, including any attempts at putting numerical values on species lost over virtually any time span. Even more ridiculous is any attempt to state the causal variables for such extictions. Too many possible unknown variables.

Picking cherries at WUWT: How a few miles in the South East Pacific became the whole world

Every so often the signs that deniers are slightly unhinged are too big to ignore.

Anthony Watts decides, eleven months after it was published, to write about a paper on research cruises in the south east Pacific off the coast of South America. (Archived here.)

No.  I'm giving the wrong impression.  Anthony doesn't write anything about the paper at all.  Anthony has written a 725 word article around a single sentence in a research paper, which itself runs to 26 pages not including the appendices.  Anthony uses that single sentence as an excuse to:

• stoke his audience's disdain of climate models
• argue that Wondering Willis Eschenbach is right because Willis has written lots of articles about clouds (none of them relevant to the paper, incidentally, except in the general sense that when it's cloudy the sunlight doesn't all get to the surface - duh!)
• give a plug to Roy Spencer's blunder book about climate
• meet his quota of blog articles for the day at WUWT.

The paper, by Simon P. de Szoeke et al, published last year in the Journal of Climate, was documenting data from observations on "9 transects from 7 research cruises to the southeastern tropical Pacific Ocean along 20°S, 75°-85°W in October-November 2001-2008".

Notice that we're talking about a small part of the ocean off the west coast of South America only.  But this is what Anthony Watts turns it into:

This paper by de Szoeke et al. published in the Journal of Climate finds that climate models grossly underestimate cooling of the Earth’s surface due to clouds by approximately 50%

According to the authors, “Coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP3) simulations of the climate of the 20th century show 40±20 W m−2 too little net cloud radiative cooling at the surface. Simulated clouds have correct radiative forcing when present, but models have ~50% too few clouds.“

Let that 40 watts/ square meter sink in a moment.

The 40 watts/ square meter underestimate of cooling from clouds is more than 10 times the alleged warming from a doubling of CO2 concentrations, which is said to be 3.7 watts/square meter according to the IPCC (AR4 Section 2.3.1)

So the cloud error in models is an order of magnitude greater than the forcing effect of Co2 claimed by the IPCC. That’s no small potatoes. The de Szoeke et al. paper also speaks to what Willis Eschenbach has been saying about clouds in the tropics.

You'd think the heavens had fallen in.  At the very least you'd think that the paper was about the entire world.  But it's not.  It's about a small section of the ocean and only during October and November.  Here's a map:

Here you can see the area surveyed on the world scale:

Needless to say, most WUWT readers wouldn't care what the paper was about.  Anything that gives them half an excuse to burst into one voice one singing the denier meme "all the models are wrong", is enough to sate their appetite for a short while.

The researchers documented a range of weather and climate variables.  It's a highly technical paper and difficult for the layperson to wade through.  Difficult for this layperson anyway.

The introduction gives a clue why the research was done.  I think what the authors are saying is that it's difficult for models to accurately simulate sea surface temperatures in the south east Pacific Ocean.  At least that's how the intro to the  paper begins.  So the scientists set out to take detailed observations to figure out what is happening in that part of the ocean.  Over a period of seven years in the months of October and November, they sent out a research vessel to take readings and report back.

What Anthony Watts has done is give his readers the impression that climate models are not properly representing clouds world-wide.  Instead the paper is restricted to observations from a small section of the south east Pacific.

The underestimate in cloud amount in CMIP3 isn't the whole story by a long shot.  The paper goes into a lot of detail including discussion of aerosols, long wave and short wave forcing, precipitation, diurnal variation and other aspects.

I think the WUWT article is a wonderful example of cherry picking a single sentence out of a long, technical and detailed paper purely to stoke a feeding frenzy of deniers at WUWT.

From the WUWT comments

The comments bring out everyone from the run of the mill fake sceptics to the utter nutters, just as Anthony Watts intended.  Here is a small sample (archived here).


markstoval says:

November 29, 2013 at 1:29 pm
It has been obvious from the get-go that anthropogenic CO2 was not an important factor (if one at all) in explaining the changing climate on planet earth. It is nice to see that a few hardy men and women are still willing to practice science in spite of all the money and accolades flowing to those practicing mindless myth-making.
Very good article today. Thanks Anthony.

john robertson says:

November 29, 2013 at 1:55 pm
well they are consistent, pretty much everything the Team(TM IPCC) does biases the models high. No highly alarming preprogrammed results results in no more funding.
Science was never more than a cloak for their naked ambition.

ferdberple says how he thinks climate models are programmed (excerpt):

November 29, 2013 at 10:22 pm
they are programmed to predict what the model builders believe the future looks like. and when the models get the prediction wrong, the model builders change the model until the model gives the correct answer.

and how does the model builder know when the model has given the correct answer? when the model delivers the prediction the model builder believes to be correct for the future.

---

De Szoeke, Simon P., Sandra Yuter, David Mechem, Chris W. Fairall, Casey D. Burleyson, and Paquita Zuidema. "Observations of Stratocumulus Clouds and Their Effect on the Eastern Pacific Surface Heat Budget along 20° S." Journal of Climate 25, no. 24 (2012): 8542-8567. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00618.1

It's utter nutter day at the WUWT nuttery, now with the Potty Peer

Christopher Monkton prides himself on his utter nuttery.   Anthony Watts loves utter nutters.  He puts up lots of articles by them.  Today we've had:

• Anthony Watts himself arguing that UHI has affected some temperature readings in the remote regions of the Arctic because of "human warmth" - see here
• Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham writing that "climate change is dominated by natural, not man-made factors" - see here
• Christopher Monckton writing about his offensive stunt that got him permanently banned from UNFCC processes, faking that he was the "honorary delegate from Burma".

Christopher writes a really, really silly article (archived here and updated) about the recent paper by Cowtan and Way.  He seems to be arguing that the paper doesn't do something that it never claimed to have done in the first place but which, according to the potty peer it should have done.  In other words, the potty peer has built a strawman so he can knock it down.

Nick Stokes demolishes Christopher's nonsense nicely quoting Christopher:

November 20, 2013 at 1:31 am

“The fundamental conceptual error that Cowtan & Way had made lay in their failure to realize that large uncertainties do not reduce the length of The Pause: they actually increase it.”

I’d like to see a quote where C&W are making that conceptual error. In fact, the “length of the Pause” as formulated here is a skeptics construct, and you won ‘t see scientists writng about it.

The period of “no statistically significant increase” is a meaningless statistical test. Rejecting the null hypothesis can lead to useful conclusions; failing to reject does not. It means the test failed.

Yes, HADCRUT takes account of the missing data in its uncertainty estimate, but does not correct for the bias in the trend. That’s what C&W have done.

If you bother to read the archived WUWT article (updated here), you'll notice that Christopher doesn't dispute the findings of Cowtan and Way.  So far I've yet to see anyone dispute it at WUWT, other than Anthony Watts.  And even he seems to be of two minds about it.

Update

I've updated the archive.  Watch out for the "absurd" pontifications of the batty duke (physics teacher rgbatduke who takes a very large number of words to display his profound ignorance of climate), the "genetic" fudgery  of ferd berple and RussR's comment (that I overlooked), in which he pointed out that Christopher argues that AGW continues:

Before long, therefore, another El Niño will arrive, the wind and the thermohaline circulation will carry the warmth around the world, and The Pause – at least for a time – will be over.

WUWT comment of the week - why the earth isn't dry

Fun fact.  Here is a picture of all the water on or near the surface of the earth compared to the size of our planet, courtesy of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Source: APOD NASA

That's a precursor.  This morning, Andy Skuse reminded me of something that appeared the other day at WUWT.

Do you know why the oceans haven't all drained down the plug hole to the centre of the earth?

No?  Then read on (archived here):

ferd berple says (my bold italics):

November 13, 2013 at 4:12 am

Ben Wouters says: November 13, 2013 at 3:28 am
Total nonsense. We’re living on a planet that consists of molten rock, with a core a molten metal.

==========
Agreed. In scale, the crust of the earth is thinner than the skin of an apple. Under the thin skin, the apple is molten rock.

Most folks think that the oceans rest on top of the earth’s crust, like water in a swimming pool. This is incorrect. The oceans extend well below the bottom of the ocean basins. They saturate the earths crust and descent towards the interior until they reach the boiling point of water under high pressure (600-800C). At which point they can descend no further.

Without the molten core of the earth to hold them in place via steam pressure, earth’s oceans would have long ago drained into the interior and the surface of the planet would be dry.

It is at this boundary layer that limestone (fossilized CO2) and steam are reduced in the presence of iron to produce hydrocarbons. Being lighter than water these percolate upwards toward the surface and are occasionally captured by rock formations. Otherwise the hydrocarbons are released to the atmosphere and digested by bacteria to continue that carbon cycle necessary for life.

Click here for a very nice video explaining what is known about earth's inner structure.

And here is a link to some NASA pages on the carbon cycle.

Is there a vast amount of water in inner Earth?  Here is the related paper in Science.

Out of the mouths of WUWT deniers

Here is a typical dose of denialism, courtesy of commenters at WUWT.  Enjoy!

A healthy willingness to be united against science

Chad Wozniak gives some stern advice to fellow fake skeptics at WUWT:

May 27, 2013 at 12:41 pm  There is more than enough hard science to disprove the alarmists’ arguments and contentions, but this does mean that skeptics should stick to the hard science.

And in the very next sentence departs from "hard science" writing:

Of course there is a greenhouse effect, and it varies by substance – surely nitrogen and oxygen and argon have some greenhouse effect, even if it is tiny relative to, say, water vapor. The Earth is definitely warmer, by about 15 degrees C, than it would be without its atmosphere. False or manifestly incorrect rationalizations by skeptics for rejecting AGW will only provide grist for the alarmist mill.

If Chad is thinking of O2, N2 and Ar then he's wrong, of course.  (However oxygen in the form of ozone and oxygen and nitrogen in the form of nitrous oxide exhibit the greenhouse effect.)  Perhaps this is why he maintains:

This debate does express a healthy willingness on the part of skeptics to mull over and argue about details, in contrast to the religious, delusional, see-no-evil-hear-no-evil-speak-no-evil dogmatism and stonewalling torpor of the alarmists, and this objectivity and skepticism among skeptics is crucial to differentiating honest science from alarmist charlatanism.

Or is he having second thoughts about sticking to "hard science" when a hardened denial suits him better.  In fact, at no time should "skeptics" back away from denial, no matter what the evidence shows:

However, my concern in this debate is first and foremost that, regardless of different opinions amongst us on details, the skeptic community must be united in its general position that there is no discernible incremental effect on temperatures of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that such effect as could ever be identified will be either nugatory or actually beneficial. At no time should we back away from this position.

The only surface temperature Elizabeth trusts lets her down...

Elizabeth says she only trusts one surface temperature data set:

May 30, 2013 at 12:43 pm This paper has to BS because reliable surface temp data from 1850 is non existent due to adjustments, UHI etc. He is comparing his CFC data with a pretend made up temperature trends by hadcrut Giss etc.The only surface temperature data that I trust is CET and it shows a 100% flat line since 1849. There has been no significant rise confirmed by satellite data since 1979

A pretend made-up temperature?  Here is the "only surface temperature" Elizabeth trusts. Her eyes deceive her if she thinks it "shows a 100% flat line since 1849"! (Click the chart to enlarge it.)

Data source: HadCET

...and so does the satellite data

Elizabeth is in deep denial:

May 30, 2013 at 1:02 pm The fact that there has been no “global” warming can easily be shown and has been overlooked massively. Look at ANY graph of Southern Hemisphere temperatures since measurements began and you will observe NO warming in the SH. see RSS remote sensing graphs. its NOT global. Actually tropics doesnt appear to show warming either (RSS data).

Let's see, shall we?  This animated chart indicates that RSS, UAH and GISTemp all show the temperature of the southern hemisphere has been going up.

Data sources: RSS, UAH and GISTemp

We've got Delingpole!

Mike Mellor says "they've got McKibben, we've got Delingpole":

June 1, 2013 at 6:31 am Dave says: June 1, 2013 at 6:15 am The problem with Morano is he has no scientific credentials. That makes him the worst possible type of person to personify the skeptical movement.Yes, but the most heard voices in the climate debate are those of the media people. They’ve got McKibben, we’ve got Delingpole, etc. etc.

Adapt! Adapt!

ferd berple wrongly thinks that humans can adapt to any heat (excerpt):

June 20, 2013 at 7:18 am ...Humans are one of the best adapted warm climate animals on the planet. Everything about us is optimized to deal with heat. So long as we have water and shade there is no place on earth too hot for us to survive. Which tells us that conditions where humans evolved were much warmer than where most of us live today.

In fact, if you sit naked on the beach in the tropics on the equator at noon under a palm tree and there is a breeze blowing you will be very comfortable. If you try the same thing at midnight and there is a breeze blowing, you will be cold. Even if you come out from under the palm tree and bask in the abundant back radiation.

Call me when the oceans are jacuzzi warm.

He needs to read this paper by Sherwood and Huber, about the maximum wet bulb temperature that humans can endure.  They write:

Any exceedence of 35 °C for extended periods should induce hyperthermia in humans and other mammals, as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible. While this never happens now, it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 °C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed. Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel burning.

And if he's ever stuck in the Lut Desert in Iran, or outback Queensland or Flaming Mountain in China, he'd better find some shade and be glad that there is low humidity.

Coal belongs in the air

AndyG55 says buried carbon is "meant to be in the atmosphere":

June 21, 2013 at 2:31 am I will repeat, for the AGW bletheren.  Coal is carbon. It mostly comes from buried plant life.  This carbon that was buried is MEANT to be in the atmosphere as CO2.
THAT IS WHERE IT BELONGS !!!!!!

Why does Bob Tisdale even think of communicating science?

omnologos says - in a comment on an article by Bob Tisdale, who as far as I can make out, has no scientific background:

July 1, 2013 at 5:23 am WHY DO PEOPLE EVEN THINK OF COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE IF THEY HAVE NO SCIENTIFIC BACKGROUND!!

Denier Whackiness: How updating a video spells the End of the World as We Know It

How it all started....

Kevin C at SkepticalScience has got WUWT in an uproar.  Kevin C wrote an article about recent surface temperatures and said he was going to update a video.  I believe this is the video in question, which Kevin wants to update to reflect the latest science:

This got poor old Bob Tisdale going.  Bob wrote a whining article about how SkepticalScience is still not taking any notice of his ENSO magic.  He's ignored everything that Kevin wrote, although he expressed some amazement that a science writer would want to update a video to reflect the latest scientific thinking.

I've spent enough time on Bob already and will just once more imagine his little leprechauns magically heating the oceans.  Bob writes about "naturally created warm water" as if it's different to any other ocean water.  Bob's a tad weird.

Who'd have thought -  an animated graphic spells the end the world...

What really drew my attention was Ferd Berple's comment. (The same Ferd Berple.)  He thinks a skeptical science video is the same as a peer-reviewed paper.

Read how smoothly Ferd makes the transition from updating a video on SkepticalScience.com through to withdrawal of Einstein's scientific papers, through to rewriting the Laws of the Universe and finally a Religious Inquisition (with capital letters).

ferd berple starts by quoting Bob Tisdale quoting SkepticalScience and says:
May 22, 2013 at 8:17 am  However the conclusions of the current video do not represent a consensus in the peer-reviewed results, and thus we will be withdrawing the current version
============
ferd berple continues:...So, following this logic, any paper that doesn’t follow the consensus should be withdrawn?

Did Einstein’s papers in the early 1900′s follow the consensus? Didn’t they break with the consensus of the day? On this basis, shouldn’t Einstein’s papers have been withdrawn?

How can science advance without papers that break with the consensus? If the consensus view is that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun circles the earth, how can anyone publish a paper that says otherwise?

Skeptical Science, this is my question to you. How, if the consensus is that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun and planets circle the earth, how can anyone publish anything different if only papers that match the consensus are allowed?

How is this any different than the days of the Religious Inquisition, when it was forbidden to publish any paper that was contrary to consensus? How can Science advance when it is slave to Consensus?

Galileo before the Holy Office - Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

Oh, Kevin C - What Have You Done?

Oh, Kevin C - you really started something.  Poor Ferd Berple thinks if you update your video it will sound the death knell for quantum physics, astronomy, all theories of the universe and all the religions in the world.  (Come on, let me call Poe! Could ferd berple be a fake denier?)

No more floods because CO2 is pressing on the walls of the sky ...

Deniers will often go on ad nauseum with the wrong notion that there isn't enough CO2 in the air to make the slightest bit of difference to climate.  To prove not all deniers are alike all of the time, here is a comment on Anthony Watt's science denying website, replying to a comment by Steven Mosher (as quoted).

According to ferd berple, the amount of CO2 we're adding to the air is so humungous it's pressing on the sky's floor, walls and ceiling to such an extent that less water will evaporate!  (Try to tell that to the Queenslanders.)

I know, there are so many people who have fun with the deniers on Tony's site it's hard to tell the fake comments from the real ones.  Poe's Law applies on WUWT as on no other anti-climate science website.

What do you reckon - is ferd berple a fake denier or a real one?