Desperate deniers Part 9: Patrick J Michael's pathetic, unconvincing WSJ report could have come from WUWT

Pat Michaels has written an article for his employer, the Cato Institute and Rupert Murdoch dutifully published it in the Wall St Journal. I was given a copy and thought you might like to see what he wrote. In my view he didn't earn his pay packet with this one. His article and arguments are pathetic. It's barely above the conspiratorial disinformation you read at WUWT.

Pat does have a bigger vocabulary and a better grasp of the English language than does Anthony Watts. And he does agree the world is warming. Maybe. But it's nothing to worry about.  His article must still be a big disappointment. The arguments are weak, wrong, unoriginal and boring, especially for someone who claims to have some scientific expertise. I'd give him the sack if I was running the Cato Institute. Wouldn't you? :)

Don't forget, Pat's had several months to figure out how to deny the hottest year on record after the hottest year on record. It's not as if he had no warning. Plus he's got a sidekick to bounce ideas off or tell what to do. Yet he couldn't come up with anything but the sort of wishy-washy Gish gallop you'll read any day on any old third-rate denier blog. This is what he should have been preparing for over the past 12 months:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature 1880 to 2015. Data source: GISS NASA

Let me tell you some of what is in his article and you can tell me what you think of it.

Tim Ball tells fibs about past climates at Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog WUWT

Tim Ball is an uber conspiracy theorist and the author of the first chapter in the greenhouse gas denying book about slaying sky dragons. One might suspect that he pens articles for Anthony Watts so he (Tim) can build up a defense of insanity in his defamation lawsuits. He's quoted Hitler and Osama bin Laden to support his conspiracy nuttery. He thinks that Tom Wigley is angling to be the Leader of the World. He's nuts.

Nevertheless he has a nutter fan club in Anthony Watts and his conspiracy theorising acolytes.

The Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age

Today he's started an article with the following:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001 Report claimed that neither the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) nor the Little Ice Age (LIA) occurred. 

I didn't need to check to know that he telling fibs. To save you the trouble let me quote from the 2013 AR5 WG1 report from the IPCC. The medieval warm period is referred to in the IPCC report as the Medieval Climate Anomaly. The report doesn't just mention it 27 times, it states its duration, from 950 to 1250. The Little Ice Age is mentioned 43 times in the document, and its duration is given from 1450 to 1850. Therefore Tim is lying when he claims that the IPCC "claimed that neither the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) nor the Little Ice Age (LIA) occurred". Quelle surprise - not. Lying and deception is pretty well mandatory on denier blogs like WUWT. Below are some of the 70 instances:

Doubling down on doozy: Anthony Watts is now denying the Little Ice Age

Professor Michael Mann recently wrote a response to a denier (who'd accused him of fraud), and corrected him, saying that:

Mr. Sauer begins by promoting the falsehood that “temperatures exceeded what we have today at a time (the Medieval period) when today’s industrialization did not exist”. That is so shopworn a myth that it ranks among the top climate change denier talking points (see the response to this myth by the scientist-run website Skeptical Science). The scientific consensus today is that, while some regions of the globe were relatively warm during the Medieval era, the warmth was not nearly as widespread as today. The overall warmth of the globe and northern hemisphere today is substantially greater than during Medieval time. Mr. Sauer might also want to take note that the year 2015 is off to the warmest start ever, 2014 was the warmest full year on record, and took place during the warmest decade on record.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how Anthony Watts used a wonky chart of temperatures on the summit of the ice sheet in central Greenland, arguing that it "proved" that Professor Mann and all the world's paleoclimatologists were wrong and he, science denying conspiracy theorist was right.

In support of his wrong claim that it was globally hotter in medieval times than it is today, Anthony tried to claim:

• the temperature of the ice sheet in Central Greenland in 1855 was a good proxy for global surface temperature of 2015. 
• if it was widely cold more than 11,500 years ago (the Younger Dryas), then it must have got hotter globally 1,000 years ago.

You say "huh? where's the logic in that?" and I say "there's none". Well, Anthony's doubled down, shifting his focus to a mountainous region in Spain (archived here).

Is it Parody or Dunning Kruger by Mike Jonas at WUWT?

Mike Jonas recently wrote a four part series of articles for Anthony Watts denier blog WUWT. I don't think it's meant as a parody of deniers, but that's how it reads. It's like a caricature of classic denialism. I'm almost surprised Anthony Watts decided to host it - it was that bad. Mike brought up all the denial oldies, which he might as well have got from the list of most used climate myths at SkepticalScience.com:- medieval warm period (myth 27), little ice age (myth 47), CO2 lags temperature (myth 12), climate models and equilibrium climate sensitivity. If Mike was trying to demonstrate that Dunning and Kruger were right, then he did a great job of it. His series was in four parts:

1. His first article (archived here) was a lot of arithmetic around climate sensitivity and attribution, which I won't bother with. 
2. It wasn't CO2 before therefore... - in his second in the series (archived here) he resurrected the ancient denier meme about the medieval warm period (or medieval climate anomaly) and the little ice age. This calls on the logical fallacy that if CO2 wasn't the cause of warming in the past then it can't be causing warming now. Which is a non sequitur (it doesn't follow).
3. CO2 doesn't lag temperature as much as deniers think - the third article (archived here) was the denier meme "CO2 lags temperature".
4. Equilibrium climate sensitivity - in his fourth article (archived here), Mike sets out to demonstrate how little he knows about ECS, climate models and climate science in general.

Back to normal at WUWT: Dog whistles and big announcements

After a short interlude of tedious boring, WUWT is back to normal. I last wrote about Anthony Watts and his blog: "Is this a lull before his next "big announcement" or dogwhistle to his lynch mob?" Turns out it was both.

Anthony Watts is shocked by clean air and becomes a Little Ice Age Bouncer

Some people get shocked by the strangest things.  Anthony Watts is shocked to find out what most people have known for a very long time.  He's just found out that human-caused aerosols can cause global dimming.

I don't know what rock Anthony's been hiding under all this time.  (Despite his recent misplaced outrage, he can't have read any of the previous IPCC reports.) It's not as if he doesn't boast that his blog is "...the world's most viewed climate website" - which is, of course, wrong.  WUWT may be the world's most viewed anti-science website, but it would be most inaccurate to describe WUWT as a "climate" website.  At best it's a disinformation resource for hard line climate science deniers and extremist right wing ideologues.

Back to the smog.  There was a paper presented by O'Dowd et al at a recent AIP international conference. The paper was called: Cleaner air: Brightening the pollution perspective?  Here is the abstract (my paras):

Clean-air policies in developing countries have resulted in reduced levels of anthropogenic atmospheric aerosol pollution. Reductions in aerosol pollution is thought to result in a reduction in haze and cloud layers, leading to an increase in the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface, and ultimately, an increase in surface temperatures.

There have been many studies illustrating coherent relationships between surface solar radiation and temperature however, a direct link between aerosol emissions, concentrations, and surface radiation has not been demonstrated to date.

Here, we illustrate a coherence between the trends of reducing anthropogenic aerosol emissions and concentrations, at the interface between the North-East Atlantic and western-Europe, leading to a staggering increase in surface solar radiation of the order of ∼20% over the last decade.

A couple of things are of interest.  Firstly, the paper seems to have put a number on the amount by which reduction in aerosols has contributed to an increase in surface solar radiation.  Secondly they appear to be defining an area to which the number applies: the "interface" between the North-East Atlantic and western-Europe.  I'm not sure what they mean by that exactly.  Probably they are referring to an area of land and ocean and maybe have a map in the paper itself, or the presentation.  They probably indicate a time period in the paper, too.  Could be since the 1960s, which is when most developed nations started to introduce clean air regulations.

The comments are weird.

Anthony Watts rejects the Greenhouse Effect and becomes a Little Ice Age Bouncer

Anthony Watts is now stepping away from his acceptance of the greenhouse effect.  See his inline response to this comment:

Lawrence Todd says:

August 19, 2013 at 1:02 pm  If i get this right, industrial pollution masked the natural warming from the Little Ice Age and the clean air initiatives caused the earth temperatures to rebound to normal levels.

REPLY: Bingo. – Anthony

There are more "it's magic" Little Ice Age Bouncers in among the comments, like RobRoy, who says:

August 19, 2013 at 1:13 pm That natural warming trend seen in the temp records as recovery from the LIA is so often dis-regarded. How many times do warmist types crow over record high temps. Or a record in record high temps. Record high temps would be expected with even with ZERO CO2 effects, through the oft forgotten natural warming trend we have enjoyed since the LIA.

WUWT-ers and aerosols

Lots of WUWT commenters have never heard of the fact that aerosols reflect incoming solar radiation.  You've got to wonder at their ignorance, particular that displayed by the WUWT regulars.  For example Peter Miller says:

August 19, 2013 at 1:23 pm  Seems to make a lot of sense, so the Global Warming Industry will do their very best to ensure this theory is stillborn. C’mon trolls, do your best..

Some of them have read about this before but don't accept the idea. Mike Jonas says:

August 19, 2013 at 1:42 pm Count me out. This smells just like the claims that the ~1940-70 cooling was caused by (man-made, unmeasured) aerosols. This hypothesis only runs marginally OK from ~1940 onwards. It has no explanation for the ~1910-40 warming, or for the cooling before that. To me, it’s a non-starter.

Cleaner air is down to technology, not regulation?

One person has decided that regulations had nothing to do with cleaning up air pollution.  They put it all down to technology.  Chip says:

August 19, 2013 at 4:32 pm I would disagree with one point. The air didn’t get cleaner because of laws, but because technology and wealth enabled us not to pollute.

Anthony Watts is unfamiliar with scientific conferences

Anthony Watts understands very little about scientific research.  He mistakes the conference paper for a peer-reviewed journal article, responding to a query from John W, who asks:

August 19, 2013 at 1:51 pm  Is this a peer review paper….? I could not tell from the link.

REPLY: yes, it is in the American Institute of Physics (AIP) website – Anthony

A few more choice comments from WUWT

A few more comments - chosen for different various reasons, mostly amusement:

Other_Andy asks about UHI:

August 19, 2013 at 2:15 pm  Also wondering, as many stations are in or near cities\ airports, how this will affect UHI for weather stations.

ntesdorf's brain can't conceive that more than one thing affects climate:

August 19, 2013 at 3:32 pm  This theory is far more convincing than the CAGW due to CO2 and other ‘greenhouse’ gases. However, first, I would like to check some temperature records that have not been surgically renovated to support the CAGW cause..

highflight56433 reckons scientists should not be the ones reviewing science (he probably thinks it should be judged by the scientific illiterati):

August 19, 2013 at 8:43 pm …peer review? Like having 12 bank robbers as jurors to pass judgment over a bank robbery case.

In fact that thread is so chock-full of denier weirdness I'm having a hard time picking out the most choice comments.

Colin O'Dowd, Darius Ceburnis, Aditya Vaishya, S. Gerard Jennings, and Eoin Moran (2013) Cleaner air: Brightening the pollution perspective? AIP Conf. Proc. 1527, pp. 579-582; doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4803337

1934 and other treasured legends of climate science deniers

Climate science deniers have a few sacred legends that they are reluctant to relinquish.  They include the MWP - better known as the Medieval Warm Anomaly or Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the dust bowl years in the USA.

Science deniers will rarely admit to the fact that evidence for the Medieval Warm Anomaly and the Little Ice Age relies a lot more on paleoclimatology than on pretty paintings or footnotes to historical documents.

The Medieval Warm Anomaly

As more data is collected and analysed it has become apparent that although the earth as a whole was most likely warm-ish, particularly in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, during medieval times, it was not the warmest period of the Holocene by a long shot.  When it was warm in one place it was cooler in other parts of the world.

Science deniers want to hang onto a myth that it was very warm everywhere.  As far as I can tell, this is because they want to argue "it wasn't CO2 in the past therefore it can't be CO2 now".  Readers here will immediately see the fallacy in this argument.  It's of the type: My car broke down but it wasn't because I ran out of petrol in the past so it can't be because I ran out of petrol now, even though the fuel gauge shows "empty"!  I think this is known as a Non-Sequitur. Maybe someone who is better versed in logic will agree or correct me here.

Here are a couple of charts of temperature reconstructions, which span the medieval period.  The first on is from Mann et al (2008) which shows the warmer period in the Northern Hemisphere during Medieval times.  It wasn't as warm as now, however.

Figure 3. Composite NH temperature reconstructions & published NH reconstructions from Mann ME et al (2008) Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 36, pp. 13252-13257, September 9, 2008. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105

Update: At the request of Phil Clarke in the comments, here is a chart from Mann et al 2009, showing the likely global surface temperature anomalies from the 1961-1990 mean during the medieval warm anomaly. You can see where it was warm and where it was cold.  However, as urged further down in the section on the Little Ice Age, I recommend you read the paper before trying to interpret the chart.

Source: Mann et al (2009)

This next chart is from Marcott et al (2013), which is a temperature reconstruction of the entire Holocene.  The temperature anomalies for all the records are referenced to the 1961–1990 instrumental mean.  You can see the bump in the Medieval period.  However, from this chart it can be surmised that current temperatures are as high, or maybe already higher than even the Holocene Optimum and considerably higher than during the Medieval Period:

Source: Marcott et al (2013) A Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years
Science 8 March 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6124 pp. 1198-1201 DOI: 10.1126/science.1228026

This next chart is based on the PAGES-2K project as discussed recently on ClimateProgress.  It doesn't show a clear Medieval "bump" in global temperature.  What it does demonstrate is that it is highly likely that the world is now considerably warmer than it was in medieval times:

Green dots show the 30-year average of the new PAGES 2k reconstruction. The red curve shows the global mean temperature, according HadCRUT4 data from 1850 onwards. In blue is the original hockey stick of Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1999 ) with its uncertainty range (light blue). Graph by Klaus Bitterman.
Source: ClimateProgress

You can read more about this work on realclimate.org.

1934 was a very hot year in the USA

Deniers from the USA are reluctant to accept that there are reasonably good instrumental records world-wide that can be used to determine global surface temperature anomalies in the 1930s.  They don't have to rely upon the many excellent photographs by Dorothea Lange or the memories of their grandparents.

Here is a chart of global surface temperature anomalies (GISTemp and HadCRUT4) showing the anomaly at 1934.  As always, click for larger version.

Data Sources: NASA and UK Met Office Hadley Centre

In 1934, the global surface temperature anomaly was below the 1951 to 1980 mean as shown in the chart above.

In this next chart you can see that yes, it was hot in the USA though not as hot as last year.

Data Source: NOAA

1934 was not such a hot year in Australia:

Data Source: BoM

And in Central England it was hot in 1934, but it's been hotter.  And it wasn't as hot as it has been lately:

Data Source: HadCET

The Little Ice Age

The reason science deniers promote the Little Ice Age is not that it shows that the climate was warm in the past :) No, it's because they argue that we are still "coming out of it".  In other words, they will try to argue that global temperatures are like a bouncing ball.  It does not require any 'forcing' to change.  What they argue is that global surface temperatures bounce up and down for no reason at all.  When temperatures drop they will bounce up again.  I've not yet seen anyone say for just quite how high or for how long the science illiterati expect it to keep on this upward bounce.

The "low" of the Little Ice Age can be seen in the Marcott chart above.  There is a paper by Mann et al (2009) in Science, which discusses the Little Ice Age (and the Medieval Warm Anomaly).  Here is a graphic from that paper showing the anomalies in the Little Ice Age compared to the 1961-1990 mean global surface temperatures.

Source: Mann et al (2009)

I'd urge you to read the paper before attempting to interpret the above chart.  I provide it to illustrate how scientists approach the science.  To show that scientists these days do not have to rely upon paintings by Brueghel to find out if the world was hotter or colder in the past.

Winterlandscape with skaters and bird trap Credit: Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Climate scientists explore reasons for changes in climate.  They don't entertain hypotheses as simple as "temperature is a bouncing ball".  Rather they investigate what may have changed in regard to external forcings and/or internal variations that resulted in fluctuations in global surface temperature, precipitation patterns and other climatic features.

Fake skeptics dismiss the science out of hand.  They mock science and scientists.  For some of them it's because they value ignorance and despise knowledge.  For some of them it's just that they are unable to accept the fact that humans are altering the climate in a way that, on balance, is bringing great hardship and that there is worse to come.  Some are crank conspiracy theorists and distrust any source that they view as being connected to "authority".  Others have a vested interest in stopping the world from acting to limit the harm we are doing.  They are the ones who could be classed as amoral, sociopathic or immoral.  They prey upon and feed off the ignorance and fear of the 8% Dismissives.

Anthony Watts claims he's won the Battle of the Brains ...ha ha ha

Anthony thinks he's clever, cleverer even than Dr Joe Romm

This quote from Anthony Watts (of WUWT) is funny, though once again it's not tagged as "humour".  Anthony decides he is cleverer than 'alarmists', in fact he even thinks he's smarter than Joe Romm and writes:

From the University of Alberta, this news release is making the rounds, but what many of the alarmists don’t get (Joe Romm for example) is that these plants had to have a warm environment to grow in first, then they were covered by ice, emerging again after the LIA ended. Many reports are only looking at the current emergence in a warmer period as if it is unique. – Anthony

Anthony, I believe you'll find, should you ask him, that Dr Romm knows that the bryophyte was not frozen in ice before it was frozen.  I wouldn't mind betting that there might even be one or two of Anthony's Dismissives who would twig to that.

Clever little Anthony is correct when he writes that the bryophytes emerged after the end of the Little Ice Age ended.  They emerged about 160 years after it ended.

It took more than the ending of the little ice age for these mosses to emerge.  It took human activity to heat up the world and cause a widespread and sharply accelerating ice retreat across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago according to the abstract:

Across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, widespread ice retreat during the 20th century has sharply accelerated since 2004. In Sverdrup Pass, central Ellesmere Island, rapid glacier retreat is exposing intact plant communities whose radiocarbon dates demonstrate entombment during the Little Ice Age (1550–1850 AD)....

What makes this warming unique

As for this warmer period being unique - does anyone think Anthony would be willing to admit its unique features?  Here are some unique features of this warmer period:

• It's the first time ever since Homo sapiens evolved that carbon dioxide has been this high;
• It's the first time in the history of earth in which there has been such a rapid period of warming as a result of human activity;
• This past hundred years marks the first period ever in the history of Earth that any species has had the power to choose whether to end the world as we know it or whether to limit the damage being wreaked upon life on earth.
• It's probably the first major mass extinction event since the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event, which took place about 66 million years ago.
• It would be the first time in the history of earth that a sentient species knowingly and willingly charged full pelt towards its own destruction, if Anthony Watts had his way.

Who's won the Battle of the Brains?

Hands up everyone who thinks Anthony Watts has it all over his scientific dog, Kenji and Dr Joe Romm when it comes to intellect.

Who has the best brain?

---

Now to the unfrozen bryophytes.  Here again is a link to the abstract in PNAS¹.  Below is a repost from The Conversation.

Frozen plants from the Little Ice Age regenerate spontaneously

By Akshat Rathi, The Conversation

Retreating glaciers are proving to be good news for plant scientists. Underneath one such glacier on Ellesmere Island in Canada, researchers have found plants they believe have regrown after being entombed in the glacier for more than 400 years, since a cold period called the Little Ice Age.

These plants are called bryophyte, a group that includes mosses. They are non-vascular, which means they do not have tissue that distributes resources throughout the plant and they do not reproduce through flowers and seeds. They use spores instead. But they also possess the ability to regrow from tiny fragments of themselves through a process called clonal growth. “This ability makes bryophytes pretty tough,” Andrew Fleming, a plant scientist who was not involved in the study, said.

The discovery reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was made by a team led by Catherine La Farge, an expert on bryophytes at the University of Alberta. Because the bryophytes found were not much different from similar variety found in the wild today, La Farge used radio carbon dating to confirm the age of their find.

The plants were trapped during a period known as the Little Ice Age, between the 16th and 19th centuries, when glaciers were growing in size. Arctic glaciers have recently been retreating and, since 2004, the rate of ice melt has increased dramatically. La Farge is hopeful that, in addition to these plants, the melting glaciers will release other interesting flora and fauna of that time.

When these bryophytes were found they were blackened, but sported a hint of green. 

See to the right of the rock in the middle. Catherine La Farge

This discovery does not displace the record of the oldest frozen plant to be regenerated. That belongs to a 32,000 year old specimen of Silene stenophylla, which was regrown by using tissue extracted from its frozen seeds.

These bryophytes are also not the hardiest plants we know. That title belongs to what are commonly known as resurrection plants, which are able to survive extreme dehydration. Some of these are commonly found in deserts, such as Selaginella lepidophylla found in Chihuahuan Desert on the border of Mexico and the US.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

¹. Catherine La Farge, Krista H. Williams, and John H. England (2013) Regeneration of Little Ice Age bryophytes emerging from a polar glacier with implications of totipotency in extreme environments, PNAS,  doi:10.1073/pnas.1304199110