What pushed Judith Curry over the edge?

Serious question. Look, we've all known that Judith has been getting more and more ratty as time goes on. Just when we think she can't sink any lower she surprises us again.  But this time she's really gone over the edge. I mean really and truly.

I've been a bit busy the last few days and have only just got around to checking out the various denier websites. I was surprised to see Judith Curry (archived here) putting up some old, wacky and long bit of idiocy from John Christy. Back in 2011, John was whining to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, protesting the IPCC, the northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions pre-2001, and all else besides.

Earth is as cold as a summit in Central Greenland?

At face value John, and therefore Judith, were doing a Denier Don Easterbrook, arguing that the temperature of earth is the same as it is on the top of the summit in Greenland.  John was complaining that a paper by Dahl-Jensen et al (1998) wasn't referred to in Section 2.3.2 in Chapter 2 of TAR, Temperature of the Past 1,000 Years. Yes, they are talking about the IPCC WG1 report from 2001, thirteen years ago.  Not the current report, not the 2007 report. The third assessment report from 2001.

Anyway, John complained that instead of discussing the temperature of Greenland's ice sheets over the past 1,000 years as if it represented global temperatures, the authors decided to discuss the temperatures of the whole world over the past 1000 years as far as it was known at the time (weird, huh?).  Turns out that back then (as is still the case to a great extent) there was an emphasis on the northern hemisphere reconstructions because there wasn't a lot of data for the southern hemisphere in 2001.

John Christy even admitted the other authors didn't think much of his idiocy:

To me Dahl-Jensen et al.’s reconstruction was a more robust estimate of past temperatures than one produced from a certain set of western U.S. tree-ring proxies. But as the process stood, the L.A. was not required to acknowledge my suggestions, and I was not able to convince him otherwise. It is perhaps a failure of mine that I did not press the issue even harder or sought agreement from others who might have been likewise aware of the evidence against the Hockey Stick realization.

Note too that there were several paleoclimatologists as lead authors of Chapter 2, so I don't know why John talks about "him" rather than "them". It's a case of the Serengeti Strategy again I guess.

John didn't point out that the paper was referred to in Section 2.4.2, How Stable was the Holocene Climate? Here is the relevant passage (my bold italics):

The early Holocene was generally warmer than the 20th century but the period of maximum warmth depends on the region considered. It is seen at the beginning of the Holocene (about 11 to 10 ky BP) in most ice cores from high latitude regions e.g., north-west Canada (Ritchie et al., 1989), central Antarctica (Ciais et al., 1992; Masson et al., 2000) and in some tropical ice cores such as Huascaran in Peru (Thompson et al., 1995). It is also seen during the early Holocene in the Guliya ice core in China (Thompson et al., 1998) but not in two other Chinese cores (Dunde, Thompson et al., 1989; and Dasuopu, to be published). North Africa experienced a greatly expanded monsoon in the early and mid-Holocene, starting at 11 ky BP (Petit-Maire and Guo, 1996), and declining thereafter. In New Zealand the warmest conditions occurred between about 10 to 8 ky BP, when there was a more complete forest cover than at any other time. Glacial activity was at a minimal level in the Southern Alps and speleothem analyses indicate temperatures were about 2°C warmer than present (Salinger and McGlone, 1989; Williams et al., 1999).

By contrast, central Greenland (Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998), and regions downstream of the Laurentide ice sheet, did not warm up until after 8 ky BP (including Europe: COHMAP Members, 1988; eastern North America: Webb et al., 1993). 

Nor did John Christy point out that the temperature reconstructions described in Chapter 2 of TAR were based on many more proxies than just tree rings.  Nor that there were several reconstructions discussed, not just those of Michael Mann and colleagues. Nor that there were lots of caveats in TAR (as always).

Now the fact that John and Judith think that the summit of Greenland on its own is a proxy for global temperatures is wacky enough and way beyond Judith's usual fare. But she not only put forward John's silliness as if it ought to be taken seriously, she threw in snippets of stolen emails as evidence of something or other.

Not only that, but she resurrected her jealousy of Michael Mann, that he was one of eight lead authors of a chapter in the IPCC's third assessment report, whereas she was but a lowly contributing author of Chapter 7. John Christy was a lead author in the same chapter as Michael Mann, so goodness knows why he and Judith were whinging. (Maybe she was miffed that Michael Mann wasn't just a lead author of Chapter 2, he was also a contributing author of Chapter 7 and Chapter 8.)

I mean we're talking TAR, the third assessment report. Judith is going back thirteen years.

Here is another reason I think Judith has finally lost it for good. She wrote:

Christy’s assessment, when combined with the UEA emails, provides substantial insight into how this hockey stick travesty occurred.  

John Christy's assessment! Climategate! Sheesh, Judith is scraping the bottom of the barrel isn't she.  What will Judith write about next? The fake Oregon Petition?

Here is a sample of John Christy's conspiracy ideation - and this is only a snippet.  There's more of the same where that came from.  Here he is referring to authors of the IPCC reports, writing:

As time went on, nations would tend to nominate only those authors whose climate change opinions were in line with a national political agenda which sought perceived advantages (i.e. political capital, economic gain, etc.) by promoting the notion of catastrophic human-induced climate change. Scientists with well-known alternative views would not be nominated or selected. Indeed, it became more and more difficult for dissention and skepticism to penetrate the process now run by this establishment. As noted in my IAC testimony, I saw a process in which L.A.s were transformed from serving as Brokers of science (and policy-relevant information) to Gatekeepers of a preferred point of view. 

John Christy is so deluded as to think that politicians throughout the world will gain economically and politically as a result of global warming. Tell that to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard! Tell that to Tony Abbott! Tell that to the James Inhofe and the GOP!

And what "hockey stick travesty"? The hockey stick keeps showing up in all the subseqent IPCC reports.  This is from the latest AR5:

Box TS5 Fig 1 Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 

Doesn't Judith know what the current instrumental record shows compared to the Holocene as a whole?  I don't believe it. She has subsequently written an article about the recent Neukom paper under a weird title: "The inconvenient southern hemisphere".  In that article she "rebuts" the paper by referring her readers to, of all places, WUWT! Yep. She's well and truly gone over the edge. Here is Figure 2 from that paper - guess what it shows. You guessed it, a hockey stick:

Figure 2 Temperature variability over the past millennium. a, 30-year loess filtered ensemble mean temperature reconstruction for the Southern Hemisphere (SH; blue) and Northern Hemisphere (NH; red) relative to the millennium mean for the period 1000–2000. Blue shading based on Southern Hemisphere reconstruction uncertainties (Supplementary Section 2.4). Thin orange lines represent the ensemble means of the nine individual temperature reconstructions making up the Northern Hemisphere dataset5. b, as a but for the 24-member climate model ensemble. Note for consistency with reconstruction data, simulated temperatures are shown as individual simulations for the Northern Hemisphere and a probabilistic range based on ensemble percentiles for the Southern Hemisphere.

Source: Neukom14

Back to basic Curry - the IPCC and Michael Mann

For once Judith isn't being her usual ambiguous self.  She is up front about her motivation. She has it in for Michael Mann and the IPCC. She has ever since I first heard of her - when she "came out" as a denier on Keith Kloor's blog way back when.  This is what she wrote the other day:

Back in April 2011, I had a post on The U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy.  John Christy’s testimony is worth revisiting, in two contexts:

• problems with the IPCC process, most recently highlighted in context of WG3 [link]
• the Steyn versus Mann and Mann versus Steyn lawsuits [link]

So she's back to basics - Judith Curry waging a war on the IPCC and Michael Mann. That's bare bones Judith Curry - in a nutshell. Forget science. Forget politics. For Judith, this is personal.

---

Neukom, Raphael, Joëlle Gergis, David J. Karoly, Heinz Wanner, Mark Curran, Julie Elbert, Fidel González-Rouco et al. "Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium." Nature Climate Change 4, no. 5 (2014): 362-367. doi:10.1038/nclimate2174

Anthony Watts got the Quadrella with an outdated clichéd caricature of a climate science denier

Deniers must be in an out and out panic for some reason.  I don't know why that is.  Yesterday I wrote about how Anthony got the trifecta, putting up articles in quick succession on the much caricatured denier memes of:

1. Climategate
2. Greenland and
3. Al Gore is fat.

Now he's added another one to make the quadrella! (Archived here.) Anthony's posted the most stereotypical clichéd conspiracy theorising slimy article from the grubby Tim Ball. Replete with resurrecting ancient attacks on some of the world's leading scientists - which are sick and twisted and false and would be laughable if they weren't such ugly smear attacks:

• "they turned off the air-conditioning in 1988 in Congress"
• falsely accusing Dr James Hansen, one of the world's living treasures and a modern day hero, of not declaring income
• Ben Santer, who is one of the most respected and trustworthy of climate scientists, "altered" the IPCC report when it was Ben Santer who ensured that the IPCC report included appropriate wording about uncertainty and ensured the report was an accurate reflection of the science of the day
• claiming 24 years ago Ben Santer was too "green" to write for the IPCC (he was 35 years old at the time and had received his doctorate three years earlier) - He was admired by his peers back then and look at how he is revered worldwide today
• Dredging up a dumb claim about the Medieval Warm Period, from arch denier David Deming of all people
• Implying there was something shonky about Michael Mann writing for the IPCC and, laughably, that there was something shonky about this triple graduate degree holder getting his doctorate

I've not seen such a gish gallop of old, disgusting ad hominem attacks on scientists since 2010.  Which in turn were in part a resurrection of the failed Fred Seitz attack from way back in 1996.  Here is the open letter of support for Ben Santer from the American Meteorological Society - from way back in 1996. And here is a more recent article by Ben Santer himself, covering these and other issues. 

Is something about to happen that I'm missing?  Why this resurrection of worn out clichéd denier disinformation?  Is Tim Ball wanting to provide more material for the court to consider at the various law suits he's got to defend? Is he trying to rope Anthony Watts into one or more of them?

And why is Anthony stuck for guest authors that he has to rely on people like the slime Tim Ball, the clown Christopher Monckton and Eric "eugenics" Worrall (can you get more obsure than Eric Worrall?).

Not only that but yesterday he dragged out a chap called Tim Tom Harris who is the "Executive Director" of the two-bit operation that grandly calls itself the "International Climate Science Coalition".  TimTom visited here and twice denied writing exact quotes I took from his article at WUWT.  One of which he'd repeated in slightly different words in a press release published on his own website - talking about "the most expensive hoax in the history of science".

Not only that, but earlier today, Anthony proclaimed to the world that the "biggest threat" to humankind is an asteroid strike.  He's made similar claims before.  He's nuts.  Even his most rabid deniers dispute him on that score.

It's as if there's something big in the wind to send Anthony Watts around the twist like this.  Utterly more Utter Nuttery than usual.

A blow to smear merchants and disinformers

Anthony Watts says (archived here) that today's Supreme Court decision (in Virginia) to reject an appeal by the American Tradition Institute to ferret through ancient emails is, as he put it in the headline: "a blow to open science".  I differ, I call it a blow to those who are trying to stifle academic freedom and open science.

Anthony thinks that science is only open if he can read the scientists' emails.  Or more likely, if he can read the interpretation of snippets of other people's emails as made by smear-merchants and disinformers (that was prophetic, see update below).  Anthony is not very knowledgeable when it comes to science.

The issue as I understand it, is an appeal by ATI against a circuit court decision.  It's mainly about ATI wanting to gain access to Michael Mann's emails, that he sent or received during the six years he spent at the University of Virginia.

Here is the summary of the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia (my paras and bold italics):

130934 American Tradition Inst. v. Rector and Visitors 04/17/2014

The circuit court was correct in denying a request for disclosure of certain documents under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. The purpose of the higher education research exemption under Code § 2.2-3705.4(4) for "information of a proprietary nature" is to avoid competitive harm, not limited to financial matters.

The definition of "proprietary" in prior case law, that it is "a right customarily associated with ownership, title, and possession, an interest or a right of one who exercises dominion over a thing or property, of one who manages and controls," is consistent with that goal and the circuit court did not err in applying that definition. Viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the university that prevailed below, it produced sufficient evidence to meet each of the higher education research exemption’s seven requirements.

Also, in the context of the Code § 2.2-3704(F) provision allowing a public entity to make reasonable charges for its actual cost incurred in accessing, duplicating, supplying or searching for requested records, "searching" includes inquiry into whether a disputed document can be released under federal or state law, and this statute permits a public body to charge a reasonable fee for exclusion review. The circuit court's judgment excluding disputed documents and approving such cost recovery is affirmed, and final judgment is entered in favor of the university.

The full decision is here. It makes for interesting reading. In it, the court noted that:

On January 6, 2011, American Tradition Institute and Robert Marshall (collectively, "ATI") sent a request to UVA, a public university, seeking all of the documents that "Dr. Michael Mann produced and/or received while working for the University . . . and otherwise while using its facilities and resources . . . ."

ATI wanted the lot. It was a pure, unadulterated fishing expedition.  They didn't have a clue what they were looking for or what they might find.  They just wanted all the documents produced or received by Professor Mann. Bear in mind that the newest document would have to be nine years old and the oldest would be fifteen years old. And at the time, to comply with VFOIA, the university would have had to provide the information within five days.

Now Michael Mann was busy during his time at UVA (from 1999 to 2005).  The university wrote to ATI and said they found 34,062 "potentially responsive" documents. They got that down to 8,000 and then worked through 1,000 of those before the ATI's $2,000 prepayment was all used up. They are very efficient workers at UVA.  They said they'd keep going if ATI paid up the balance of the original cost estimate ($8,500).  Which I think it did.

But then there was a bit more to-ing and fro-ing between UVA and ATI.  Before all the material was provided to ATI, Michael Mann intervened.  He argued that the University could not sufficiently protect his interests in privacy, academic freedom, and free speech.  He wasn't objecting to published material and related.  What he was arguing was that his personal correspondence was just that - personal and that his other emails should be exempt under the "proprietary" definition. Or at least that's how I understand it. There's a lot of legalese. There was a lot more to the arguments, including what constitutes "proprietary", which definition the press was keen to narrow. The other argument related to who should bear the costs of getting the information.

Anyway, the upshot seems to be that scientists can continue to communicate by email, at least in Virginia, and be open with their colleagues knowing that the grubby little denier bloggers won't easily purloin snippets of their conversations and twist them beyond recognition. At least until and unless there is a different definition of proprietary in Virginian law.

Moreover, provided no-one steals them.  Anthony Watts yesterday wrote another article on the same subject, in which he said:

With Mann, it’s all about delaying the inevitable, unless of course somebody like the hero of Climategate “FOIA” decides to take matters into their own hands and stop this abuse of the legal system and FOIA law by making an email dump. I don’t underestimate that possibility.

It's heroic to steal personal property in deniersville (just like it's heroic to pretend to be a dog).  But only if you're a science denier.  (I expect Anthony will find his door being knocked upon if anyone does steal emails of climate scientists in the USA.)

Other blog articles

Michael Halpern has written about the Supreme Court decision and the implications, at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

There's also a short discussion of the finding by L. Steven Emmert, who blogs about court findings and appeals. I've archived it here for future reference, because there doesn't seem to be a way to link directly to the article.

Eli Rabett has written about this too.

WUWT update - another email smear

Anthony Watts has just done some more smearing with the help of Eric "eugenics" Worrall.  He's cut and pasted snippets from two stolen private emails, reversing them, to make it appear as one email and to make it look as if it's something it's not.  The two emails don't involve Michael Mann.  They are a query from one scientist to another, asking the first scientist if, under the (then) new FOI laws in Britain, he would be required to hand out to all and sundry computer code prepared (as I understand it) by the second scientist.  The reply was that code might be exempt under property rights provisions. But Anthony and Eric manage to turn it into a smear.  That example is a good illustration of why private emails should be kept private and out of the hands of smear merchants and disinformers. (The article is archived here.)

From the WUWT comments

Many of the commenters at WUWT don't have a clue.  Here are a couple of comments from Anthony's article of yesterday (archived here):

bushbunny has got the situation topsy turvy and says:

April 16, 2014 at 7:21 pm
I thought the university of Virginia were suing him because they want their grant back? Oh the result will be interesting, as it may affect Mark’s case too?

Proud Skeptic is wrong, and needs to learn about what FOIA covers and what is exempt, and maybe think about the result of allowing all government-funded information to be freely available to everyone at any time when he or she says:

April 16, 2014 at 8:14 pm
Maybe I’m naïve but isn’t public money funding Mann’s research? IMHO, when the public is paying the freight then EVERYTHING is public. if you want privacy, then use private money…preferably your own.

 And here are a few from today's article (archived here). Not all WUWT-ers disagree with the decision.

Brad hatches a conspiracy theory about the seven Supreme Court Judges and says:

April 17, 2014 at 7:53 am
Sounds rigged, have to wonder how many judges, or family members, or political contributors, are alumni?

Something stinks…. And Lew-paper won’t make the smell go away.

tim maguire didn't read the decision or the bit about "not limited to financial matters" and says:

April 17, 2014 at 7:42 am
Publicly funded educational research is specifically exempted to protect financial interests? Wouldn’t the right of possession be held by the people of Virginia?
What a strange outcome. 

David in Michigan finds the decision correct and says:

April 17, 2014 at 8:01 am
After reading the decision by the court, I agree that their interpretation is correct. It’s disappointing, yes, but reasonable and coherent. I also note the caveat by one of the judges at the end of the decision write up that there might be unintended consequences of applying the definition of the word “proprietary” to other sections. So it goes….

Paul Coppin says:

April 17, 2014 at 8:06 am
On a quick read through and without looking at the referenced cases, I note two things: ATI probably argued the case badly, and the ruling is a cautious ruling. Th nut of the last part is in the court’s caution over the meaning of “proprietary”, the ambiguous intent of its meaning as derived from the Va legislature in statute (which the court has asked the legislature to clarify), and the consequence, that because of this ambiguity, the court was obliged to follow the narrower definition established by case law in respect of the specific Codes in the VAFOIA. The competitive issue of public schools vs private schools is an interesting wrinkle. The decision is not a failure of the court to uphold access to publicly funded information, it’s a failure of the state legislature to properly construct statutes with consistent common use terminology. 

How Professor Michael Mann started a climate movement - by email...if only we could find it...

Anthony Watts has just discovered something that happened more than four months ago (archived here). There was an amicus brief filed by the Reporters' Committee in the Virginia emails case.  The Reporters' Committee want the court to narrow a definition.  A quick scan suggests they aren't necessarily wanting access to Michael Mann's personal emails, they are just concerned that the decision was worded in a way that may have implications for future FOIA requests and their "freedom" to delve into other people's emails.

The secret email winging its way to the climate movement!

The edifice of science crumbles under an email...eh what?

Anyway, no point in my speculating about that case.  It'll run its course soon enough. What got me was the fact that deniers at WUWT still seem to think that two hundred years of climate science is going to come undone because of one person's emails stored on a server somewhere between nine and fifteen years ago.  Do they honestly think that there is only one climate scientist in the world?  Do they seriously think that the whole edifice of earth, ocean and atmospheric science - paleoclimatology, geology, atmospheric physics, ocean chemistry, ecology, biology, cloud microphysics and the multitude of knowledge accumulated since the early nineteenth century is going to be turned on its head by some right wing lobby group getting access to a bunch of old emails?

Let's see.  Here are some comments.

The climate "movement" ...eh what?

First a ponderous pronouncement from Anthony Watts:

IMHO, the Mann’s days are numbered as a hero of the climate movement.

In those few words, Anthony Watts has both created a "hero" and tried to cut him down. He's also created a "movement".  I don't know what sort of weird lies between those ears - but really - now a study of earth sciences is a "movement"?  WTF!

Thing is, it's deniers who made Michael Mann a "hero" or perhaps their anti-hero.   They protested the temperature of the past and the present.  They couldn't accept that humans have changed the climate and we're still doing it, with a vengeance.  Oddly, most of them don't realise that there is more and more evidence by lots of quite independent teams of scientists that have refined and supported the findings of that early reconstruction.

In fact greenhouse effect denier and Anthony fanboi, dbstealey, takes all the credit on behalf of Anthony and WUWT and says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:21 pm
Anthony and WUWT have a lot to do with this.
If relentless pressure was not kept up, Mann might have skated…
Kudos to Anthony and all the contributors who helped bring this about.
Everyone deserves credit. With sunshine, the truth will emerge.

Nick Adams lives a very boring dull life and can't comprehend anyone standing up for a principle. He trots out "a trojan horse" like all those despicable people who try to justify an unjustifiable invasion of privacy and says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:01 pm
A man with nothing to hide never tries this hard to hide it.

myrightpenguin is one who has woken up to the fact that Professor Mann isn't the only climate scientist in the world and says he's already fingered the next target for deniers.  What he doesn't seem to realise is just how much science is lined up.  You can guess who that is, most probably, because it was the Number One most protested paper last year.  myrightpenguin is nevertheless deluded:

March 18, 2014 at 12:09 am
Mann may be disposable because of a series of papers inc. Marcott et al., so even if he is thrown under the bus the alarmists and MSM may still say there is a hockey stick regardless. There needs to be readiness for this, including education regarding the issue of splicing datasets with completely different resolutions, something that wouldn’t stand a chance of getting past peer review in scientific fields uncorrupted by special interests.

When deniers have nothing else to offer they unimaginatively call on Nazis. True to form, nicholas tesdorf says:

March 17, 2014 at 9:52 pm
Could this trial turn out to be the Warmistas’ Stalingrad. Before Stalingrad, the Nazis never had a defeat: after Stalingrad, they never had a victory.

Oh, and you'll enjoy this one.  Out of 220,000 stolen emails the deniers found.....nothing!  Anthony loses his cool with dp when he says:

March 17, 2014 at 11:30 pm
Climategate III is mute because nobody with the password has a pair, to draw a phrase from the current post. Too bad it wasn’t given to me as if that had happened the world would have it now. That is an advantage granted those of us who have no expectation of seeing another birthday. Never misunderestimate the fearlessness of motivated senior citizens. There are some jobs nobody else can get done.

REPLY: Hey, “dp” you can have the right to complain about “nobody with the password has a pair” here when you put your own name to your words. Otherwise kindly STFU. Basically there’s nothing new in CG III that hadn’t already been covered in CGI/II. Megabytes of mundane stuff, much like NSA flypaper. The important stuff has been extracted. Dumping the whole file on the net won’t help anybody. Tough noogies if you don’t like the situation but that’s the reality. – Anthony

I'll leave you with the unholy reverend from the Cornwall Alliance, as richardscourtney makes a now-rare appearance at WUWT.  Just some excerpts, you can read the godless mess here:

the ‘war’ to stop the AGW-scare ... WW2...H1tler never had a defeat before the battle of El Alamein...Montgomery won the Second Battle of El Alamein...defend against the AGW scare...Battle of Stalingrad...advance of H1tler’s forces...military might of the Naz1s...AGW-scare...the ‘Kursk’ of the AGW-scare: the ‘bunker’ of the CRU at UEA...etc etc

It's time to visit Alice's Restaurant again, isn't it :)

I mean, if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. ... And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it's a 

...wait for it....

they may think it's a movement.

Read more: Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant Massacre Lyrics | MetroLyrics

.

Resurrecting Fred Singer and the MWP at WUWT

As if anyone needed more proof that WUWT is just another outlet for anti-science disinformation propaganda.  Today Anthony's put up a pack of lies by Fred Singer (archived here), who's made it his business to invent disinformation.  The article is another "hockey stick is a fraud" article.  Wouldn't it be nice if Fred Singer and Anthony Watts were added to one of the cases currently being heard in the US courts.

Fred Singer Manufactures Lies and Dispenses them at WUWT

Here is some of what Fred wrote in today's WUWT article:

...the Hockeystick is a manufactured item and does not correspond to well-established historic reality. It does not show the generally beneficial Medieval Warm Period (MWP) at around 1000AD, or the calamitous Little Ice Age (LIA) between about 1400 and 1800. In the absence of any thermometers during most of this period, the Hockeystick is based on an analysis of so-called proxy data, mostly tree rings, from before 1000AD to 1980, at which point the proxy temperature suddenly stops and a rapidly rising thermometer record is joined on.

Talk about "manufactured items".  Here are a few "hockey sticks" from the IPCC AR5 report.  I've indicated the times that are usually referred to as the MWP.  There's no fixed period.  I've also indicated the Little Ice Age - and you can see that in the case of the Little Ice Age there was cooling overall.  In the Medieval period most reconstructions in the Northern Hemisphere show a slight warming particularly starting around 950, but not so much in the southern hemisphere.  Globally there's a slight bump around 950.  So Fred's wrong on that score.  Nothing been "disappeared".  It's just that with more and more data the record is becoming more refined, but there are still differences in the different reconstructions - that aren't being hidden by anyone.  Click for larger image as always.

Figure 5.7 IPCC AR5 WG1 Reconstructed (a) Northern Hemisphere and (b) Southern Hemisphere, and (c) global annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions (see Appendix 5.A.1 for further information about each one) are shown as indicated in the legends, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extra-tropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (HadCRUT4 land and sea, and CRUTEM4 land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881–1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on timescales less than ~50 years.

Fred bemoans the "good old days" when knowledge was scarce

Fred puts up a couple of drawings in a single image.  At the top of the drawing below is one of the images Fred included and at the bottom I've included a diagram from the first IPCC assessment report, published 24 years ago in 1990. This was before there were any global temperature reconstructions of the type we have today.  Fred is still living in the dim distant past.  He's getting on a bit (he's 89 years old) and can't hack this modern society or cope with new knowledge.

I don't know why Fred shifted the timescale to the left in his diagram above.  He could have left it as it was in the FAR report.  Anyway, about the Medieval Warm Anomaly, this is from FAR:

The late tenth to early thirteenth centuries (about AD 950-1250) appear to have been exceptionally warm in western Europe, Iceland and Greenland (Alexandre 1987, Lamb, 1988) This period is known as the Medieval Climatic Optimum China was, however, cold at this time (mainly in winter) but South Japan was warm (Yoshino, 1978) This period of widespread warmth is notable in that there is no evidence that it was accompanied by an increase of greenhouse gases.

In FAR (WG1), the word "medieval" appears only four times, once in the above diagram and three times in the text - and not once in the title of any reference.  In the AR5 report the word "medieval" appears 45 times including in the title of numerous references.

If you look at the top chart above and then the one below, you can see the difference between what was known in 1990 with what is known from scientific research conducted since that time. You can also tell from the text.  Compare the extract from FAR above with the following from the IPCC AR5 report (my bold italics):

For average annual Northern Hemisphere temperatures, the period 1983–2012 was very likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 800 years (high confidence) and likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years (medium confidence). This is supported by comparison of instrumental temperatures with multiple reconstructions from a variety of proxy data and statistical methods, and is consistent with AR4. Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the mid-20th century and in others as warm as in the late 20th century. With high confidence, these intervals were not as synchronous across seasons and regions as the warming since the mid-20th century

You may have noticed Fred's references above were to work done in 1978, 1987 and 1988.  Fred did manage to move into the 21st century further on in his article, bypassing all the other temperature reconstructions and singling out  two authors whose work he seems to have approved from a science denying perspective.  After maligning Michael Mann and misrepresenting his early work while ignoring his later work, Fred wrote:

In actuality, we now have adequate proxy data from other sources, most particularly from Fredrick (sic) Ljungqvist and David Anderson. Their separate publications agree that there has been little if any temperature rise since about 1940! However, there was a real temperature increase between 1920 and 1940, which can be seen also in all the various proxy as well as thermometer data.

I guess Fred's not too familiar with the work of  Fredrik Ljungqvist because he misspelt his name.  Thing is, he also is not too familiar with the work of Fredrik Ljungqvist because he misrepresented it.  The following is from Ljungqvist et al (2012):

Our results show, in a comparative manner, the degree to which the various proxy types can be used to assess regional temperature variability on centennial time-scales. We conclude that during the 9th to 11th centuries there was widespread NH warmth comparable in both geographic extent and level to that of the 20th century mean. Our study also reveals that the 17th century was dominated by widespread and coherently cold anomalies representing the culmination of the LIA. Understandably, the centennial resolution of this study precludes direct comparison of past warmth to that of the last few decades. However, our results show the rate of warming from the 19th to the 20th century is clearly the largest between any two consecutive centuries in the past 1200 yr.

And does Fredrik Ljungqvist dispute the global surface temperature record in the instrumental era as Fred claimed?  I'd say not.  Here's another section of that same paper:

Analyses of instrumental data (Brohan et al., 2006) shows that the last decade of the 20th century was much warmer than the 20th century mean nearly everywhere over NH land areas with sufficient data (Fig. C1). Moreover, the first decade of the 21st century was even warmer in most locations, thus, providing evidence that the long-term, largescale, NH warming that began in the 17th century and accelerated in the 20th century has continued unabated (see Appendix C for more details).

What about David Anderson? I couldn't find any global temperature reconstructions (or hemispherical ones either) by any David Anderson - but I probably missed it.  Anyway, if it's this David Anderson he's talking about, then Fred's barking up the wrong tree.  This from a 2002 paper:

Climate reconstructions reveal unprecedented warming in the past century; however, little is known about trends in aspects such as the monsoon. 

 Incidentally, the work of Fredrik Ljungqvist is cited several times in the AR5 report.


Below is a reference to a Ljungqvist paper plus just a sample of all the published work of Michael Mann and his various co-authors, to give you some idea of just how selective is Fred Singer.  Notice his paper on the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Anomaly.  I'd say he knows a lot more about this than does professional denier Fred Singer.

Notice too all the different authors and how Fred Singer singles out Michael Mann?  That's the Serengeti Strategy in action.

(Copies of Michael Mann's papers are usually available at his website.)

Ljungqvist, F. C., Paul J. Krusic, Gudrun Brattström, and Hanna S. Sundqvist. "Northern Hemisphere temperature patterns in the last 12 centuries." Climate of the Past 8, no. 1 (2012): 227-249.. doi:10.5194/cp-8-227-2012 (open access).
Mann, Michael E., and Jeffrey Park. "Global‐scale modes of surface temperature variability on interannual to century timescales." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 99, no. D12 (1994): 25819-25833.

Mann, Michael E., Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes. "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries." Nature 392, no. 6678 (1998): 779-787.

Mann, Michael E., and Philip D. Jones. "Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia." Geophysical Research Letters 30, no. 15 (2003).

Jones, Philip D., and Michael E. Mann. "Climate over past millennia." Reviews of Geophysics 42, no. 2 (2004): RG2002.

Mann, Michael E., Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm K. Hughes, Raymond S. Bradley, Sonya K. Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni. "Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 36 (2008): 13252-13257.

Mann, Michael E., Zhihua Zhang, Scott Rutherford, Raymond S. Bradley, Malcolm K. Hughes, Drew Shindell, Caspar Ammann, Greg Faluvegi, and Fenbiao Ni. "Global signatures and dynamical origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly." Science 326, no. 5957 (2009): 1256-1260.

From the WUWT comments

It's mostly a lot of people raging at Michael Mann, not suitable for HotWhopper. The Serengeti Strategy works for WUWT dismissives but it no longer works with the general public, from what I can see.  There are a couple of choice comments that I can print though.

Steve from Rockwood says the recent warming "doesn't look natural".  Well, duh!

January 21, 2014 at 3:25 pm
Just looking at Mann’s reconstruction – it doesn’t look natural. The Earth has been cooling for 1,000 years and suddenly warms out of control? It can’t be real. If he had left in the LIA and MWP maybe I would have believed him.

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale must have a soft spot for Fred, because he accepts Fred's lies - though he couldn't swallow some of Don Easterbrook's lies yesterday. He says:

January 21, 2014 at 3:30 pm
Thanks, Fred. Nicely done.

Running (tree) rings around Anthony Watts - Ignoramus Extraordinaire

Anthony Watts has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth any time he lets his fingers touch his keyboard. (Ha ha - do you like the contortionist imagery?)  This time he's showing off his ignoramus side again in a WUWT article with the headline: Bad news for Michael Mann’s ‘treemometers’ ? (Archived here.)

Implications for paleoclimatology and Mann's hockey stick?

Anthony introduced his copy and paste press release by writing this (my bold italics):

From the “trees aren’t linear instruments and the Liebigs Law department” and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, comes this story that suggests the older trees are, the less linear their tree ring growth might be, which has implications for “paleoclimatology” and Mann’s hockey stick temperature reconstructions from tree rings.

I found Anthony's quote all over the internet - but only in copy and pastes from WUWT!  I'm guessing Anthony is about the only person whose first thought was that this has implications for “paleoclimatology” and Mann’s hockey stick.  Wishful thinking on the part of science deniers. (It's probably worth mentioning that nowhere in the remainder of Anthony's article or the sciencedaily.com press release or the abstract of the paper he was referring to was there any mention of tree ring growth, it's linearity or otherwise.)

The new paper Anthony was introducing wasn't about dendrochronology at all.  It was a paper about how for "most species, the biggest trees increase their growth rates and sequester more carbon as they age".

Anthony quoted himself in his introduction, with his reference to Liebigs (sic) Law.  (See below for some "paleo" curiosities about Liebig's Law and its successors.)  Back in 2009 Anthony Watts wrote an article about how plant growth is limited by the least available nutrient or requirement for growth.  It was one big logical fallacy article.  What he was trying to argue was dendrochronologists "don't know nuffin'" about tree growth.  He was suggesting that world-leading scientists who have spent most of their careers examining and analysing signals in tree growth, don't understand that there are multiple factors that affect plant growth.  He wrote:

I make no claims of being an expert in either forest growth or dendroclimatology. I’m simply presenting interesting information here for discussion.

But, I am amazed at the nonlinearity and interactivity of all limiting growth factors, and especially the parabolic response to temperature.

...If you see a wide tree ring, you can safely conclude the tree had a good year. If you see narrow rings you can conclude a poor growth year. But was that poor year a product of an unfavorable temperature range alone? Or was it due to lack of moisture or lack of sunlight or both? Not having local records for those, how would you know?

It seems to me that dendroclimatology has a lot of uncertainty.

Well, duh!

Anthony Watts: "scientists don't know nuffin'"

Anthony Watts was in effect saying that "scientists don't know nuffin'".  His logical fallacy was his "argument from personal incredulity".  In this 2003 paper by Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn and Fritz Schweingruber, the very first paragraph in the introduction is (my bold italics):

A large amount of tree-ring research is concerned with very localised site studies (Dean et al., 1996), necessarily reflecting the complex ecological processes that operate on small scales in forest ecosystems. Depending on the specific situation, dendrochronology can focus on the study of many different factors that influence tree growth. Examples include the following: the frequency of insect defoliation, the occurrence of severe frosts or fire, or the general competitional interactions in forest dynamics. The challenge for the tree-ring researcher is to establish an optimal representation or reconstruction of the past variability of the particular factor under study. This should involve providing realistic estimates of uncertainty, given that in practice many factors can act together to produce the changing patterns of tree growth that are measured.

Anthony's specialty is not dendrochronology but doubt and disinformation.  So he can't be expected to know the main points, let alone the finer points, of any subject let alone one as highly specialised as dendrochronology.  And if, in some parallel universe, an Anthony Watts did know anything about trees or the study of their cross-sections, do you think he would present it honestly?

Trees keep growing

Anthony Watts is barking up the wrong tree. The study to which Anthony's introduction purportedly related is published in Nature.  Stephenson et al conducted an analysis of 403 tropical and temperate tree species around the world and found that for most species, mass growth rate increases continuously with tree size.  In other words, trees keep growing as they age.  The press release states that trees "grow more quickly the older they get".  I don't have the paper so I don't know by how much growth rate accelerates with age.  The abstract does state that this doesn't conflict with observations of (presumably) old growth forests having declining leaf level and productivity:

The apparent paradoxes of individual tree growth increasing with tree size despite declining leaf-level and stand-level productivity can be explained, respectively, by increases in a tree’s total leaf area that outpace declines in productivity per unit of leaf area and, among other factors, age-related reductions in population density. Our results resolve conflicting assumptions about the nature of tree growth, inform efforts to understand and model forest carbon dynamics, and have additional implications for theories of resource allocation and plant senescence.

For some reason this notion of increasing growth as trees get older makes me think of fractals.  The bigger the tree the bigger the trunk, the more branches it has and the more it can sprout new branches.  So even if individual branches grow at the same rate as branches did when the tree was younger (or even more slowly), there are more of them as the tree ages so the total mass of the tree accelerates over time. I'll be interested to read the paper itself.

Supplementary data can be accessed here.  It's a list of all the species studied.  The fattest tree they recorded was Picea sitchensis, a conifer from North America, with a diameter of 270 cm.  According to Wikipedia the trunk diameter at breast height can exceed 5 m. The supplementary data doesn't include height.

The press release at ScienceDaily.com specifically mentions trees that grow around these parts, the mountain ash - Eucalyptus regnans.  These trees have a phenomenal growth rate - Sadly many of the largest and oldest specimens got chopped down in times past.

---

About Liebig's Law

Liebig's "Chemistry"

Liebig's Law, as it's sometimes referred to, is that growth is limited by the scarcest resource (in the case of plants, for example, by water, CO2 or soil nutrients).  This is said to have been first proposed by Carl Sprengel in 1828. Click here for Liebig's text, which has numerous references to Sprengel.


I came across another early paper, "Limitations of Blackman's Law of limiting factors and Harder's concept of relative minimum as applied to photosynthesis" by B. N. Singh and K. N. Lal published in Plant Physiology.  It was published in 1935 and the newest reference is dated 1925.  The paper points out that no resource acts in isolation, so it's not as simple as saying that growth is limited by the scarcest resource.  (For example, think of how plants respond to increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations and the response of stomata, which allows them to lose less water.)

---

Stephenson, N. L.et al. "Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size." Nature (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12914

Briffa, K. R., T. J. Osborn, and F. H. Schweingruber. "Large-scale temperature inferences from tree rings: a review." Global and planetary change 40, no. 1 (2004): 11-26. doi:10.1016/S0921-8181(03)00095-X

Singh, B. N., and K. N. Lal. "Limitations of Blackman's law of limiting factors and Harder's concept of relative minimum as applied to photosynthesis." Plant Physiology 10, no. 2 (1935): 245.

---

From the WUWT comments

As usual, the dead wood WUWT-ers are all over the place.  Some are saying "this isn't anything new" while others are arguing "it's not so".  And others have opted for Anthony's "implications for paleoclimatology". (Archived here.)

@njsnowfan is still jumping up and down trying to get Michael Mann to listen to his "ice age cometh" argument and says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:01 pm
That will have to be filled under the category” Oh Mann” with all the rest.
Timber!!!

P.S Dr M. Mann
If you read my post, Just want to know if you are seeing signs of the sun freezing your hockey stick in the ice yet? Remember my first tweet to you when you blocked me 2 years ago. Yup this is I, so many blocked how could you remember me?

arthur4563 doesn't know much about factors that can affect tree rings and says "scientists don't no nuffin'":

January 15, 2014 at 12:07 pm
The biggest mstery is why anyone who claims intelligence in these matters would ever buy into the idea that temperature determines tree growth. I would think that any farmer would consider Mann a city-bred fool.

Donald Mitchell's mind works in strange ways - he says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:14 pm
I really do not see a problem for the alarmists. If the public finally realizes that the increased carbon dioxide increases the rate of growth, they can always claim that increasing temperatures cause increasing carbon dioxide. This not only wraps things up in a nice circular argument, but certainly would not affect their credibility in my estimation.

Theo Goodwin decides he likes this work, but rather oddly implies that he doesn't think dendrochronology is empirical when he says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:35 pm
Finally, someone is doing empirical research on treemometry. It comes only seventeen years after The Team ignored the obligation to do it. Once this work gets rolling, prepare to be amazed. Science will replace wishful thinking. Should be broadcast to all secondary school students.

And Theo Goodwin follows it up with another blunder when he says:

January 15, 2014 at 12:41 pm
Cam_S says: January 15, 2014 at 12:20 pm “Wow! This story has made it to The Guardian.”

I bet it gets disappeared. They do not yet understand its implications.

Alec aka Daffy Duck says "everybody knew that":

January 15, 2014 at 1:23 pm
??? They think this is new? I’m a layman but logged wood in Maine in my youth AND know the equation for the volume of a cylinder … I thought everyone knew tree faster and faster as they grow

Rud Istvan says "it's not universally true" - just look at the tree rings!:

January 15, 2014 at 1:35 pm
Another way to see that this is not universally true is simply to look at growth rings of a boll cross section. My wife and I just harvested two, a white pine and an oak, for proposes of making furniture at the cabin in Georgia. For both the hardwood and the softwood, the annual ring spacing starts large, and shrinks as the tree matures. Inner rings are more widely spaced, outer rings are quite narrow. One can measure this differential over time, and using the change over time in pi* delta r^2 (since volume is just times height, and trees reach their species typical maximum height long before maximum mass (explained by the hydraulic limitation hypothesis) can actually use calculus to work out optimum harvesting times depending on the wood sought-sawtimber or pulpwood (or, in the case of hardwood with extensive crowns, both).

While Gary Pearse says the opposite to Russ Istvan and this isn't "a new discovery" :

January 15, 2014 at 1:40 pm
A little arithmetic would have saved the researchers all that trouble:
(Circumference of year 20 ring / Circumference of year 10 ring) >2
given, on average, rings are similar in thickness plus there is growth upwards and outwards of the canopy. Certainly if you measured 100 trees the relation would be pretty firm. Sheesh what are they teaching in botany and forestry these days that this is a new discovery.
And:
“…growth accelerates as they age suggests that large, old trees may play an unexpectedly dynamic role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.” Suggests? It is a certainty! Sheesh, what arithmetic are they teaching botanists and foresters these days. No 95% certainty among these folks.

KNR decides that specialist dendrochronologists know nothing about tree growth:

January 15, 2014 at 1:48 pm
One thing for me that stood out was in ‘the team’ there was not one person who was well qualified in consider what actual effects tree growth, considering how important was to their claims . But then one thing climate ‘scientists’ have never been short of its ego and a extreme belief, against all evidenced, if their own intelligence. So perhaps they felt they did not need one.

M Courtney had the same thought as I did when he said:

January 15, 2014 at 3:13 pm
When talking of volume growth it is worth remembering that trees are fractal.
The growth in tree volume can be a twig from a branch. An increase in the external sixe of the tree may not be necessary.
So the limits of growth may not be reached on the lifetime of a tree.

Matt Ridley goes to Serengeti and tells big fat lies about the work of Michael Mann and Keith Briffa

Update - see below for link to relevant article on RealClimate and more.


WUWT had an article by Brandon Schollenberger in which, by a string of seriously flawed logic, he accused Dr James Hansen of being a climate science denier.

Of course, this champion of climate science is anything but.

However the same day, Anthony Watts posted a display of absolute science denial by one Matt Ridley (archived here).  I've written about Matt Ridley before a few times, such as here. Matt Ridley pretends that paleoclimate records are all wrong, writing utter junk:

Given that these were the most prominent and recognisable graphs used to show evidence of unprecedented climate change in recent decades, and to justify unusual energy policies that hit poor people especially hard, this case of cherry-picked publication was just as potentially shocking and costly as Tamiflugate. Omission of inconvenient data is a sin in government science as well as in the private sector.

Matt Ridley tried to resurrect an old, tired and failed disinformation tactic.  He claimed that an obsessive by the name of Stephen McIntyre "unearthed problems" in paleo temperature reconstructions and Matt is implying that earth hasn't warmed compared to the past.  Matt is intent on doing his utmost to burn up the world to a cinder.  How's that for exaggeration!  But it is probably a truer statement than any in Matt Ridley's despicable article.

Matt Ridley has opted for the Serengeti Strategy.  He's singled out Michael Mann and Keith Briffa and is lying about their research.  Yes, there were some statistical errors in the first Mann reconstruction but they made no intrinsic difference to the result.  As for Keith Briffa - I know of no-one who has questioned his meticulous research and found it wanting.  Except for failed banker Matt Ridley - but Matt couldn't tell a bristlecone from a bar of soap let alone understand the ins and outs of dendrochronology.

In any case, Michael Mann's initial results have been confirmed by multiple subsequent reconstructions using many different types of proxies from many different sources, carried out by many different independent teams of researchers.

Matt Ridley is telling big fat lies.

There are numerous temperature reconstructions of the past using a variety of proxies, many more than the "handful of ...trees" that Matt Ridley wants to have you believe.  They are described in Chapter 5 of the IPCC's latest WG1 report.  For example, below is Figure 5.7 - click to enlarge it.

Figure 5.7 IPCC AR5 WG1 Reconstructed (a) Northern Hemisphere and (b) Southern Hemisphere, and (c) global annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions (see Appendix 5.A.1 for further information about each one) are shown as indicated in the legends, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extra-tropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (HadCRUT4 land and sea, and CRUTEM4 land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881–1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on timescales less than ~50 years.

I don't have time to research or go into all the ins and outs of Matt Ridley's wrongs. I do notice that he is swinging further into denial and disinformation as time goes by.  I think that for a man of his stature (he managed to get into the British House of Lords) - shrunken though it is by his spectacular failure in his own field of endeavour - to go to such lengths to disinform the public is utterly disgusting.  And all the people who promote his disinformation, like Anthony Watts and Lord Lawson of the Global Warming Policy Foundation - are equally despicable characters.

What do you think?

I don't have time to look at the WUWT comments, either.  You can see them for yourself in the archive here. They will doubtless enlighten readers about the madness of denial much more than science.

Update

Tim Osborne reminded me about the RealClimate article on his and Keith Briffa and co's recent work.  While Matt Ridley is tweeting the Auditor as his "authority" once again.  Perhaps he really is so scientifically illiterate he can't tell the difference between a wannabe denier like McIntyre and real science from the experts.  It's more likely that Matt can tell the difference.  After all, he's on the GWPF bandwagon.  The GWPF expects him to misinform the public.  That's what it does and it's presumably why they exist and why they back him - and vice versa.

Anthony Watts trips over his feet (in mouth) in his haste to stomp on Michael Mann

Anthony Watts of WUWT is full of blunders today.  First some science-related blunders now a legal blunder. As readers know from previously, US law is not something I'm familiar with but it reads to me as if poor old Anthony has got it wrong again. (Confirmed!)

Anthony wrote gleefully, popcorn in the popper (archived here):

What a great Christmas present for Mike. It is back to square one for him with his lawsuit over what he views as libel by Mark Steyn and CEI.

Poor old Anthony is going to be dreadfully disappointed.  He thinks that the appeals court overturned the previous court ruling.  But it didn't.  Anthony wrote:

Since the previous ruling this summer that said the lawsuit could go ahead was nothing less than a bad legal joke: ...Mann-Steyn lawsuit judge inverts the defendants actions, botches ruling…that ruling has now been nullified by a higher appeals court ruling, Mann’s case will now have to start over.  This new ruling seems pretty blunt. They basically accepted the ACLU amicus brief as fact, saying:

ORDERED, sua sponte, that the Clerk shall file the ACLU’s lodged amicus curiae response as its response.

The appeal was granted with no caveats or exceptions, suggesting that the appeals court views the decision by that wacky judge Natalia M. Combs Greene (now retired) this summer as being very badly flawed, much like the hockey stick itself.

Anthony's wrong.  The appeals court didn't overturn anything let alone "with no caveats or exceptions".  No appeal was granted. On the contrary, some appeals were dismissed. Nor did it accept any amicus curiae as fact.  It only ordered that various amici curiae be filed.

From the The Court of Appeals Order - it  "considered" various bits and pieces relating to Michael Manns lawsuit against Mark Steyn and various parties.  It ruled that:

• The ACLU's amicus curiae be filed
• The amicus curiae submitted by Reporters for Freedom of the Press (whoever they may be - they are supporting the appellant, Mark Steyn) and umpteen others, and the supplement to it be filed
• Michael Mann's opposition to the appeal and Mark Steyn's response to the opposition be filed
• The appeals by Mark Steyn etc be dismissed because Michael Mann amended his complaint, so the appeals are moot.  They've subsequently lodged new appeals which remain pending.
• The dismissal of the appeals doesn't prevent the appellants from lodging new appeals.

Anthony Watts is acting like a goose again!

I'd say there is nothing to see there.  It's nothing more than legal housekeeping. Anthony Watts is acting like a goose (again).

Denier weirdness: Mock outrage and conspiracy ideation by Anthony Watts at WUWT

Today Anthony Watts indulges in some more scientist-bashing and conspiracy ideation.  He writes a protest article on his blog WUWT about a newly published article by Lewandowsky et al.  Anthony blogged under the headline (archived here):

Mann and Lewandowsky go psychotic on climate skeptics

It would be very rare, if not unheard of, for five people, while simultaneously experiencing a psychotic episode, to co-author an article and have it accepted for publication by the Association for Psychological Science.

Sane Australia provides a generalised description of psychosis:

When someone experiences psychosis they are unable to distinguish what is real — there is a loss of contact with reality. 

About psychosis from Wikipedia:

In properly diagnosed psychiatric disorders (where other causes have been excluded by extensive medical and biological laboratory tests), psychosis is a descriptive term for the hallucinations, delusions, sometimes violence, and impaired insight that may occur.[6][7] 

Anthony Watts feeds off people's inability to distinguish what is real. Delusional beliefs and impaired insight are commonly seen at Anthony Watts' blog.

No, I'm not saying that Anthony Watts is psychotic or that climate science deniers are psychotic.  Psychosis is a particular condition that is usually temporary or episodic in certain psychiatric disorders.

Being unable to tell science fact from science fiction doesn't mean a person is psychotic.  It usually means they don't have sufficient knowledge.  Sometimes an individual may not have the mental capacity to obtain such knowledge. Sometimes a person's brain refuses to process information properly because there is a perceived conflict between their view of the world and knowledge - resulting in cognitive dissonance.  There is research that suggests that with some people, when faced with particular facts, the "fear" centre of the brain takes over from the "reasoning" pathways.

The article that Anthony basis his "psychotic" accusation upon has the title:

The Subterranean War on Science

It was written by Stephan Lewandowsky, Michael E. Mann, Linda Bauld, Gerard Hastings, and Elizabeth F. Loftus and published in the Association for Psychological Science's Observer.  The paper is short and strong.  It's well worth reading.

Conspiratorial thinking

The paper refers to the conspiratorial element of denial, for example:

The conspiratorial element of denial explains why contrarians often perceive themselves as heroic dissenters who — in their imagination — are following Galileo’s footsteps by opposing a mainstream scientific “elite” that imposes its views not on the basis of overwhelming evidence but for political reasons. Mainstream climate scientists are therefore frequently accused of “Lysenkoism,” after the Soviet scientist whose Lamarckian views of evolution were state dogma in the Soviet Union. Other contrarians appeal to Albert Einstein’s injunction “. . . to not stop questioning” to support their dissent from the fact that HIV causes AIDS (Duesberg, 1989).

One has often seen on Anthony Watts' blog accusations of Lysenkoism in among the comments.  Anthony Watts himself has indulged, for example:

• Putting up a Forbes article: An Utter Nutter: Anthony Watts has "Gone Lysenko" in a Bout of Recursive Fury
• Promoting the idea by Lindzen: A divide is emerging among the contrarians - utter nutters vs tarnished lukewarmers

Attacks on science and scientists in a variety of disciplines

More from the Lewandowsky et al paper - I've changed the formatting slightly adding dot points:

This conspiratorial element provides a breeding ground for the personal and professional attacks on scientists that seemingly inevitably accompany science denial. The present authors have all been subject to such attacks, whose similarity is notable because the authors’ research spans a broad range of topics and disciplines:

• The first author has investigated the psychological variables underlying the acceptance or rejection of scientific findings;
• the second author is a paleoclimatologist who has shown that current global temperatures are likely unprecedented during the last 1,000 years or more;
• the third and fourth authors are public-health researchers who have investigated the attitudes of teenagers and young adults towards smoking and evaluated a range of tobacco control interventions; and
• the fifth author has established that human memory is not only fallible but subject to very large and systematic distortions.

This article surveys some of the principal techniques by which the authors have been harassed; namely,

• cyber-bullying and public abuse;
• harassment by vexatious freedom-of-information (FOI) requests, complaints, and legal threats or actions;
• and perhaps most troubling, by the intimidation of journal editors who are acting on manuscripts that are considered inconvenient by deniers.

The uniformity with which these attacks are pursued across several disciplines suggests that their motivation is not scientific in nature.

Cyber-bullying and public abuse - this is what Anthony Watts' blog is all about, particularly the "public abuse".  Note for example the title that Anthony Watts gave to his article:- "Mann and Lewandowsky go psychotic on climate skeptics".  This is mild abuse by comparison with his normal fare.

Harassment by vexatious freedom-of-information (FOI) requests, complaints, and legal threats or actions - it was just over a week ago when Anthony's blog was last used to urge harassment by email.  Anthony posted an article by Willis Eschenbach.  Willis wrote some rather impolite (to say the least) letters to Science and Steven Mosher urged WUWT readers to spam Science (archived here).  Steven Mosher says (excerpt - my bold italics):

October 22, 2013 at 8:06 am
...I would suugest that people at WUWT start filling email boxes at Science. with polite requests for the data and the code. Grass roots effort. people rely too much on guys like willis and steve Mc and me to make these requests. The more people who ask or complain in a nice way the better chance we have of changing things. We might not agree about the climate but we can agree about the importance of supplying code and data. On this there should be no sides to the debate. both sides, all sides. Show your data and your code or stop wasting our time.

Anthony Watts often posts articles about the ongoing frivolous lawsuits by ATI used to harass, intimidate and try to get access to scientist's private emails.  Examples are archived here and here and here or just use google.

And who can forget Anthony Watts threatening to sue Greg Laden (archived here) simply for pointing out the silliness of Anthony's speculative article about life in space?  Click here for Greg Laden's take.

Intimidation of journal editors who are acting on manuscripts that are considered inconvenient by deniers - the standout case relating (peripherally) to climate change is the attempt to suppress the Lewandowsky et al paper, Recursive Fury.  Anthony Watts blogs about that too - archived here. (Be warned, Barry - if you post a comment pushing your barrow here it will be deleted.  Same goes for the others who want that paper suppressed. I rarely delete a comment.)

Anthony Watts' mock outrage

Now to Anthony Watts' latest article of mock shock horror that anyone could be so accused.  Anthony writes (archived here):

Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky have a new paper out that redefines the term “climate ugliness”. Apparently FOIA requests are “harassment”. And Internet blogs “wrongly sidestep peer-reviewed literature”. Oh Mann, tell that to the IPCC who used magazine articles as sources for AR4. The title suggests all this is happening “subterranean” when in fact blogs are all out in the open, while Dr. Mann continues to fight expensive legal battles to hide his publicly funded emails at the University of Virginia and imagines the Koch brothers behind every virtual rock and tree.

What is harassment?

Apparently FOIA requests are “harassment”  FOIA requests are only harrassment when they are organised campaigns like that solicited by Steven Mosher above or by Anthony Watts himself when he wrote (archived here):

My advice to UK readers, start sending an FOI request every week and complain loudly to your UK representatives and write letters to the editor.  Details are in the body of the post below. – Anthony

Or when Steve McIntyre wrote on his blog (archived here).  Click the image to enlarge:

Side-stepping peer-reviewed literature

Side-stepping peer-reviewed literature: Internet blogs like WUWT do this as a matter of course.  There are plenty of examples at WUWT.

Anthony Watts claims that the IPCC report quoted from a magazine article.  He's wrong.  Ironically, Anthony points to a newspaper article as his source for that claim!

In fact, the reference was to a University of Berne Masters thesis by Dario-Andri Schworer (search the page for "Schworer").  Also it was only one of several references in a table in Working Group 2, not Working Group 1 (see Table 1.2).  Working Group 2 is about Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability not the physical science as such. This volume by its nature draws on many more sources of information than can be found in scientific journals.

And now I'll point to the transcript of a television show that has an interview with Dario-Andri Schworer, in which he discusses the IPCC's use of his reference :D  Or you can watch it here:

Anthony continues (my bold italics):

Mainstream climate skeptics admit there has been warming in the last century, CO2 has an effect, but that the issue has been propped up by biased surface temperature measurements and oversold by activist scientists (such as Mann) and the media, since we have seen that climate sensitivity has been observed to be significantly lower than claims by computer models.

Anthony's claim about climate sensitivity could be described as "side-stepping peer-reviewed literature".  It's a bald statement and in any case it makes no sense.  Climate models don't make claims.  Scientists and science deniers may "make claims" but climate models are just tools.  Very sophisticated tools but tools nonetheless.  (A very different and much less sophisticated tool is Anthony Watts.)

Anthony Watts' Lysenko-style conspiracy ideation

Anthony foolishly writes (my bold italics):

Since they are slowly losing the argument as nature keeps adding years to “the pause” in global warming, what Dr. Mann and Dr. Lewandowsky are doing is engaging in suppression of dissent.

That's just silly.  Has Anthony Watts' dissent been suppressed? No?  Then who or what dissent is being suppressed?  He doesn't say.  What he could be arguing is that Professors Mann and Lewandowsky are so all-powerful that they control not only the world's media but all the little science-attacking blogs on the internet.  The evidence shows otherwise.

But Anthony is busy proving the paper correct, writing:

Their tactic is exactly the same thing that went on in communist Soviet Union with dissenters. It is called Political abuse of psychiatry. Psychiatry was used as a tool to eliminate political opponents (“dissidents”) who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted official dogma. Dissenters were labeled as having a form of mental illness that needed to be cured. We all know how that turned out. The Soviet Union is no more.

Aha!  Anthony's promoting the old Lysenko theory again!  Anthony Watts likens the publication of a paper to Stalinist Russia! The circle is complete!

(Is Anthony forecasting the demise of the USA with his "the Soviet Union is no more"?)

From the WUWT comments

The comments section is bursting with conspiracy ideation and attribution of unimaginable power and influence to just two scientists - Professors Lewandowsky and Mann.  The WUWT commenters largely ignore the other authors of the paper and focus in on the two whose names they recognise, except for one or two mentions of Elizabeth Loftus. (Comments are archived here.)

pablo an ex pat says:

November 1, 2013 at 10:47 am
Looks like projection to me too

David Johnson says:

November 1, 2013 at 10:49 am
It is beyond parody

daviditron says:

November 1, 2013 at 10:50 am
The clearest case of projection I’ve seen in a while.

Pat Michaels is digging for something and says:

November 1, 2013 at 10:50 am
I’m betting that his email shows how much he received from Fenton for RealClimate. Mann does not work for free.

007 says Michael E Mann has wielded enormous power right from when he was only seven years old!:

November 1, 2013 at 11:01 am
Funny he doesn’t mention the millions who’ve died from malaria due to the de facto ban on DDT (instigated by people like Mike Mann and in the absence of sound scientific evidence).

gopal panicker says:

November 1, 2013 at 11:03 am
they are using the tobacco industry as a straw man…if they have the truth they should welcome questions…these guys are now paranoid

Oldseadog says:

November 1, 2013 at 11:17 am
Mann et al are guilty of assisting in the deaths of countless third world people by making sure that £Billions are spent needlessly in useless research regarding CAGW.
Kettle, black, pot, calling, the. Rearrange to suit.

andrewmharding says:

November 1, 2013 at 12:29 pm
I have said this on WUWT several times before, AGW is now a belief, no different to a belief in astrology or witchcraft. The science of AGW ended when the world stubbornly refused to warm for 17 years as it was predicted to do by the computer models.
Mann and Lewandowsky are like rats in a corner with a cat coming towards them, hence the squeals. Their squeals though are not of terror, but of spite and self-righteous indignation to those who would dare have the temerity to question their beliefs. One thing is certain though, the louder and the more shrill the squeals, the more certain we can be that the whole rotten mess they have concocted is falling around their ears and more importantly, their wallets!

Tim Clark says:

November 1, 2013 at 12:44 pm
HEY LEW,
You’re sick.
Because you have to be proven correct to maintain self-esteem and the CAGW bandwagon is crumbling, your fragile ego is shattered.
Self loathing has caused you to become bitter with hatred.
Seek professional help, please.
Tim

Dr Burns rejects Anthony Watts' own statement about what "mainstream climate skeptics admit" and says:

November 1, 2013 at 12:49 pm
“Mainstream climate skeptics admit there has been warming in the last century, CO2 has an effect, but …” No they don’t. Where is the evidence that atmospheric CO2 concentration is not an effect of warming oceans rather than a cause ?

SanityP, in among the 150-odd comments to date about what Professor Lewandowsky and Mann et al wrote, says:

November 1, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Nobody actually cares what Messieurs Mann and Lewandowsky actually think about anything.

bushbunny says:

November 1, 2013 at 8:12 pm
You know if this came to trial, how many scientists will test their hypothesis a lot more than 99.

DirkH has particular criteria for determining when he is being lied to and says (excerpt):

November 1, 2013 at 6:17 pm
Well, I grew up near the Iron Curtain and we were able to receive DDR television.
When I hear that 97% of people agree on something I know I’m being lied to. (The DDR’s ruling party SED hat that kind of election result.)

Jim Clarke does his own amateur psychological analysis, singling out - you guessed it - Michael Mann and says (excerpt):

November 1, 2013 at 8:29 pm
I have recently been learning about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), due to an unfortunate relationship in my personal life. As I read the above paper, I could not help but see some similarities to the disorder, particularly with Prof. Mann. I am certainly in no position to make a diagnosis. Not only do I lack the necessary qualifications, but I know practically nothing about the authors outside of their published statements. 

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Note to commenters:  As HotWhopper readers know, I have a very liberal comment policy.  It will be more tightly enforced for this article.  I will not allow this article to be used as a springboard for resurrecting old denier memes about climategate emails or to post conspiratorial rants about Recursive Fury or NASA faked the moon landing or similar.  (This is despite the fact that any such comments would most likely support the findings of these papers and the paper discussed in the above article. )