Anthony Watts wants coral reefs to face extinction - again

Photo: Toby Hudson

Coral reefs are critically important to the marine ecosystem. Despite this, there's another attempt to make corals extinct at Anthony Watts' blog wattsupwiththat.com (WUWT) (archived here). Anthony wrote an article saying how it was hilarious for scientists to want to study corals, because they've been made extinct a number of times before and came back hundreds of millennia later. Or something like that.

As Phil Clarke pointed out in a comment here, Anthony started his strange plea to stop studying corals by referring to an article on the website of the Global Reef Project. Anthony quoted the first sentence of the article, and decided to not post any more of it. Here is the first sentence, plus a bit more (my emphasis). The part that Anthony quoted is in italics. The part that contradicted his whole article is in bold:

Corals are 500 million years old, and date back to the late Cambrian period, during the Paleozoic era (Fig. 1). Evidence suggests that they started as simple, solitary organisms but, in response to changes in their environment, later evolved into the coral reefs we know today. It is also known that over the 500 million years, during which corals are known to have existed, they have experienced a number of extinction events. These extinction events were largely the result of dramatic changes in their environment, such as we are seeing today. 

Coral reef bleaching with world-renowned expert Terry Hughes - and a Gish Gallop from "science" quack, Jim Steele

Bleached staghorn coral
on the Great Barrier Reef
between Townsville and Cairns, March 2017,
Credit: Bette Willis, Source: JCU

Some years ago I visited the Great Barrier Reef offshore from the resort town of Port Douglas. It was a magical experience (and I think the only time I've scuba dived in the ocean). Later I had the privilege of swimming over part of the Great Barrier Reef again from the seas around the Whitsundays, staying at Airlie Beach. Apart from some snorkelling over coral reefs in a few other places, such as Bali, and doing some work with the fishing industry, I know very little about coral reefs. Any knowledge I do have is thanks to experts.

What I do know is that coral reefs are extremely critical ecosystems for maintaining marine life and protecting coastal environments, and for all sorts of human activities too, such as fishing, tourism and more.

I also know that our actions are killing many corals and even entire reefs.

Although I've written about them in the past, I'm reluctant to delve too deeply into a topic as complex and specialised as coral reefs for risk of giving wrong information. However the sort of nonsense that you read by deniers and disinformers, who seem to want to kill the reefs off as quickly as possible, has prompted me again. That plus the fact that governments in Australia (the Australian Government and the Queensland Government), a suspect coal company from India, and less prominent players are doing all they can to speed up the death of the Great Barrier Reef by giving our hard earned money, plus permits, for Adani to mine coal and wreck the reef (and use up our precious water).

On top of all that, the Great Barrier Reef is suffering another bleaching event this year, hot on the heels of the worst mass bleaching ever that happened last year.

What finally got me going was an article at WUWT by Jim Steele, in which he tried to tell his readers that the 2016 coral bleaching wasn't really widespread (it was the worst ever), and was caused by any of a whole number of different reasons he offered up, except the real cause - excessive ocean heat. Jim Steele's a global warming denier, in case you've not heard of him.

See update below, too.

Denier Deception #67: Disgusting Jim Steele misrepresents Dr. Kevin Trenberth

Kevin Trenberth is one of the world's leading climate scientists and a top science communicator. He is one of the experts who is more than willing to explain the science of climate to the general public and is often approached by journalists.

Jim Steele is a science denier and disinformer. I doubt he would ever be approached by mainstream scientific journalists. Jim uses climate conspiracy blogger Anthony Watts to promote his denial and his vanity-published denier manifesto.

Kevin Trenberth has 700 papers listed in his Google Scholar listing, and an h-index to weep for (97). Jim Steele has zero peer-reviewed publications and probably doesn't know what an h-index is.

Jim Steele goes to Serengeti to hunt Kevin Trenberth

Kevin Trenberth stands head, shoulders
and neck above the rest.

Today Jim Steele has written a Gish gallop attacking Dr Kevin Trenberth (archived here). As you know, this is a favourite technique of science deniers. It doesn't work so well these days, since the technique was named the Serengeti Strategy (by Michael Mann in his book "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars"). The aim is to try to discredit an individual scientist, isolate them from all the other climate scientists, and then say "aha - climate science is a hoax".

Yeah - it's pretty dumb, isn't it. Even were someone to find a mistake in a scientific paper, or object to something a scientist once said, it's hardly going to tear down the fabric of science. Most of the time, however, as in this case, it's the deniers who get it wrong, not the scientist they are attacking.

I thought about which Serengeti animal would typify Dr Trenberth and settled on the giraffe. It's got a great personality, it stands head, shoulders and neck above the rest of us mere mortals, it's elegant, and it would respond to attacks from dim deniers with the grace and wit befitting an honest person of strong character, like Dr Kevin Trenberth.

Jim Steele's "yellow journalism" at WUWT, and coastal erosion

Jim Steele is one of those science deniers who can't get his stuff published anywhere except climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT and in his own vanity-published denier book. Today, he wrote an article (archived here) about the collapse of cliffs in his home town Pacifica, in California. Jim could have just written a straight piece about what is contributing to coastal erosion and it might have been an informative article. However, as is usual for Jim Steele, he spoilt his article and further reduced his credibility by using it as a platform to tout his climate science denial. His article was a good example of the techniques of climate science denial. It was peppered with disinformation, twisting and misprepresenting others.

Jim Steele's yellow "journalism"

Jim's article seems to have been little more than a pretext so he could once again imply that climate science is a hoax. He accused two leading science journalists of being "yellow journalists". (Yellow journalism is where facts take a back seat to sensationalism.) Jim  wrote:

Jim Steele brings the Arctic to Antarctica

There's a very odd article at WUWT by Jim Steele about Antarctic sea ice (archived here, latest here). He started off the article saying he'd just read a new paper about Arctic sea ice. The paper, by Neil Swart and colleagues was published in Nature at the end of January.

The introduction to the paper sets the scene:

Internal climate variability can mask or enhance human-induced sea-ice loss on timescales ranging from years to decades. It must be properly accounted for when considering observations, understanding projections and evaluating models.

The scientists were looking at trends in Arctic sea ice in recent years. What they were looking at in particular was the extent to which internal climate variability can affect the trend. That is, how much of the ups and downs in Arctic sea ice could come from internal variability compared to the underlying decline from enhanced greenhouse warming.

The main message from the paper, I think, is that Arctic sea ice decline is not necessarily underestimated by climate models. The recent big dips of 2007 and 2012 could be natural variability. It's difficult to tell.

Duet on Ice: More denier silliness at WUWT

This will be short-ish - by HotWhopper standards :). It's about a duo of articles at WUWT. About ice at opposite ends of the earth - Greenland and Antarctica.

Jim Steele's Bold Greenland Prediction

Jim Steele wrote an article (without mentioning Camille Parmesan once!) predicting that Greenland will start accumulating ice next year. He pulled something out of thin (Arctic) air and wrote:

And based on historical analyses, Greenland will likely begin gaining mass in the coming years.

The back story

This is just a placeholder for any stray WUWT-ers who are not such fake sceptics that they'll not investigate denialist claims made at WUWT. What Dr Michael Singer actually wrote. In full. Without the quote-mining by Jim Steele.

http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/11/jim-steele-at-wuwt-pushes-for-pseudo.html

Dr Singer's long comment is in the body of the article. He adds quite a bit more in the comments. I'm linking to this to put Jim's latest dummy spit into perspective.

(Didn't I once say that sexism and climate science denial are common to a certain demographic? I did? Yep, I was right, wasn't I.)

PS WUWT moderator Smokey aka dbstealey aka D Boehm aka  ~dbs is wrong again as usual. Here's why.

Jim Steele at WUWT pushes for pseudo-science, not science, in schools

Update: See below for comment from Michael C Singer, husband of Camille Parmesan, who Jim Steele referred to in his article and the comments.

---

Jim Steele is a climate science denier who's popped up in the last year or so at WUWT, trying to flog his book protesting climate change. He is known for denying practically anything to do with global warming and more (eg ocean acidification), but most of all he will use any excuse to take a shot at scientist Camille Parmesan (see here).

Jim Steele's Serengeti Strategy

I don't know what is really at the heart of Jim Steele's vendetta against Camille Parmesan. He hasn't said except that he disputes something about her 1996 publication on butterflies. But his ongoing personalised campaign goes way beyond that. If it was merely a scientific dispute he'd argue scientifically, in the literature. He doesn't. He just rants and raves to science deniers, and contradicts himself, and misrepresents Dr Parmesan's work. This leaves one to wonder - did she snub him at a party? Did she forget who he was one time? Does she not know who he is? Whatever the reason, if Jim Steele can bring Dr Parmesan into a discussion he will. Even if there's no reason to do so, he will.

It's Jim Steele's application of the Serengeti strategy.

Today he's arguing (archived here) that Dr Parmesan and the AAAS are wrong about teaching science to children in Texas. To demonstrate how he applied the Serengeti strategy, the article that Jim used as his launching pad was written by Camille Parmesan and Alan I. Leshner. But Jim doesn't once mention Alan Leshner by name, only by his organisation, the AAAS.

Camille Parmesan is a world-renowned biologist. Last year, she was named the 2013 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is one of the most highly regarded scientific organisations in the world. Alan I. Leshner is the CEO of AAAS.

By way of comparison, Jim Steele is not a scientific researcher. He has never done scientific research that I could find. Or none that he's published in the academic literature. I believe this would be the closest. He was a part time teacher at different places, and ran a field station part-time. He also says he ran a bird counting program that got funding from the US Forest Service. You can read the chips he's lugging around on his shoulder in his own bio.

Draft science textbooks have wrong information

The first paragraph of the Statesman article Jim quote-mined was this:

Some proposed Texas textbooks would badly misinform K-12 students by falsely suggesting that scientists do not agree on what is causing climate change and by incorrectly suggesting a future cooling trend. Two draft textbooks — astoundingly — even confuse climate change with the ozone hole, which is a completely separate concern and driven by different human actions.

So now you can see the context of the article. Apparently some ideologues in Texas got some people to write some dodgy science denying books and want to flog them in schools. It's the same as the religion vs science vs politics battle that's been waged before in the USA - for example, creationism vs science. Jim is on the side of the ideologues and against science. Jim Steele seems to be arguing that textbooks that confuse climate change and the ozone hole should be used in K-12 schools.

You can read the Parmesan and Leshner article here. It lists a few awful examples of pseudoscience that the politicians want taught to the children of Texas. (It also says that Professor Parmesan is a geology professor. She's not. Her field is biology.)

Debating pseudo-science in schools

Jim Steele reckons that children should be fed all manner of denialist nonsense and allowed to "debate". He cites climate science denial as an example, but it looks as if he means it to apply to any scientific topic, writing:

Science textbooks should not be instruments to teach one-sided propaganda. Textbooks should encourage debate....

A bit later he writes:

...It is Parmesan and the AAAS that are using politics to pressure school boards to force feed school children that CO2-caused global warming is now some sort of scientific law, when in fact both Parmesan’s research and the CO2 hypothesis are increasingly not supported by the evidence. 

So Jim Steele is a greenhouse effect denier, with his "CO2 hypothesis". Well, I already knew that.

By all means let's debate science in the classroom. Except it's clear from what Jim wrote that he wants to control the debate and argue that all the science is wrong. Anyway, I've had a shot at chapter headings for debates to be included in Jim Steele's revised science textbooks:

• Debate the moon: Is the moon made of cheese and is there really a man living there?
• Debate the shape of the Earth: If the Earth is flat, have all the missing persons simply fallen off the edge?
• Debate evolution: Is Jim Steele evidence that humans evolved from the same ancestor as our (very) distant relative, the gibbon?
• Debate extinction: Which species will survive the sixth major extinction and how.
• Debate water vs beer. Which is better. Do a taste test.
• Debate atoms. Are they no more than imaginary models?
• Debate models. Miranda Kerr vs Fernando Cabral vs Henrik Fallenius vs Kate Moss vs Tyra Banks vs Gryphon O'Shea.
• Debate the atmosphere. Would wacky pseudo-scientists like Jim Steele have evolved if there were no atmospheric CO2 and Earth was a snowball?
• Debate the ice age that cometh: Are rising sea levels evidence that an ice age cometh?
• Debate science itself. Should paranoid conspiracy theories be given equal weight with science in the classroom. The pros and cons.
• Debate science hoaxes: Is climate science the biggest hoax perpetrated on dumb deniers? List all the people and organisations that must be in on the hoax and explain how the scam has been kept secret from the other 8% of the world's population.

Here are some debating tips from Huffington Post for all the deniers at WUWT, as if they need them.

And if Jim Steele doesn't want his children and grandchildren to learn about science, he can always send them to a charter school that is anti-science.

Update: Comment from Michael C Singer

The following was sent to me via email. It was too long to be posted as a comment. 

Sou 12 November 2014

I am Parmesan's husband, referenced by Jim Steele.  I have, indeed, advised him against replicating Parmesan's work.  However, I didn't say that the original study was "not important," I said that it would not be important to replicate it NOW.  And I gave Jim an explanation of my opinion.

Parmesan's work was done between 1992 and 1996.  As a grad student she spent 2-3 months in the field each summer, driving her pickup from Baja California to Alberta and back, examining previously-reported populations of Edith's checkerspot and reporting which still existed and which were, at that time, extinct.  Her published study reported presence or absence of the butterflies in sites that she judged to be still suitable habitat.  She concluded that the average location of an existing population in good habitat was both significantly further north and at significantly higher elevation than prior records.

Edith's checkerspot is not migratory, it lives in small habitat patches susceptible to natural extinctions.  However, usually when natural extinctions occur, not all the populations in an area go extinct and if the habitat is OK the extinct site can be naturally recolonized.  I've observed this several times; I've seen extinct sites recolonized after just 3 or 4 years or after 20-25 years, and I've seen them stay extinct to the present day.  Ilkka Hanski in Finland, working with a related butterfly, has shown that every population has a high risk of natural extinction. The species persists in Finland only through an approximate balance between rates of extinction and colonization.  What Parmesan showed was that in Edith's checkerspot the extinction process had recently involved an elevational and latitudinal bias. For me to observe, as I have informed Jim, that some populations reported by Parmesan as extinct have since been recolonized, is entirely unsurprising and does not refute the conclusion that she drew.  Jim accuses me of scientific dishonesty by not publishing these observations, because he believes that they refute Parmesan's conclusions.  He is wrong. They do not.  If they did, I WOULD have published them.

It would be possible to repeat Parmesan's study now and to ask whether Edith's checkerspot has shifted its range in the opposite direction to that reported by Parmesan, but to do that you'd need to examine the entire species' range again, from Baja to Alberta. This would be an enormous amount of work, and it did not seem to be what Jim proposed to do.  Instead, he felt that, if he could show that some of the populations reported as extinct by Parmesan were no longer extinct, this would refute her conclusion. It would not. 

Unfortunately it's not possible now to ask whether Parmesan was wrong back in 1996, you'd need to be a time-traveler.  This study was important in 1996 as a pioneering effort to ask what was happening to an entire species’ range.  But this study was just a single species, and the bias that Parmesan showed, while consistent with warming climate, could have been caused by other factors.   For this reason the study is no longer an important part of the evidence that biologists use to conclude that species’ ranges are shifting upwards and polewards in a GENERAL sense.  This comes from aggregate studies, called meta-analyses.  For example, Vincent DeVictor and 20 other authors (not including myself or Parmesan) published a paper in Nature Climate Change in 2012 in which they summarized data from 9,490 bird communities and 2,130 butterfly communities and found an average poleward shift of 37 km in the birds and 114km in the butterflies.  In this study some species were shifting towards the equator, some towards the pole and some were not shifting at all, but there was an overall significant trend for poleward range shifts.  This is the type of evidence used to conclude that a general trend for range shifts is under way.

Suppose that Jim Steele were to replicate Parmesan’s study and find that Edith’s checkerspot has now shifted its range towards the equator.  Suppose that Jim’s conclusion were incorporated into a summary like the one by DeVictor et al.  In the context of such a large study it would be a drop in the ocean and would make no difference to their overall conclusion.  The average poleward range shift of butterflies might change from 114km to 113km.  This is the sense in which I have advised Jim Steele that he would make little scientific impact if he were to replicate Parmesan’s study of a single species and get a different result.  The original study was important at the time.  However, to replicate it now in the context of the very large amount of knowledge on other species that has accumulated since 1996, would not be important, no matter what the result.   

Parmesan’s affiliation is correct: in Texas she is now in Geology; in the UK she is a Professor of Oceans and human health in a Marine Biology dept.

From the WUWT comments

The extremists come out in favour of Jim Steele. A very large number of comments were about what a nasty awful person Dr Parmesan is, and how people should write to her university (email address was provided) and anyway, climate science is a hoax.

SasjaL is an illiterati who argues science shouldn't be taught in school and likens science to extreme religious indoctrination.

November 8, 2014 at 2:58 pm
Parmesan is a nice cheese (like all other Italian food), but this both smell and taste bad!
This type of indoctrination are found in countries where extreme forms of Islam exists.
– Wait … We already have these (climate) changes in Swedish schoolbooks 

M Courtney says that one can use pseudoscience to teach children how to distinguish it from real science. Perhaps he's just wanting to up the traffic to WUWT.

 November 8, 2014 at 11:38 am
Surely science is a process not a catechism?
Why doesn’t she call for the “wrong” science to be presented and then debunked with numerous validated models of how the climate works, graphs of the correlation of GHG emissions with Global temperatures and, of course, the obvious methods of distinguishing anthropogenic from natural effects?
Wouldn’t that teach the young Texans how to spot pseudoscience and confront it thorough out the lives?

J. Philip Peterson thinks there are only two "sides" to climate science. He knows nothing about it.

November 8, 2014 at 1:58 pm
I wish more would speak out. You really can’t teach both sides of the CAGW science?? (without getting fired)?? You have to teach it as settled science??

mpainter does get one thing right:

November 8, 2014 at 11:46 am
This report dismays. Camile Parmesan seems to be an evil antithesis of science. That there are so many in science who are like her is sickening.

It bears repeating: the CAGW crowd represent a setback for science.

One person posted Dr Parmesan's email address, with obvious bad intentions. Another said they've already written to her University - something about the IPCC's Nobel Prize award.


jim Steele says populations of Edith’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha) haven't moved north, only the statistical centre has moved north. Huh? He's not that good at arithmetic. (extract)

November 8, 2014 at 2:48 pm
What I find most disgusting and dishonest in this 2013 video is that she still repeats her old story that her butterfly (Edith Checkerspot) had moved upwards and northwards when 1) No such thing ever happened. Only the statistical center moved because more the butterflies had been extirpated due to urban sprawl mostly in southern California and 2) she has known for at least 5 years now that populations that she reported as extinct have now returned. Thats why she refused to let me replicate her study. So she still refers to her zombie data, instead of telling the world she was wrong the butterflies returned and never died due to global or local warming! 

He makes up weird stuff, implying butterflies "died" rather than shifted, due to global or local warming. Is he an utter nutter or a disinformer, or both? He's not very bright but is he at some level conscious of his absurdities?

Another thing. Jim Steele claims that the butterfly populations reported as extinct have now returned. But he also claims he doesn't know where those populations are, so how does he know they've returned? jim Steele claimed:

November 8, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Although good science requires a methods section to allow independent replication her paper in Nature never had a Methods section. I needed the coordinates of each location and her determination of present or absent, to check both her statistical conclusions as well as to examine the surrounding habitat to assess the effects of landscape change. Instead of providing me that data, her husband and colleague Dr. Michael Singer kept trying to dissuade me from replicating her work saying it was “too much work” or that original study was “not important” any more. Curiouser and Curiouser she still touts that original story in every press release as a “beautiful example” global warming. (Makes me gag)

Note: See update above for response by Michael Singer.

The thing is that Camille Parmesan doesn't ignore landscape changes. (Also, unlike Jim, she knows the name of the butterfly in question.) Click here to read a short overview of the work of Dr Parmesan on Edith’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha). Click here for the original paper that Jim Steele is still stewing over nearly twenty years later.   Click here to see what I discovered when I looked into Jim Steele's various claims some time ago. Jim Steele has not published one scrap of scientific research to support his own claims about it. Not in the scientific literature. It's all hot air denier style - full of fudgery, misrepresentation and self-promotion.

If Jim Steele represented the work of others properly, he'd never be invited to write at WUWT or be a guest speaker at science denier shingdigs, and his pseudo-science book sales would plummet.

---

Parmesan, Camille. "Climate and species'range." Nature 382, no. 6594 (2009): 765-766. doi:10.1038/382765a0

Assaying a muddled befuddled Jim Steele essay at WUWT

Oh boy. Poor old WUWT-ers are in for a boring time. Befuddled Jim Steele is back and has written an even more muddled article at WUWT. For those who weren't pronounced brain-dead after his last bowl of tripe, they will be after this one (archived here).

It's (not) natural

Jim Steele's article can be summed up as "it's natural". That's just the same as his last one, only he's more long-winded and even less coherent this time around (if possible). Jim starts in the Arctic, spins backward to medieval times and crashes forward. He reckons the world is about to cool, writing:

If natural cycles are indeed the climate control knob, the next 2 decades should witness a cool phase of the AMO and the retreat of southerly marine organisms. And the current scientific consensus that the upper 300 meters of the oceans have been cooling since 2003 bodes well for natural cycles prediction.

700 metres, 300 metres - what's 400 metres difference!

I don't know where he gets the upper 300 metres of oceans have been cooling from. Jim put a number beside it but it leads nowhere. Last time around he claimed it was the "upper 700 meters of Argo’s ocean data [that had] a cooling trend since 2003". This time he's dropped it back to 300 metres. He's got a Part 3 coming. I wonder will it be the "upper 100 meters cooling" next time?

Anyway, here is a chart showing the temperature changes in the ocean to both 100 metres and 700 metres. Since neither depth has cooled since 2003, the upper 300 metres could hardly have got any cooler.

Data source: NODC/NOAA

A muddled tour through deniersville

Of course since Jim doesn't believe that there is any such thing as a greenhouse effect his article is a load of garbage. He's pulled together various ingredients from denier memes, mixed them up in a blender, and the result is an incoherent babble. I wouldn't be surprised if he was a little under the weather when he wrote his "essay". Oh, he managed to put full stops in the right place much of the time. And most of his sentences had at least one noun and a verb. As for the rest, well let's see how he meandered:

• The Arctic
• Climate models
• Dr James Hansen
• Medieval warm anomaly
• Sardines
• Dr Camille Parmesan (Jim's anti-hero)
• Pacific decadal oscillation
• Back to the Arctic again

A one-way cycle!

Jim finishes off with this profound "natural cycles" comment:

If indeed natural cycles are the real climate control knobs, the next 15 to 20 years will settled the debate. While alarmists predict total loss of ice by 2030 (and earlier predictions have already failed), believers in the power of natural cycles expect Arctic sea ice to rebound by 2030. Until then the science is far from settled. And claims that the science is settled just one more of the great climate myths. (Part 3 will look at the chimeras created by averaging and meta-analyses)

It's easy to guess what Jim means by "believers" - and it's about the only accurate thing he's written in the entire article. Science deniers "believe" what they want to believe rather than explore facts and many of them "believe" we're heading for an ice age - any day now. And have "believed" that like, forever. A bit like there are "believers" in an imminent "day of judgement" or lizard men or flying pigs.

For the rest - natural cycles are the climate control knobs? Meaningless. What natural cycles? What controls the natural cycles. Settled (sic) the debate? What debate? Why has nature been cycling in the same direction for the past hundred years or so?  Hotter and hotter. That's not a cycle that's a speeding locomotive on a straight run!

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

If you want unnatural cycles, Jim Steele cycles between pursuing his strange vendetta against Dr Parmesan and shouting to all who'll listen that "it's not happening".

What an odd "essay". Why Anthony put it on his blog is anyone's guess. Perhaps he is very hard up for essays.

From the WUWT comments

Jim's post has been up for a while and so far there are only six comments. Partly that's because most of the WUWT readers (who are in the USA) are fast asleep. The rest of them probably went to sleep reading Jim's article.

As if to prove that Jim's "essay" is incoherent, cnxtim can only parrot the denier standby comment and says:

June 27, 2014 at 12:35 am
Another nail in the coffin of CAGW – thanks…

M Courtney doesn't usually babble meaningless nonsense, but p'raps he thinks he'll reflect the tone of the "essay", so he says:

June 27, 2014 at 12:48 am
It’s CO2…
It’s the Sun…
It’s the Oceans…
It’s all and none of these. Just because the redistribution of heat from ocean currents is consistent with polar temperature observations does not mean it is the sole or even dominant cause.
Climate is complex. 

evanmjones is referring to his and Anthony's as-yet-unfinished work on US weather stations when he talks of "sensors", and seems to think the USA is the whole world when he says:

June 26, 2014 at 11:17 pm
But that narrow focus has biased Hansen and his disciples who have underestimated the power of ocean oscillations.
Bingo.
Of course, Hansen was making his projections before the PDO was described by science (i.e., 1996). So he ascribed the natural PDO warming to CO2 alone. Take it from 1950 when CO2 became significant and we see 1.1C/century warming. That’s over one complete PDO cycle (so that balances). So we see CO2 forcing according to Arrhenius — without net positive feedback.

And that’s assuming the sensors are accurate, and 4 out of 5 of them ain’t. 

Bob Tisdale picks up on Evan Jones and says (extract, removed quote and link):

June 27, 2014 at 12:58 am
...The PDO represents the spatial pattern of the sea surface temperature anomalies in the North Pacific, not the sea surface temperature anomalies. There is no mechanism through which the PDO can alter temperatures globally. ..
Regards 

Old England uses the "essay" as an excuse to spout his latest conspiracy theory and says (excerpt from a much longer comment with more of the same):

June 27, 2014 at 1:09 am
What a clear illustration of the extent to which science has been blinded by the UN and Governments funded CO2 mantra. I wonder if scientists who have entered the fields of ‘climate change’ in the last 10 – 20 years are actually still capable of critical appreciation of true science and the extent to which you must look to explore all possible causes and explanations.
CO2 and ‘global warming’ is not about climate it is about deeply infiltrated and, typically, well-concealed marxist politics. It is all about creating ‘obedience’ to a doctrine by fabricating a climate of fear about climate. ...

Jim Steele, greenhouse effect denier, gets up to his tricks in the Arctic

Anthony Watts is on a roll wheeling out one greenhouse effect denier after another. Yesterday it was Dr Lu who reckons that CO2 isn't working anymore. Now it's Jim Steele (archived here).

This article is quite long. It's not a bad example of denialism in action - from the WUWT article itself through to the idiotic comments that followed it. As well as relying on the very same scientific papers (and scientists) he scoffs at, Jim misrepresents them. Jim uses cherry picking mixed with disinformation. If Anthony Watts really wanted to be taken seriously, he wouldn't be promoting greenhouse effect deniers like Jim Steele. But Anthony doesn't want to be taken seriously, except as a true blue disinformer and fake sceptic. His first priority is to impress all his science-rejecting fans who willingly send him their hard-earned cash, and patrons like the Heartland Institute.

Jim Steele fails Logic 101

I don't know if Jim is lacking in the intellect department or if he's just pretending to be dumb, but he doesn't start off his article too well. He begins by attacking an article at SkepticalScience.com, without linking to it of course. He wrote:

At the website deceptively named SkepticalScience, they list “Climate Changed Before” as the skeptics’ #1 “mythical” argument. But the website’s authors have fabricated a straw man argument writing, “The ‘climate changed naturally in the past’ argument is a logical fallacy known as non sequitur, in which the conclusion doesn’t follow from the arguments.  It’s equivalent to seeing a dead body with a knife sticking out the back, then arguing the death must be natural because people died naturally in the past. It fails to even consider the available evidence.” 

Jim doesn't say what he finds to be the strawman in that passage that he quotes. I can't see one. Perhaps a reader can explain it. All I see is an explanation of why the notion that climates having changed in the past from other causes is no reason to reject the notion that it's human activities that are causing the current climate change. Pretty straightforward, I'd have thought.

Jim goes on and writes:

Then after wading through theoretical gish-gallop, the Skeptical Science author concludes their argument with a non-sequitur of their own-“Past climate change actually provides evidence that humans can affect climate now.”

Jim thinks the SkepticalScience article is a gish-gallop. Jim doesn't know what a gish gallop is. He is also mixing up two articles. SkepticalScience.com has two responses to the denier illogic: "climate changed naturally in the past [therefore it must be changing naturally in the present]". There is a short basic version and a longer intermediate version. Jim has taken the last sentence of the intermediate version out of context and wrongly labelled it a non-sequitur. (Jim isn't an expert in climate and evidence shows that neither is he competent at logic.) The statement is factual, accurate and stands on its own in any case. Past climate change does indeed provide evidence that humans can affect climate now.

Click "read more" if you want to read lots more nonsense from Jim Steele.

Living Dangerously: Jim Steele denies Texas warming

Jim Steele seems to be addicted to making up stuff.  Today he wrote a long article for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT, picking on Katharine Hayhoe and Don Cheadle, who featured in the Years of Living Dangerously (which I haven't seen). Jim wrote a long article short on facts and long on his normal rejection of science (archived here).  At one stage he wrote:

The truth is there has been no climate warming in Texas. 

To support his claim he put up a chart that he described as "Plainview TX temperature trends found online from the US Historical Climate Network".  I don't know why he stopped at 2012.  Anyway, I've got a better chart if you want to know about Texas temperatures.  It's a statewide chart, not just one small town in the north of the state.  The data is from NOAA. I converted it from Fahrenheit to Celsius and plotted it as an anomaly from the twentieth century mean.

Data Source: NOAA

You can see how much hotter it's been getting, consistently - in Texas. It's been hotter for longer for any time in the record going back to the late 1800s. Much hotter, with 2012 being nearly two degrees Celsius above the twentieth century average.

I can't be bothered going through the rest of Jim's diatribe.  He does end up blaming Joe Romm for whatever Katherine Hayhoe said.  Jim's a climate science denier.  He's written a book about his denial. It pays to check every word he writes.  What I suggest for anyone who's come looking to find out more about Jim Steele, you can type his name into the search box above.  This is by no means the first time he's lashed out at scientists or misrepresented data.

You can read about how Jim doubled down when I pointed out he'd got his seas wrong and his seasons wrong.  [Update: You can see Jim continues to "double down" in the comments below. Not once has he conceded that the NOAA data shows warming or that the paper he himself cited states that Texas has warmed (which  it does).  Not only does the paper state that Texas has warmed, it attributes some of this warming to human factors! Sou 2:10 pm AEST Thurs 17 April 2014]

Better yet, have a look at the Years of Living Dangerously and tell us what you think of it.

Anthony Watts is confused about ENSO.

Update - see below for how it's sometimes me who makes a fool of myself!


Anthony Watts is very confused about ENSO. He's got a little competition going at the moment (archived here, latest update here).  This is what he's written:

When/if a large or super El Niño forms, you know the usual suspects will try to link it to global warming/climate change. It is as certain as the sun rising in the morning.

Anthony doesn't say who the usual suspects are. Nor does he say how they will try to link an El Niño to global warming/climate change.  He does give a hint about the latter though, writing:

So, readers are invited to create statements/headlines that they think are likely to appear in the media, and when we get a hit on one of those, we’ll refer back to this WUWT article and point out that it was expected, but there’s just no linkage.

My contribution is:

Trenberth told us that heat hiding in the ocean would jump out and burn us in the future, and he was right!

Happy headlining!

This article is long - to parse Anthony's confused comments, see Bob Tisdale's fudged chart and find out what WUWT-ers think about ENSO, click here to read on.

Jim Steele, science denier, gets lost in Florida's mangroves

Jim Steele got lost in the Arctic a few months ago, confusing the Chukchi Sea and the Bering Sea.  He also couldn't tell the difference between seasons and demonstrated that he can't read a simple chart.

So it won't be a surprise to anyone that he got lost in Florida and finds statistical analysis "bewildering".

Today at WUWT (archived here), in another attempt to sell his book about how all the scientists in the world have got it wrong, Jim has taken to a study of mangroves along the Florida coast.

The PNAS paper (open access for now) is by Kyle C. Cavanaugh and co and what they found was that mangroves are moving up the Florida coastline.  The scientists looked at Landsat images over a thirty year period, writing:

We measured mangrove area along the east coast of Florida (25°N to 30°N) each summer from 1984 to 2011 by using 30-m resolution multispectral Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper satellite imagery. All three species of mangroves found in Florida (A. germinans, L. racemosa, and R. mangle) were grouped together in our analysis.

Mangroves are marching north

What the scientists found was the mangroves are expanding northwards as the number of days below minus 4 degrees Celsius lessens. In the abstract they write:

This expansion is associated with a reduction in the frequency of “extreme” cold events (days colder than −4 °C), but uncorrelated with changes in mean annual temperature, mean annual precipitation, and land use. Our analyses provide evidence for a threshold response, with declining frequency of severe cold winter events allowing for poleward expansion of mangroves. Future warming may result in increases in mangrove cover beyond current latitudinal limits of mangrove forests, thereby altering the structure and function of these important coastal ecosystems.

Maybe Jim thinks he has to call all the scientists wrong in order to get anyone to buy his science denial book.Whatever the reason, he makes a habit of picking out papers to try to prove them wrong.

Jim Steele is bewildered by simple statistics

To show his credentials to the scientific illiterati at WUWT, he said the authors "use a bewildering array of statistics".  My reading of the paper is that the statistics are straightforward and not at all bewildering, even to me - and my statistics days are in the dim distant past.  They used linear regression and correlation analysis, and it doesn't look bewildering at all. It tells us a lot about Jim's scientific expertise that he thinks otherwise.

Where are the Indian River Lagoon mangrove re-establishement sites?

Jim's main argument, however, was that he knew "people" who took part in shoreline restoration projects in the region of Indian River Lagoon.  Jim provided a link.  The Indian River Lagoon covers a large-ish spread along the Florida coast from around 27N to 29N, covering around 245 km from beginning to end by my reckoning.  What Jim is arguing is that it's not the number of minus four degree days that is causing the mangroves to expand north, it's a mangrove planting project.

Well I decided to see if there was anything to Jim's claim.  I found a 2008 paper that reports on the project. It reported numbers of plantings, the sites and various other matters.  I was struck by a couple of things, given Jim's claim that the increase in mangroves was because of revegetation projects.

First of all, the paper reports around 760 survived trees from all 57 sites at the time of the report (the survival rate is reported at 10% +/-2%).  There were 57 sites scattered along the lagoon spanning about 165 km along the coast. The top-most planting site was at around 28 15'N.  That should indicate the scale of the planting compared to the entire Florida coastline.  I've also posted a map below.

Now let's go back to what the researchers found.  They wrote:

The historical northern limit of mangroves in eastern North America, believed to be set by cold temperatures, is located near 30°N, just north of St. Augustine, FL (22).

And they found that:

The area of mangrove forests increased dramatically between 1984 and 2011 near the northern range limit of mangroves in Florida (Fig. 1). Over this time period, the spatial extent of mangroves between 29° and 29.75°N doubled.

Here is a map showing the above, plus the stretch of coastline along which the Indian River Lagoon revegetation sites were scattered.  The top yellow arrow marks the stretch of coastline where the scientists found a doubling in mangrove area.  The bottom yellow arrow marks the stretch  of coast along which the people Jim knew planted mangroves.

As the map shows, the area that the study referred to in regard to expansion to the north is not the same as the areas being revegetated.  The mangrove planting sites are quite a way south of there.  Once again, Jim Steele has shown his incompetence at best and the lengths to which he will go to try to discredit science and scientists.

Addendum

Here's a chart that also shows clearly how Jim Steele got it wrong. I've roughly marked the boundaries of the mangrove planting sites along the Indian River Lagoon:

Fig. 2. A 28-y time series of mangrove area separated into 0.25° latitudinal bands. Mangrove area is displayed relative to the first year in the time series (1984). (Right) A value of 1 indicates no change (100% of 1984 area), 0 indicates total loss of mangroves, and 2 indicates a doubling of mangrove area. Data were calculated from Landsat imagery collected each year between April and July. White areas indicate that no cloud-free Landsat data were available.

Source: Cavanaugh13

Added by Sou 11:55 pm 2 January 2014  (AEDST)


Jim has a habit of denying climate science, and of attacking scientists.  That's why I believe it's important to show up his incompetence and his shallow efforts at denial.

If he stuck to his area of expertise, which as I understand it is habitat restoration, he could do a lot of good.  Instead he goes for doing bad and all because he doesn't "believe in" climate science.


Kyle C. Cavanaugh, James R. Kellner, Alexander J. Forde, Daniel S. Gruner, John D. Parker, Wilfrid Rodriguez, and Ilka C. Feller (2013), Poleward expansion of mangroves is a threshold response to decreased frequency of extreme cold events, PNAS, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1315800111

Lisa K. Johnson and Laura W. Herren (October 2008), Re-establishment of Fringing Mangrove Habitat in the Indian River Lagoon, Shoreline Restoration Project 2007-2008 Final Report, Florida Department of Environmental Protection (click here for report)

From the WUWT comments

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale takes the opportunity to name-link back to his own blog in the hope of selling his own claptrap and says:

January 1, 2014 at 8:18 am
Thanks, Jim, for another enlightening article.
Regards

Bill H is a typical fake sceptic who doesn't check facts and says:

January 1, 2014 at 8:28 am
The state plants a whole bunch of man groves and along comes a scientist, who ignores mans influence and then touts the increase as evidence of CAGW…. ?? And those doing the study couldn’t figure this one out?

John does a good imitation of a parrot who's lived at WUWT long enough to learn some words and says:

January 1, 2014 at 8:45 am
I am not a geologist but fancy this sort of stuff… The geologic record proves this planet warms and cools in natural cycles – something these climate change nuts ignore. So ridiculous.

pat is a good little parrot, too, and has even learnt the big bewildering word "Smithsonian":

January 1, 2014 at 9:24 am
A fraud. A fraud by the Smithsonian.

Another WUWT-trained parrot,  Steve Keohane says:

January 1, 2014 at 9:43 am
I feel a need for a special stupidity descriptor for this type of non-sense. Perhaps ‘G-WS’ for ‘Grant-Whore Stupid’. This is really getting to be too much.

R. de Haan says he's pigged out on WUWT:

January 1, 2014 at 9:00 am
One warmist crap strory after another. I’m really getting boared.

Proud Skeptic is a member of the Illiterati Society and says he can't understand why scientists want to find out stuff:

January 1, 2014 at 6:20 pm
I find myself wondering why Warmists are so insistent that all present ecosystems remain exactly as they are in the places they now exist. Whatever the reason the mangroves are moving, aren’t they a valid ecosystem?

Vendettas and denial on WUWT

Not much happening on WUWT in the past couple of days.  Here's a a rundown on a couple of articles.

Vendetta still being waged

Jim Steele, who I've written about before here and here, continued his lone vendetta against a biologist who he has a grudge against, using WUWT to do it (and to try to get someone to buy his book).  From those previous articles he has no credibility left and I'll not bother with him any further.

Global warming is real

justhefactswuwt and/or werner brozek put up a noisy monthly chart of RSS global temperatures starting at 1997 and says, look, no warming for 200 months.  Then proceeds to work out for how long there has been "no warming" by plotting monthly charts of different data sets - saying 23 years, 18 years etc.  Here's a long term chart from GISTemp, which makes their efforts to deny global warming look silly:

Data source: NASA

Fake sceptics go to an awful lot of trouble in their attempts to disprove global warming.  If only they put as much effort into figuring out how to address the problem.

Here is the RSS chart. It registered a very high anomaly for 1998, the year of the super El Niño.  What will happen the next time we get a super El Niño?

Data Source: RSS

Here is a decadal chart of RSS temperature anomalies.  The first and last decade are, of course, incomplete.

Data Source: RSS

What do you think?  Climate trends are much easier to see in years than in months, because months clog up the data with seasonal fluctuations and noise. Longer term climate trends are even easier to see in decades, because years have noise from year to year natural fluctuations, like ENSO.

Bear in mind, too, that RSS doesn't monitor temperatures right to the top of the poles.  It only goes as high as 82.5 degrees North and South.  So it misses out on some of the Arctic amplification.  Here is GISTemp showing also the temperature 64 degrees and north (the Arctic).

Data source: NASA

From the WUWT comments, lsvalgaard says:

August 25, 2013 at 10:06 am  RSS Flat For 200 Months (Now Includes July Data)
Thus no global cooling…

Jim Steele, climate change and the sixth major extinction event

Jim Steele writes on WUWT that he thinks the scenario of "catastrophic climate change" is false (my bold):

Why have so few scientists celebrated the good science like Jeremy Thomas’ when it empowers us with the critical understanding that allows us to locally build a more resilient environment? Why instead have thousands of scientists uncritically pushed false scenarios of catastrophic climate change? Although some skeptics have suggested a nefarious scientific conspiracy, I believe it demonstrates the ease with which the human mind embraces illusions. 

Jim Steele was ostensibly writing about the work of Jeremy Thomas, who he much admires, and how he figured out what was the cause for the extinction of a butterfly in Britain (which has subsequently been reintroduced by conservationists from populations in Europe).  I say "ostensibly", because Jim Steele used what would otherwise have been a fascinating story as a springboard for a rant against climate science and against a biologist, Professor Camille Parmesan, against whom he seems to hold a particular grudge (unexplained).

I looked up Jeremy Thomas and his work.  He's an entomologist, the Professor of Ecology and Professorial Fellow of New College working in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University.  He has published quite a few papers.  Clearly a top scientist in his field and held in high regard.

(This is kind of long - so if you're on the blog home page and want to read more, click here.)

Jim Steele, another WUWT science denier, gets it wrong about Kivalina

See update below


Jim Steele is a so-called environmentalist who rejects climate science and fails geography.  Some environmentalist!  He's another born again denier whose articles have started to appear more often on Anthony Watts' anti-science blog.

Today on WUWT he has a go at the people of Kivalina.  Many readers may be familiar with this settlement because they took on Exxon a few years ago.  They didn't succeed in the courts.  The people of Kivalina will need to relocate in the near future as their settlement will soon be uninhabitable.

Kivalina is a tiny settlement situated on a barrier reef on the Chukchi Sea.  It's at the mouth of the Kivalina River.  Because the ice is melting sooner in spring and forming later in autumn, the settlement is more vulnerable to sea surges and storms than in the past, when ice lasted longer and protected it.  It is reported that the barrier reef is rapidly eroding from these storm surges plus, presumably, rising sea levels.

Jim Steele fails geography plus...

Jim Steele cites greater winter sea ice in the Bering Sea as evidence that the lack of ice is causing erosion at Kivalina. He writes (my bold italics):

Finally it is hard to understand Sackur’s claim, “No longer does thick ice protect their shoreline.” In 2012 the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported “ice extent in the Bering Sea was much greater than average, reaching the second-highest levels for January in the satellite record.” NASA’s Earth Observatory wrote, “For most of the winter of 2011–2012, the Bering Sea has been choking with sea ice… NSIDC data indicate that ice extent in the Bering Sea for most of this winter has been between 20 to 30 percent above the 1979 to 2000 average. February 2012 had the highest ice extent for the area since satellite records started.” And in 2013 Bering Sea ice was again above normal as seen in National Snow and Ice Data Center picture.

Two points. Firstly, it's not the winter ice that's the problem, it's the fact the ice is melting sooner and forming later than it used to.  Secondly, Kivalina is on the Chukchi Sea, not the Bering.  This chart from Cryosphere Today shows how the sea ice has been declining over the years.  Note particularly the anomalies in recent years - from the late nineties in particular.

Source: Cryosphere Today

Here are two extracts from a report by the US Army Corps of Engineers . The file properties indicate it is from March 2009.  The pdf file includes outlines of the past coastline and short term projections.  (My bold italics in the following):

Kivalina has not historically seen significant erosion. The Kivalina spit has seen cyclic accretion, with modest accretion on the Chukchi Sea side more prevalent during the 30-year period of 1970 to 2000. The higher energy storms that could result in significant erosion occur during the winter months when the Chukchi Sea is frozen. This has resulted in natural erosion protection in the past. However, with global climate change the period of open water is increasing and the Chukchi Sea is less likely to be frozen when damaging winter storms occur. Winter storms occurring in October and November of 2004 and 2005 have resulted in significant erosion that is now threatening both the school and the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) tank farm. This erosion has resulted in the loss of some teacher housing and the school and community washateria drain fields....

What is the expected time line for a complete failure of the usable land? 
The winter storms of 2004 and 2005 eroded 70 to 80 feet of uplands behind the school. The bank line is now within 25 feet of the main school structure. Erosion in the vicinity of the AVEC tank farm is similar, with only 5 feet of uplands remaining between the nearest tanks and the bank line. Without the construction of emergency erosion control structures, the school and tank farm will begin to fail within the next year if erosion continues at the same rate as it has during recent months,. Even if erosion slows, these critical structures are in imminent danger and are unlikely to survive for any extended period of time. Due to the physical lack of open land in the Kivalina community, these structures can not be relocated, and their failure would render the community uninhabitable. 

You sometimes read fake outrage on WUWT, from deniers who try to argue that the world's poor need to burn fossil fuels or they'll get poorer.  But when it comes to vulnerable people who's lives are being turned upside down by climate change, the deniers show their true colours.

Most of the WUWT comments are lashing out at the BBC, because there was an article on the BBC about Kivalina.  There was one comment by a person outraged that anyone would consider looking out for the interests of indigenous peoples. Heck, what decent plundering victor would give a toss for displaced persons.

PS So far, not a single fake sceptic at WUWT has commented on the fact that Jim Steele was wrong and that Kivalina isn't on the Bering Sea!  Nor that it's the fact the ice season is shorter that's causing problems, not mid-winter ice.

UPDATE: 4 August 2013 

Jim Steele has visited us and claimed that (my bold italics):

However the Bering Sea extent is a good climate indicator and correlates well with sea ice in the Chukchi.

Let's check that out, shall we?  Here is an animated gif showing the anomalies for the Bering Sea and the Chukchi Sea over the last few decades.  Note particularly the recent years I've circled:

Source: The Cryosphere Today - Chukchi and Bering

Looks like Jim's not just wrong but he's spectacularly wrong.  (Does anyone think it's necessary to do a correlation analysis to see just how wrong Jim is?)

Remember, Jim Steele is a man who thinks heat waves disprove global warming!  So is it any surprise that he maintains such wildly different patterns are a good correlation?