Polar bears, sexism and climate science denial

Adult polar bear on the look-out.
Source: Ian Sterling

When a science paper about polar bears generates multiple articles on denier blogs you can see it has hit a nerve. This happened recently when a paper was published, with a classic illustration of how deniers reference each other to make out there is dispute about climate change impacts.

The paper was by Jeffrey A Harvey and a bunch of other leading scientists. When I say a bunch, there were fourteen scientists listed as authors, comprising rising stars and heavyweights in the climate science world.

It's fortunate I wasn't able to write about this paper when it was first released because it allowed time to see the numerous articles about it on denier blogs. However, before looking at deniers' various reactions, how about a quick summary of the paper. It's open access and is easy to read. It may help if you understand the analytical techniques used, though that's not essential.

WUWT Weirdos: Anthony Watts is hoping for email science

More desperation from deniers. Anthony Watts is very hopeful of getting his grubby paws on some more emails. The mindset of conspiracy theorists is mind-bogglingly stupid - and rancid.  The Peeping Toms among the denialati can't read or understand science, but they can spread snippets of emails all over the internet, provided someone tells them how to misinterpret them. Anthony starts off badly with a wrong headline:

Uh, oh, Mann’s MBH98 ‘hockeystick’ emails ruled fair game by judge

That wasn't remotely like the ruling of the appeals judge, according to the article Anthony linked to. He ruled that trial judges are to determine what documents the University of Arizona is to release to E&E Legal Institute. That organisation, E&E, seems to specialise in tying up the courts' to try to get access to scientists' email so that they can pore paw through them to try to prove that climate science is a hoax. Utter nutters.

Global surface warming continues without pause contrary to denier claims

There's another new paper out in Nature Climate Change today that discusses the recent trends on global surface temperature. It's by a rash of notable authors: John C. Fyfe, Gerald A. Meehl, Matthew H. England, Michael E. Mann, Benjamin D. Santer, Gregory M. Flato, Ed Hawkins, Nathan P. Gillett, Shang-Ping Xie, Yu Kosaka, Neil C. Swart. Anthony Watts heralded the paper (archived here), which is unusual because he normally scoffs at the findings of most of these authors. He referred to an article in the Examiner newspaper, which claims that this paper contradicted "another study last June" that stated that the "the hiatus was just an artifact that “vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.”

Well it doesn't contradict it. Needless to say Anthony and the Examiner was comparing apples and oranges.

The new paper, Fyfe16, discussed the reality of the slowdown. There was no "hiatus" or stopping of global warming, contrary to Anthony Watts' headline. The rise in global surface temperatures slowed down earlier this century compared to the rate of rise from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. As Jeff Tollefson of Nature wrote about the lead author: "Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory."

Global sea surface temperature and model projections, with Bob Tisdale

A couple of days ago at WUWT Bob Tisdale posted a whole heap of charts of sea surface temperature and compared them to CMIP5 models (archived here). He was doing his usual thing of complaining the climate models don't model weather. He wrote:

The climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not simulating climate as it exists on Earth. 

What he was really complaining about was that:

The multi-model mean of climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are not simulating climate as it exists on Earth. year to year variations in the weather as recorded by the older version of Reynold's OI v2 data, when looking at some sections of the ocean. 

Well, they aren't meant to do that. Climate models are for, you guessed it, climate not weather. The CMIP5 models are used for climate projections as well as learning more about particular aspects of climate. They are pretty good when it comes to global projections. Not as good (but not that bad) when looking at large areas like entire oceans. They are not intended to be used for weather forecasts. (Bob wants them to time ENSO events at the same time as they happen. That won't happen. There are other models specially developed for localised projections looking ahead a few months.)

There were some charts that were noticeable by their absence, so I figured I'd fill in the gaps in his article.

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).

A Doozy Denier Don from Anthony Watts: Medieval Warming was 11,500 years ago!

If anyone is under the wrong impression that Anthony Watts knows something about climate science, this will set you straight. He doesn't. You might have thought that he doesn't "believe" a lot of what he posts. It seems he does. Even the silliest nonsense. I used to think that he didn't read anything he posted, but it appears that he does. Only sometimes. But mostly not. And I was wondering the other day when we were going to get another article from him. He writes so rarely these days, leaving it all up to other people that I was beginning to think that he had quit altogether.

Today he's written a short piece (archived here). What he has called a Quote of the Week. It's not a bad quote I suppose, but there's no reason for a denier to pull it out as a quote of the week unless they are a hard core denier.

Now I've said before that when Anthony Watts decides to write something himself, he usually gets things dreadfully wrong. Today is no exception. He's done a doozy. And he's proven that he does read some of what he posts. He must have read some Denier Don Easterbrook. Or maybe this is a homage to Don.

Vicious attacks on Michael Mann: More smears from Mark Steyn and Anthony Watts' lynch mob

Today Anthony Watts is promoting Mark Steyn's last ditch attempt to discredit one of the world's leading climate scientists. Professor Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director, Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. Mark Steyn is an ex-smut columnist turned smut blogger, who arguably viciously defamed Professor Michael Mann (any others?) and is now being sued by Professor Mann. Anthony Watts is a blogger who promotes climate conspiracy theories of the ugly kind, and falsely accuses scientists of fraud and more.

Note: I've added an addendum about the contents of the book below. [Sou 7:52 pm 13 August 2015]

The Hockey Stick

In 1998 a paper by Professors Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes was published in Nature - hereafter called MBH98. The paper had the title: "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries".  In that paper was a figure that was to become a symbol of global warming, even getting a name - the hockey stick. Below is Figure 5b, the Hockey Stick, from MBH98:

Figure 5 Time reconstructions (solid lines) along with raw data (dashed lines). ... b, for Northern Hemisphere mean temperature (NH) in 8C. In both cases, the zero line corresponds to the 1902–80 calibration mean of the quantity. For b raw data are shown up to 1995 and positive and negative 2j uncertainty limits are shown by the light dotted lines surrounding the solid reconstruction, calculated as described in the Methods section. Source: MBH98.

Slowing ocean circulation prompts more Mann bashing from deniers at WUWT

Update: The Rahmstorf paper is getting more important by the minute. Now there are not one, not two, but three protest articles by Anthony Watts in the space of a few hours. You'll be surprised (probably not) that what Anthony thinks refutes the study actually lends support to it. See below.

Added by Sou 6:30 am 26 March 2015

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There is a new paper in Nature Climate Change by Stefan Rahmstorf and others, which is getting a lot of protest from deniers. This signifies that it is potentially an important paper. Stefan has written about it at realclimate.org.

What the research suggests is that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may have slowed a lot in the late twentieth century (particularly between 1970 and 1990). This is attributed to the influx of fresh cold water, primarily from melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

Double standards at WUWT. When is a witch hunt a witch hunt?

Anthony Watts' blog WUWT is known for inconsistency, its collation of pseudo-science claptrap from around the climate deniosphere, attacks on climate scientists and double standards. I've not posted much from there the past few days because I've been busy. Also because many of the recent WUWT articles are bemoaning a witch hunt, or what passes for a witch hunt at WUWT.

Are climate contrarians witches?

So what is the WUWT definition of a witch hunt? Is it the endless requests for personal emails by right wing lobby groups that Anthony Watts frequently hails on his blog? Is it court cases to push for release of personal emails from climate scientists, like of Michael Mann here and here and here and lots more. Is it harassment of James Hansen to list all his payments from speaking engagements - like here?

On opprobrium and disrespect

See below for an addendum.

A convoluted mixed up quote from the Curry files, as seen at WUWT:

In the climate wars, those that use pejorative names for people that they disagree with are the equivalents of racists and anti-semites, and deserve opprobrium and disrespect. 

Quit calling us racist and anti-semitic, Judith, or you'll get my opprobrium and disrespect.

On second thoughts, too late.

Deniers are milking the free speech thing for all they think it's worth. I gather from their mixed up, convoluted articles, that they want to be free to say whatever nonsense pops into their head without being criticised for it. But they don't want anyone else to say whatever pops into their head.

Or maybe they are lauding the right of anyone to say whatever pops into their head. It's hard to know. At WUWT there's a stack of quotes ranging from 'deniers should be hung, drawn and quartered' (or equivalent) to 'aren't people just simply too, too awful for saying deniers should be hung, drawn and quartered' (or equivalent). It's not been made clear whether WUWT is approving all the quotes or only some of them are permitted in their own quaint version of "free speech".

Oh, and various denialist lobby groups (well, one anyway - you can guess which one) want to be invited to talk on BBC radio programs. I expect the BBC could arrange a special radio segment for climate science deniers, along with the anti-vaxxers, the pro-smoking lobby and the flat earthers.

A few years ago I had the ABC radio on while driving, and there was a long segment devoted to ghost hunters. It wasn't April 1 and the interviewer treated the shysters with courtesy and respect.

So my advice to deniers is don't give up. Push for a fake sceptic segment on your local radio station. Failing that, there's always Prison Planet and Jesse Ventura and David Icke and Breitbart and WattsUpWithThat and ClimateEtc.

(If you haven't guessed, WUWT has slowed down a lot lately, which is fine by me. The average daily post count since New Years' Day is 2.5, a long way shy of the eight or nine a day in recent months. Anthony Watts himself has all but vanished from the scene. The other nutters are left to run the nuttery.)

Addendum

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't read it myself - archived here. IMO Judith Curry has behaved more badly than Anthony Watts at his worst. If you can stomach it, read the archive. Do a search for her weird comments.

She uses the murders of cartoonists in Paris as a pretense to take another shot at Michael Mann. She calls alleged defamation "satire", arguing people who defame are merely exercising their right to free speech. She doesn't have a clue about what is allowable as free speech. Would she think the same if someone wrote an article in the press claiming she committed scientific fraud? Multiple times? What if they added an aside about child molesters?

She labels as the equivalent of racist and anti-semitic, people who refer to climate science deniers as such and says it is "very sad" to see scientists behaving like that. She seems to be oblivious to the inconsistency. She refers to people who accept science as "warmists" and "alarmists" and then goes on to write: "When person A calls person B a ‘denier’ or any other pejorative word, in my opinion they deserve disrespect, in the context of the broader discussion in my piece."

Even hard-boiled deniers recognise the difference between murdering people, defamation and free speech, and have tried to point this out to Judith. Judith is so mired in her personal dislike of Michael Mann that she can no longer see straight. That plus her ideology looks to have taken such a hold that she has lost her grasp of science.

Perhaps the biggest visible sign of how low Judith has sunk is that she left this gross disgusting cartoon up on her blog for more than a day. I didn't comment on it earlier because I assumed she would remove it when she saw it. She didn't. Even her fans thought she would remove it.

It appears that nothing is too gross or vulgar for Judith these days. If you thought she'd lost it before, then see where she is now.

Finally, she is being caught out by her own words and has succumbed to criticism of inconsistency or whatever, and put back up her sky dragon slayer articles, which she'd removed some time ago.

Sou 14 January 2015

Anthony Watts pokes fun at ATI

Anthony Watts takes a shot at the“American Traditions Institute” now known as the “Energy & Environment Legal Institute”. Thing is, he doesn't even know it (or if he does he didn't tell his readers).

Today he posted an out of focus photo he took of the cheque Michael Mann gave to the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. The cheque was the damages awarded by the court when ATI/EELI tried to get his personal emails. You may remember the case (see Washington Post article). The judge saw it for the harassment it was and awarded damages of $250 dollars to Michael Mann. Dr Mann wasn't looking for a payout. All he wanted was justice and to prove a point that he will not tolerate the sort of vexatious law suits that disinformers bring from time to time, when they harass and try to intimidate research scientists.

Peter Sinclair of ClimateCrocks has the story and a much better photograph :D

Dr. Michael Mann displays his court awarded damages check, won against the climate and science denying, fossil fuel funded “think” tank,  “American Traditions Institute” aka, the “Energy & Environment Legal Institute”, after judges realized that actions against Dr. Mann were pure anti-science harassment and had no basis in fact.
From left to right, CSLDF Executive Director Lauren Kurtz, and Board members Charles Zeller, Scott Mandia, and Josh Wolfe. The picture was taken December 18, 2014, in San Francisco, at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting
Source: Peter Sinclair/ClimateCrocks

How the unethical Anthony Watts goes for the ethical Michael Mann

You might have noticed I've not written about the numerous Anthony Watts' articles from AGU14 yet. That's because there aren't any. From Day 1 the only "reports" from Anthony are two tweets - here and here, unless you count his latest Michael Mann bashing (archived here), which looks as if it was written before Anthony went to AGU.

At WUWT a day or so ago, the ethically-challenged Anthony Watts thought it's "hilarious" that Professor Mann should give a talk about professional ethics. Anthony doesn't have an ethical bone in his body when it comes to climate discourse. I doubt he understands the meaning of the word "ethics".

Yesterday, Michael Mann and Kent Peacock gave an invited talk: ED11D-02 Professional Ethics for Climate Scientists. It wasn't posted on the virtual options website, which is a shame because it's an important topic. Below is the description:

Crimes against humanity by the fools and tools of climate denial

Sometimes I regard deniers as fools and tools. Other times I see the dark side of them. Their wilful crimes against humanity. You think I'm over-reacting? I don't. I'm just saying what should be said from time to time.

Deniers are hypocritical bigots

These same hypocrites will even claim that the "poor" need fossil fuels. This is when they know full well that the people who will suffer first and most from global warming are those living in less developed nations. They just want the world all for themselves. They think they don't need people in Africa and Asia. Given that most deniers are conservative, bigoted old white men, they are quite comfortable that it's people who live at a distance from them, and mostly people of a different race to them, people who they regard as "failures", as "unsuccessful" for not being as wealthy as they are - therefore "unworthy" of life, who will bear the brunt of global warming initially.

That WMO illustration was correctly labelled

I started to write a comment in reply to Phil Clarke, who was commenting on the appalling article by Christopher Monckton at WUWT (archived here). Christopher was doing his best to be added to a defamation lawsuit and to bring Anthony Watts along with him. Oh, I would like to see that happen. But I doubt it will. They are small fish who live in a fishbowl that's closed to most of the world. By their own choice I might add. Sane people don't go for conspiracy websites as a general rule.

(Anthony might think he can get away with defamation by describing the article as "opinion". He can't. He's the publisher and promoter of that filth.)

This is the gist of what I was going to put in my reply to Phil Clarke's comment. (Go read it. Phil made good points.)

Thanks, Phil. I've also written about this briefly on other occasions, here for example. The cover illustration was described adequately in the WMO report. I'll stress that again. The illustration was described properly for what it was in the WMO report. It's a crying shame that Muir Russell didn't acknowledge that. Maybe they felt obliged to give the fake sceptics a small bone. They were wrong.

First up, Michael Mann didn't prepare the illustration, he merely commented to the people who did. Secondly, the WMO report described the illustration properly:

WMO-No. 913
© 2000, World Meteorological Organization
ISBN 92-63-10913-3
Front cover: Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records. The data are shown as 50-year smoothed differences from the 1961–1990 normal.

Uncertainties are greater in the early part of the millennium (see page 4 for further information). For more details, readers are referred to the PAGES newsletter (Vol. 7, No. 1: March 1999, also available at http://www.pages.unibe.ch) and the National Geophysical Data Center (http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov).

(Sources of data: P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa and T.J. Osborn, University of East Anglia, UK; M.E. Mann, University of Virginia, USA; R.S. Bradley, University of Massachusetts, USA; M.K. Hughes, University of Arizona, USA; and the Hadley Centre, The Met. Office).

Christopher Monckton is rehashing tired postings of that other miserable excuse for a human being, the auditor, who has nothing else to write about these days but is still doing his best to make sure the world suffers badly from global warming. Even Christopher Monckton, entertainer denier, can't come up with any new material of his own.

Defamation is a tool in the denier's arsenal

It's a pathetic that these despicable deniers resort to defamation of people of good character. They know they can't refute the science so they try to shoot the messengers. The people who are working their butts off to help save the world from itself.

Relegated to a footnote in the history of the climate wars

We know who some of these miserable creatures are, at least. The ones who come out of the shadows in public. We might not know all the people behind the various curtains who are pulling the strings of the denialati. However we do know who the puppets are. And someone will list their names in some footnote when writing the history of the climate wars (yet to occur). I hope that there is no excuse given them when it's written. No leeway. No mistake made that they were committing crimes against humanity. That they played a small role in the lead up to the climate wars.

The motley band of science deniers are making martyrs and heros of climate scientists like Phil Jones and Michael Mann - all because they know that in the long run, they can't beat science with science denial. (When NYC is under water again, will it be the Christopher Monckton's who'll be hailed as heroes or will people (grudgingly) acknowledge the James Hansen's who sounded the warnings.)

Oodles of hockey sticks on display for WUWT

Poor old WUWT is in the doldrums. Now that temperatures are shooting to unprecedented heights again, deniers don't know what to say or do. So they've fallen back on an old faithful.


Just when I was thinking it's been a while since WUWT took a shot at Professor Michael Mann, he makes another appearance. This time in an article by climate disinformer Doug L. Hoffman. Doug mistakenly thinks that the days of hockey sticks have passed. I'm here to tell him he's wrong - and to show him oodles of hockey sticks.

Doug's article is very long considering the point he is trying to make. He's arguing that the MBH98 hockey stick chart, which shows that modern temperatures have shot up suddenly from what they were for most of human civilisation, is "dead".  He's dead wrong!

Figure 5 Time reconstructions (solid lines) along with raw data (dashed lines)....b, for Northern Hemisphere mean temperature (NH) in 8C. In both cases, the zero line corresponds to the 1902–80 calibration mean of the quantity. For b raw data are shown up to 1995 and positive and negative 2σ uncertainty limits are shown by the light dotted lines surrounding the solid reconstruction, calculated as described in the Methods section. From MBH98

Cabot Institute talks: Michael Mann - The Hockey Stick and the climate wars and John Cook

I promised to let people know when Michael Mann's video was published, and here it is. Thanks to Katy D and Jammy Dodger for the alert.

Click in the bottom right hand corner to view full screen or on YouTube.

John Cook at Bristol

You can see John Cook's lecture here on YouTube. (It doesn't permit embedding here).

Tree ring growth vs latewood density: Pat'n Chip get lost in the forest at WUWT

Anthony Watts has a "guest essay" by Pat'n Chip (archived here, latest update here), the duo from the CATO Institute. (Part of their job seems to be to spread disinformation about climate science. It's a good lark. Money for jam. They don't have to do much except spend a few minutes every now and then writing stuff and nonsense.)

Today's serving has a woody flavour. They are claiming that a new paper in GRL, by Martin Tingley and colleagues, contradicts a paper by Michael Mann. Michael Mann says, no. That's wrong.

To summarise

As suggested by Steve Bloom in the comments, here are the main points as I see them:

• Tree ring growth reconstructions do not register the sudden (short-lived) drop in temperature following very large volcanic eruptions of the past millennia. This has implications for estimates of climate sensitivity based on paleoclimatology. (Mann12)
• Latewood density measures exaggerate the drop in temperature following large-ish recent volcanic eruptions, Krakatau and Novarupta. (Tingley14)
• The new paper by Martin Tingley et al complements, rather than contradicts, the 2012 paper by Mann et al. 
• In dendrochronology, density is not the same as tree ring growth and one does not necessarily follow the same pattern as the other.

Initial impressions

Before I discovered Michael Mann's Huff Post article, I looked at the Mann paper and the abstract of the Tingley paper and at first glance it looked to me as if the papers were about different things. Or at least about different volcanic eruptions. I had some questions, though, because both papers were looking at how the sign of a temperature drop after large volcanic eruptions are manifested in tree rings.

So I went to the Tingley paper itself. It's not open access, so unless you can get hold of a copy, you'll have to take what I write at face value. Or you can read what Michael Mann has written about this at Huffington Post.

All over, almost before it started. Michael Mann and what WUWT won't tell you

Update - see below. The WUWT report is now up.

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I know that after my last article you'll all have been expecting a new conciliatory tone from Anthony Watts. Well maybe some of you were. Okay, fair enough. No-one was. And it looks as if no-one was wrong. Just as I was able to report some of John Cook's lecture where Anthony Watts, who was paid to attend, failed. Now I can report a bit more about Michael Mann's Cabot Institute lecture in the Victoria Rooms at the University of Bristol yesterday. Anthony hasn't even bothered to write one article about it, or not so far anyway. The lecture was called:

The Hockey Stick and the climate wars - the battle continues

Victoria Rooms, Michael Mann Lecture venue Credit: Katy Duke

Prof Michael Mann heralds 97 hours of climate scientists

The mystery of the silhouettes has been revealed. SkepticalScience.com has come up with a fun way to tell people about climate science via the scientists themselves.

The first scientist to appear is Michael Mann:

From skepticalscience.com:

Climate scientists from across the globe feature in our 97 Hours of Consensus campaign addressing one of the most significant and harmful myths about climate change. Each hour, beginning at 9am Sunday EST, September 7th, we'll publish a statement and playful, hand-drawn caricature of a leading climate scientist. Each caricature lists the scientists’ name, title, expertise and academic institution.

To translate the time, it's probably referring to eastern time in the USA, which was 11:00 pm in Australia and 1:00 pm Greenwich Mean Time or Universal Coordinated Time for all you modern young things :)

You can check out the unveiling of a new scientist on the hour every hour for the next 96 hours at the cute website created by a computer wizz at SkS. Or read about it at SkepticalScience.com and in an article by Dana Nuccitelli at the UK Guardian.


Anthony Watts will be mortified. Not only was he woefully wrong. Not only will he not have any grounds for "suing the pants off" SkepticalScience.com.  Dumb denier blogs like his won't rate a mention. This is about climate science and real live scientists, not wacky conspiracy bloggers who dwell in the dark fringes of cyberspace.

Anthony Watts and others are heading off to England to hear John Cook and Michael Mann

Update: see below how Anthony was mulling his choices and evaluating his options. Flattery will get him nowhere.


This is cute. Anthony Watts is going to take a trip to England in September (archived here). He's arranged it specially because he saw that John Cook is speaking for an hour and a half (including question time) at the University of Bristol. Apparently Anthony prefers to try to get in "some questions" at the end of the lecture in Bristol rather than sending John Cook an email.

Anthony wrote:

Note: I registered since I’ve always wanted to come to England anyway, and this was as good as an excuse as any…plus I have many questions to ask. Note also that while the event is free, there are a limited number of tickets available.

Not long after he wrote about John Cook's lecture, Anthony discovered that Michael Mann is also speaking there four days later in September. Anthony decided to take the opportunity to go to his session and see if he can ask him a question or two as well. Here's the updated archive.

For anyone in Bristol in September, here are the dates and times:

John Cook: Dogma vs. consensus: Letting the evidence speak on climate change 19 September 2014, 6 pm - 7.30 pm, Victoria Rooms, Queens Road, Bristol, BS8 1SA

Michael E Mann: Cabot Institute Lecture: The Hockey Stick and the climate wars - the battle continues 23 September 2014, 6 pm - 7:00 pm plus question time, The Victoria Rooms, Queen's Rd, Bristol, BS8 1SA

You might even get to meet a real celebrity, Anthony Watts, blog owner of the crackpot blog, WUWT. After all, now Anthony Watts has now made the public lectures with John Cook and Michael Mann all about Anthony Watts. Narcissism in extremis.

Reading the comments there could be an opportunity for US-based deniers to cobble together and charter a plane :) You'd think that John Cook and Michael Mann never spoke in public in the USA. Do the WUWT-ers know where Bristol is, I wonder? Seems a long way to go to sit in a lecture theater for three hours. Not that I don't think that John Cook and Michael Mann aren't worth listening to. But to fly half-way around the world for two one-hour lectures? To stopover in Bristol for four or five days? (Oh, I'm sure it's a lovely town. Yep, quit while I'm ahead - I'm just grovelling to the fine people from Bristol now :D.)

Click "read more" if you're on the home page and want to see the reaction of deniers at WUWT.

When deniers have nothing, they recycle dead arguments....

In the ongoing effort to demonise the work of Professor Michael Mann in particular, Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Judith Curry and John Christy are passing around wrong and worn out "arguments", presumably to try to bolster a defense for the people who allegedly libelled Professor Mann.

It's a pathetic effort on behalf of a pathetic lot from the climate science disinformation brigade.

In a repost at WUWT, Steve McIntyre (and Anthony Watts) are arguably wanting to be added to the list of people being sued.  It's as if they think that if they misrepresent history often enough someone will believe them.

I don't know what point they think they are trying to make. It looks as if they are trying to resurrect "trial by email", which has been tried before and failed dismally. (Update: see especially Marco's comment below, and the links to deepclimate's damning indictments of Steve McIntyre here and here).

I've already written about the misrepresentations from John Christy, which Judith Curry resurrected recently and that is now apparently being touted again at Steve McIntyre's blog and WUWT.  Anthony Watts (archived here) copies Steve McIntyre who copies Judith Curry who quoted from John Christy's misleading testimony to the US government:

Christy gave the following damning summary of Mann’s conduct as IPCC TAR Lead Author:

Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

Three things.

1. Serengeti Strategy: Singling out one from 850 plus people

Firstly, John Christy was also a lead author of Chapter 2 of TAR, the chapter in question, so he is as culpable as any other lead author of its content.  The other lead authors were: R.A. Clarke, G.V. Gruza, J. Jouzel, M.E. Mann, J. Oerlemans, M.J. Salinger, S.-W. Wang.

In addition there were two coordinating lead authors of Chapter 2, C.K. Folland, T.R. Karl, who presumably vetted the final content.

And two review editors:  R. Hallgren, B. Nyenzi who would also have had a say.

Not only that but there were 140 contributing authors:

J. Bates, M. Crowe, P. Frich, P. Groisman, J. Hurrell, P. Jones, D. Parker, T. Peterson, D. Robinson, J. Walsh, M. Abbott, L. Alexander, H. Alexandersson, R. Allan, R. Alley, P. Ambenje, P. Arkin, L. Bajuk, R. Balling, M.Y. Bardin, R. Bradley, R. Brázdil, K.R. Briffa, H. Brooks, R.D. Brown, S. Brown, M. Brunet-India, M. Cane, D. Changnon, S. Changnon, J. Cole, D. Collins, E. Cook, A. Dai, A. Douglas, B. Douglas, J.C. Duplessy, D. Easterling, P. Englehart, R.E. Eskridge, D. Etheridge, D. Fisher, D. Gaffen, K. Gallo, E. Genikhovich, D. Gong, G. Gutman,W. Haeberli, J. Haigh, J. Hansen, D. Hardy, S. Harrison, R. Heino, K. Hennessy,W. Hogg, S. Huang, K. Hughen, M.K. Hughes, M. Hulme, H. Iskenderian, O.M. Johannessen, D. Kaiser, D. Karoly, D. Kley, R. Knight, K.R. Kumar, K. Kunkel, M. Lal, C. Landsea, J. Lawrimore, J. Lean, C. Leovy, H. Lins, R. Livezey, K.M. Lugina, I. Macadam, J.A. Majorowicz, B. Manighetti, J. Marengo, E. Mekis, M.W. Miles, A. Moberg, I. Mokhov, V. Morgan, L. Mysak, M. New, J. Norris, L. Ogallo, J. Overpeck, T. Owen, D. Paillard, T. Palmer, C. Parkinson, C.R. Pfister, N. Plummer, H. Pollack, C. Prentice, R. Quayle, E.Y. Rankova, N. Rayner, V.N. Razuvaev, G. Ren, J. Renwick, R. Reynolds, D. Rind, A. Robock, R. Rosen, S. Rösner, R. Ross, D. Rothrock, J.M. Russell, M. Serreze,W.R. Skinner, J. Slack, D.M. Smith, D. Stahle, M. Stendel, A. Sterin, T. Stocker, B. Sun, V. Swail, V. Thapliyal, L. Thompson,W.J. Thompson, A. Timmermann, R. Toumi, K. Trenberth, H. Tuomenvirta, T. van Ommen, D. Vaughan, K.Y. Vinnikov, U. von Grafenstein, H. von Storch, M. Vuille, P. Wadhams, J.M. Wallace, S. Warren,W. White, P. Xie, P. Zhai 

And nearly 700 "expert reviewers".

So to my way of thinking, to put imagined "wrongs" of any single IPCC report (which has been twice superseded) on the shoulders of one lone individual and neglect the more than 850 other people who played a part, is a bit much!  What it demonstrates is the Serengeti Strategy so beloved of disinformers and deniers. This time they try to isolate one individual from a very large herd.

2. A false claim from the disinformers

Secondly, the chapter did not misrepresent the temperature record of the past 1,000 years. At the time, arguably the paper by Mann and colleagues was indeed the "best estimate". In any case, Chapter 2 of the IPCC TAR included references to other reconstructions with citations and charts.

3. Deniers are out of touch and out of date

Thirdly, there have been two more IPCC reports since TAR and they present more recent research, which has refined knowledge with new data and multiple new temperature reconstructions, all of which lend support to earlier findings.

Box TS.5 Figure 1 Last-millennium simulations and reconstructions Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Disinformers are misleading

Anthony's copy and paste misleadingly includes the following claim:

Further, both the Oxburgh and Muir Russell reports concluded that the IPCC 2001 graphic was “misleading”. 

This is misleading! The Muir Russell report referred to the WMO graphic used on the cover of the 1999 report and only indirectly, in parenthesis, to the IPCC TAR, writing about "one of the series" (not the others of the series):

25. The WMO report is a short document produced annually. It does not have the status or importance of the IPCC reports. The figure in question was a frontispiece and there is no major discussion or emphasis on it in the text. The caption of the figure states: "Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records”.

26. Finding: In relation to "hide the decline" we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.

The Oxburgh report does not use the word "misleading" in relation to the WMO graphic or any TAR temperature reconstruction.  The only relevant passage I could find was this:

Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

I think it's worth emphasising what the Oxburgh report noted. For example, one of the papers referred to in TAR emphasizes uncertainties and limitations in its title - Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, 1999: "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations". Geophys. Res. Lett., 26, 759-762.  Since that paper was published there have been numerous other reconstructions. When you take them together with the instrumental records you end up with a hockey stick!

It's also worth highlighting the Addendum to the Oxburgh report, which clearly states about "any research group in the field of climate change":

For the avoidance of misunderstanding in the light of various press stories, it is important to be clear that the neither the panel report nor the press briefing intended to imply that any research group in the field of climate change had been deliberately misleading in any of their analyses or intentionally exaggerated their findings. Rather, the aim was to draw attention to the complexity of statistics in this field, and the need to use the best possible methods.

Meanwhile, the world takes its sweet time to act decisively

The main point, though, is that all this is past history.  There has been a lot more work in the thirteen years since then.  While climate science deniers are obsessed with misrepresenting the past, we keep marching on toward hotter global temperatures and rapidly changing climates. The world hasn't even stopped increasing annual CO2 emissions, let alone reduced them.