Almost everything we know about fake sceptics like "Joanne Nova" is spot on...

While WUWT is trying to get warm (posting articles about ice at the moment), I popped over to see what "Joanne Nova" was doing on her blog.  I found this:

Almost everything the media tells you about skeptics is wrong: they’re engineers and hard scientists. They like physics too.

...96% of respondents said that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing with 79% attributing the increase to man-made sources. 81% agreed that global temperatures had increased over the 20th century and 81% also agreed that CO2 is a warming gas. But only 2% believed that increases in CO2 would cause catastrophic global warming....

Now that's not necessarily a survey of "skeptics" (ie fake sceptics or science deniers).  In fact going by the first three lots of responses, there were something like 20% of responses from flat out deniers, with around 4% being completely deluded deniers.  (I've previously written about the survey itself, here.)

"Jo" had 210 comments to her article.  Since she seemed to be arguing that fake sceptics accept the science in regard to climate change, I decided to check the comments to see how many of the people commenting on her blog accepted the science.

This is how many of Jo Nova's respondents, writing 210 comments, agreed that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing and attribute the increase to man-made sources and that global temperatures had increased over the 20th century 81% and that CO2 is a warming gas.

One.

One - I can't even be sure about that.  That one person did explain in detail the evidence for 'CO2 is increasing from "man-made" sources'.  That's probably not a completely fair reflection though.  There was one other person commenting who didn't actually come right out and say that he accepted the science.  However, going by the reaction of other people to his comments, he does accept science.

For the rest, it's pretty obvious that Jo Nova's readers are the 20% who reject global warming including some who don't even accept that atmospheric CO2 is increasing.  The talk consisted mostly of comments full of words like "scam, BS, and bottom feeding" and "CAGW" and "falsify[ing] records" and "nobody has a clue" and "tampering" and "climategate" and "evil mongrels" and "warmists" and "Al Gore" and "outrageous propaganda" and even "Those of us who accept that CO2s net effect is to cool the atmosphere are treated like lepers, even by the ‘mainstream’ sceptics."  Oh, and the people who owned up to their quals mostly said they were engineers.  (I make that observation, knowing it is a generalisation having a basis in the numbers and offer my apologies to intelligent, educated engineers.)

Only a couple of people seemed to have read the article Jo posted, one writing mournfully:

So four out of five have bought in to the simplistic warmist arguments. 

And another bemoaning the fact that the fake sceptics who answered Mike Haseler's survey must in reality be non-genuine fake sceptics, writing:

Therefore it seems to me unlikely that all these highly qualified people have looked at the published evidence and formed their own opinions on the basis of the evidence.

Jo Nova is a genuine fake sceptic

Enough said on that score.  You might be interested to read what Jo Nova said, two articles after her claim that "Almost everything the media tells you about skeptics is wrong".  She was writing about a new article in Nature Climate Change (open access), which demonstrates that "observational data show a continued increase of hot extremes over land".

It's getting hotter

Here's a summary from ScienceDaily.com:

While there are claims that there has been a hiatus in global average temperatures, no such hiatus has occurred at the extreme end of the temperature spectrum. New research shows extremely hot temperatures over land have dramatically and unequivocally increased in number and area despite claims that the rise in global average temperatures has slowed over the past 10 to 20 years.

Jo Nova falls back on the dumb denier meme: "the models and theory are wrong"  - but it's Jo Nova who's wrong

Jo doesn't believe it.  She's a genuine fake sceptic, not like all those non-genuine fake sceptics who responded to Mike Haseler's survey.  Jo found six points to protest the observations, calling it "strained nonsense", and then added another protest at the end. The main text is Jo Nova's with my comments in italics:

If the world was warming, they wouldn’t bother with this strained nonsense, would they? They are talking about 15 year trends in air over land, in summer, on the hottest 10% of days.

1. Seneviratne et al acknowledge the pause in global temperatures. Therefore the models, and the theory is wrong. Every other incidental trend in smaller markers is a deckchair on the Clitanic. [Sou: What a load of rot. Jo's still riding the denier's escalator.]
2. There is no causal connection with CO2. The greenhouse effect is supposed to be full time. It’s not like there are days when it doesn’t work. CO2 is either making the global average warmer as predicted or… it isn’t and their models are useless. [Sou: For all her denier talk, Jo is claiming there is either unnatural or natural variation, there can't be both. Dumb as!  Hasn't she heard of ENSO, or solar variation, or volcanos?]
3. The paper admits the summer extremes are warming over land, but not the warm winter extremes. So the greenhouse effect switches off in winter? That will be news. Wait, they also find there is a cooling effect in the mid-high latitudes of the northern hemisphere during the boreal winter? Isn’t that pretty close to when and where peak CO2 levels occur? I guess that’s only 10ppm of extra CO2, but this is not “parts of a jigsaw” coming together — it’s cherry picking. [Sou: This is a misrepresentation of the paper, of science as well as a misrepresentation of "peak CO2 levels", which don't differ by 10 ppm NH summer to NH winter and are highest in May, at the start of the boreal summer, not in the boreal winter.] 

Data Source: CO2Now.org

4. Extreme heat doesn’t necessarily mean hot. Looks like some of these extreme warm days occurred in places like Russia, Alaska and Greenland. As far as I can tell, they define “hottest extreme days” as being the hottest 10% of all days in a grid cell from 1979-2010. The average July temperature in Nuuk, Greenland is 10C (50F)  so the top 10% of “extreme hot weather” there is not so scary. [Sou: Jo, come back when the ice melts on Greenland and seas rise by seven metres and let us know how "scary" it is!]
5. Are they serious? A 15 year noisy trend in 30 year dataset is irrelevant. The graphs start in 1979 (when satellites start) but that’s also near the start of the last long warming cycle. For all we know it is connected to the natural upswing in the 60 year PDO cycle. Indeed, if surface cooling of the ocean is reducing global averages now (the explanation Seneviratne offers for the lack of global warming), obviously surface warming of the ocean could have been doing the opposite before. Without longer records this is meaningless, mindless PR headline hunting with no scientific significance. [Sou: Oh, so RSS data from 2002 or whenever is the ants pants and disproves global warming, but careful measurements of heat extremes over 30 years have "no scientific significance"? Pull the other one!]
6. Just because something is statistically significant doesn’t mean it is meaningful. Since it warmed for the first 20 years of the dataset and then paused at the warmer level, it’s hardly surprising that someone can still “discover” some short trends that are rising. [Sou: ha ha ha.  This is too weak to comment on except to ask why non-significant data since 2005 are worth thinking about but statistically significant trends from 1979 that are consistent with AGW are not?]

Are the UNSW scientists trying to learn something about the world, or are they trying to generate headlines with the words “extreme hot temperatures”? Judge them by their press releases….

I'd say the UNSW are trying to learn something about the world, wouldn't you?  It's the Jo Nova's of the world who want to hide the data.

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Sonia I. Seneviratne, Markus G. Donat, Brigitte Mueller, Lisa V. Alexander. No pause in the increase of hot temperature extremes. Nature Climate Change, 2014; 4 (3): 161 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2145

Scottish (Fake) Sceptic: A legend in his own lunchtime but no survey expert

Results are out - see below.

Anthony Watts has an article up by/about Mike Haseler (archived here), who going by uknowispeaksense is regarded as a "legend in his own lunchtime".  What he isn't is a true sceptic, though that's what he's called his blog, and I'm not even sure that he's Scottish.  (Then again he also calls himself a climate scientist though from his own blog, the closest he's got to anything remotely related to climate science is designing precision temperature controllers and who knows what they were used for!)

What is clear is that he is tied up with another shonky organisation that call themselves (or their blog at any rate) the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum.  Mike describes himself as "Chairman".  According to the blog there are six on the committee.  They had a bit of a natter one day and decided that with six people they could form a club, from the look of things.  (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.**)

Anyway, like the ScottishSceptic blog, the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum blog is just another dime a dozen anti-science blog.  (The third most recent article on the blog is promoting Murry Salby of all people!  You can see an archive of their home page here if you're curious about them.)

A month or so back Mike Haseler asked fellow fake sceptics to complete a survey.  According to UKISS, he did the rounds of various science denying blogs in the UK and the USA. A month later and he's got some preliminary results.

Mike reckons he got 5,000 responses, so he managed to get as far as reading the respondent count.  He also managed to process some of the questions, but he reckons it will take him a year to write a report.

It's pretty obvious that Mike Haselaar doesn't design or analyse surveys for a living.  Still, to take a year, even part time, to write up the result of a 21 question survey, of which most were just demographic questions and of which only two were open ended (including the last "any other comments" question) probably means he hasn't got a clue what to do with the responses.  Nevertheless, he's going to try to get some funds from the "guvmint" he so despises to tide him over while he tries to figure it out.  He wrote to Anthony Watts:

Given the huge number of responses and detail of questions a full assessment will take up to one year to complete. 

Do you reckon he's going to go through each response one by one?  Or what?  Weird that the number of responses is a factor in writing up the results.

What about the "detail of questions"?  Well, all but two were tick the box questions so that would take no time at all to analyse.  In fact he should by rights have prepared the analytic framework before he asked people to respond, as part of the survey design.  He should have already set up the crosstabs or whatever he was doing. Then all he needed to do was plonk the numbers in.  If he wanted to do any fancy analysis on the basis of the initial results he could still do that.  But a year? Sheesh!

Now normally if a person wanted someone to pay for something they'd write up a proposal and pitch it to the prospective funder.  You wouldn't write a mickey mouse survey that has no apparent design, is filled with loaded questions and pitched to the scientific illiterati and then say "it's all too hard to analyse and will take me a year, how about some dosh!"  But that's exactly what Mike Haselar is doing.  He wrote to Anthony Watts that he's:

... looking to rub shoulders with the politicians in the hope of scrounging more public money...

Oops - nope.  I accidentally (on purpose) got that from one of his articles when he was writing about something else.  I'll try again.  What he says about his twenty-one question quiz:

This is a huge commitment from an organisation that has no outside funding and is reliant on one full-time volunteer (Mike Haseler). We will therefore be approaching the Scottish and UK government with a view to obtaining funding to complete the analysis.

A huge commitment? Uknowispeaksense has the survey here.  See for yourself.  It's a short quiz with only one six-part question about climate.  (The rest are mainly demographic questions and voting preferences etc. although there is a strange question which I'll get to shortly)  The vaguely climate sciency question was simple in the extreme, or I should say simplistic.  Mike prefaced the survey asking people to "Please say if you agree or disagree with the following statements" and then proceeded to give them three more choices. So he couldn't even get the simplest question straight.

Anyway, here is the one and only climate question.  Feel free to complete it.  I'll let it run for a while and let you know the results FWIW :)

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey , the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Mike had one other question that was, well I don't know what he was trying for with this one.  I think he may have been trying to figure out the extent to which his respondents had a tendency for conspiracy ideation.  Maybe you can figure it out.

What he did was offer a number of statements about a flu epidemic and wanted people to put them in order from most trustworthy to least trustworthy.  In case people didn't understand what he wanted he put the question another way and told them their highest ranking should be at the top and the lowest ranked at the bottom.   Then, because he still wasn't sure his readers would understand what he wanted, he tried a third time, telling them the highest ranking should be at the top etc.

Here it is, thanks to UKISS. Click to enlarge it.

Source: scef via uknowispeaksense

All the statements except the top one provide a source for the information.  What do you reckon Wondering Willis Eschenbach would put up the top :)

Anyway.  That's it.  Just goes to show that despite their scorn of guvmint and guvmint-funded research, some fake sceptics have no hesitation in putting their hands up for taxpayer funding.  And it just goes to show why fake sceptics have such a hard time getting research published.  Some of them are so hopeless they can't even design and analyse a simple little survey on their lonesome.

As for Mike Haseler - given his history, I'm waiting for him to come running crying "copyright" and "libel" and "sue".

PS If you want to know Mike's preliminary results, you can read them in the WUWT archived article here.

PPS**

.

Results - 97% agree

Okay - the survey has run long enough. The numbers are actually just survey respondents so they don't necessarily reflect the readership of this blog.  Having given that caveat, I'll extrapolate the results to HotWhopper readership anyway.  It makes life more interesting :)

• 3% of HotWhopper readers are science deniers of the "sky dragon slaying" type.
• 3% of HotWhopper readers aren't aware that burning hydrocarbons results in CO2 - or maybe they aren't aware that coal and oil are hydrocarbons or maybe they don't know how a lot of electricity is produced or maybe they don't know that most motor vehicles run by burning petrol or diesel.
• 3% of HotWhopper readers don't know that earth has warmed, rather a lot actually, and rather quickly.
• One HotWhopper reader says climate doesn't change naturally.
• 15% of HotWhopper readers don't agree that CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, 68% agree that it will and 17% are "neutral", though I can't tell what proportion of that 17% took "neutral" to mean "don't know" vs "neither agree nor disagree" vs "I'm not saying".
• 97% of HotWhopper readers understand something about CO2 and greenhouse gases and climate.  Now that number seems awfully familiar.