More than 10 years on, Anthony Watts at WUWT is still befuddled by temperature anomalies

It's hard to believe but poor Anthony Watts, despite all the help offered him over the years, is still totally befuddled, perplexed and bamboozled by the notion of temperature anomalies. You know he's not the brightest spark in deniersville yet you'd have thought that by now even he might have learnt something about temperature charts. But no.

The oddest thing is that he's unashamed of being numerically illiterate. He might even regard it as a strength. It means his readers have found someone, somewhere, who's dimmer than they are, and that could be why they keep coming back for more.

Today Anthony wrote about the global average surface temperature for 2019, saying at least in the USA it wasn't another "hottest year". That's a classic conspiratorial diversion tactic, by the way: focus on a detail and try to dispute the big picture.

Getting rid of the spurious blips - another look at global sea surface temperatures

Kevin Cowtan | Source: U York

Once again, Kevin Cowtan has brought his skills to climate science, working with Robert Rohde and Zeke Hausfather. They decided to explore those pesky ups and downs in the temperature record, which a lot of people (scientists mostly) have expressed concerns about. This new paper is largely addressing bucket bias in sea surface temperature and is very detailed. Taken with his other work on temperature records, this has to cement Kevin Cowtan's place among the "serious climate nerds" (h/t ykw!)

A hybrid check on sea surface temperature bias corrections

The authors analysed sea surface temperature, the main source of the temperature blips, from a new perspective. Their analysis can be seen mainly as a check of the bias corrections used in other sea surface temperature records. Instead of reanalysing data from ships and buoys, they compared weather stations on the coast and on islands with the measurements taken on ships when they passed close to the coast. They subjected this to further analysis and called the result a hybrid SST (sea surface temperature).

I can only imagine how much work this must have entailed. There are hints in the paper. Not only did they get the temperature records from land and nearby sea, they made adjustments in their analysis to compensate for the fact that with global warming, the land surface is warming faster than the sea surface, plus more.

They used their results to assess the bias correction that needs to be made when the sources for sea surface temperature changed, such as from buckets to engine intake, and to buoys (see below). The end result was a different check on sea surface temperatures and additional evidence that:

• Some of the odd blips in the temperature records were not what actually happened - particularly the upward WWII blip and the drop down around 1910
• The NOAA sea surface temperature record from 1997 onwards is probably closest to reality. On the other hand, the Cowtan17 analysis indicates ERSST v4 is too warm in the earliest years (1860 to 1900 or so) and too cool in the early 20th century (1910 to late 1930s).
• Climate models reflect reality even more closely than previous records suggest. 

There's an excellent article on Kevin Cowtan's website which explains the research, and accompanying provisos. The paper and supporting information contain a lot more detail, including all the ifs and buts and maybes. Co-author Zeke Hausfather has a  Twitter thread about the paper, too.

Challenges in the historical record of sea surface temperature

The authors begin by pointing out that getting a record of sea surface temperature is more challenging in many ways than putting together land temperature records. The difficulty with sea surface temperature is that information sources change much more than those on land.

On the land, apart from getting as many records together as possible (thank you CRU and other early collectors, and more recently ISTI), the main issues to contend with are adjusting for changes in instrument design and location. Location changes can be identified from station records or inferred from abrupt changes in the record compared with neighbouring records. Technological change hasn't happened all that often in the past 150 years or so. The main ones include the introduction of the Stevenson screen way back, and the more recent shift to automatic weather stations with resistance probes replacing mercury thermometers.

On the sea, the problems include the different sources for temperature readings: buckets of differing materials being dipped into the sea, engine room intakes, sensors on the ships hull and, more recently, drifting buoys and satellites. Within all that, scientists have to account for things like changes in the height of ship decks, interruptions to the consistency of records caused by world wars (where the data source changed from predominately merchant ships to predominately naval vessels), and more. The marvel is that researchers have worked through all these difficulties and developed records of sea surface temperature going back many decades.

Questionable peaks and troughs in the SST records - WWII and all that

One period about which most scientists who've worked on the subject have had most issue with are the years of the second world war (WWII). Some data sets show a peak in temperature that has not been easily explained by weather or climate change phenomena. In addition, previous records show a drop in the temperature around 1910 that looks a bit odd. In this paper, the authors did not find the spike that exists in ERSST v5 and to a lesser extend in HadSST3. Neither did they find the drop in temperature in the early 1900s.

In the top chart below, the hybrid record is shown in blue. The different series are a bit hard to distinguish so you might want to click on the image to enlarge it.

Figure 1 | Comparison of the coastal hybrid temperature reconstruction (using all coastal stations and fitting the global mean of the coastal temperature differences only) to co-located data from HadSST3 and ERSSTv5 for the period 1850-2016. Spatial coverage is that of HadSST3 for all of the records, with coastal cells weighted by ocean fraction.The shaded region is the 95% confidence region for the HadSST3 anomalies including combined bias adjustment and measurement and sampling errors. The lower panel shows the adjustment applied to the raw data in the HadSST3 and coastal hybrid records. A comparison with the ERSSTv4 ensemble is shown in Figure S7. Source: Cowtan 17 Figure 12.

To help see the difference, the chart below compares the Cowtan17 hybrid record with NOAA's ERSST v4 record. As discussed, the two are very similar in the most recent decades, but differ much more in the period prior to the early 1940s.

Figure 2 | Comparison of coastal hybrid temperature reconstruction to the ERSSTv4 ensemble. The dotted line is the ensemble median, while the shaded region is the 95% range of the ERSSTv4 1000 member ensemble from Huang et al (2016). DOI: 10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0430.1 . Source: Cowtan17 supporting information Figure S7

The table below highlights further that the Cowtan17 analysis is closer to the NOAA data set for the period after WWII since 1997 than it is to the Hadley record (HadSST3). The trend of HadSST3 is lower than that found in Cowtan17 and ERSST v4.

Table 1: Trend in sea surface temperature since 1997. Source: Cowtan17 Supporting Information Table S2.

The analysis supports the CMIP5 models

Another thing the analysis suggests is that there is less of a difference between observations and the blended mean from CMIP5 model runs. This is shown in the chart below, from Kevin Cowtan's briefing paper, where the green line is the CMIP5 blended mean.

Figure 3 | Comparison of global temperature records based on either the UK Met Office sea surface temperature record (HadSST3), or our coastal hybrid record. The smoothed records are compared to the average of climate model simulations from the CMIP5 project. The lower panel shows the differences between each set of observations and the models. Source: Kevin Cowtan's blog article.

Constraints and provisos

The authors of Cowtan17 show a lot of restraint and go into quite a bit of discussion of uncertainties and provisos. They present their findings not as the be all and end all of temperature reconstruction, but as a suggestion of where to investigate further. Kevin Cowtan wrote in his briefing:

However we do not necessarily trust our new record, because of the assumptions we had to make in constructing it. The most important result of our work may therefore be to identify places where extra attention should be given to addressing problems in the existing sea surface temperature records. A secondary result is that caution is required when trying to draw conclusions about any differences between the models and the observations, whether it be to identify internal cycles of the climate system or problems in the models, because the differences that we do see are mostly within the range of uncertainty of the observations.

Just the same, this paper has a lot of merit, looks at the data differently, and shows that the spurious peaks and troughs from years gone by may indeed be out of whack. It also supports the records in recent times, which seems to me to add weight to their findings.

What deniers are saying about Cowtan17

Nothing. At least nothing at WUWT or anywhere else that I've seen. Either they all missed the paper because it came out in the holidays, or they haven't figured out what to say about it.

References and further reading

Cowtan, K., Robert Rohde, and Zeke Hausfather. "Evaluating biases in Sea Surface Temperature records using coastal weather stations." Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (2017). DOI: 10.1002/qj.3235 (pdf here)

• Evaluating biases in Sea Surface Temperature records using coastal weather stations - overview, briefing document, links to methods and data and more from Kevin Cowtan
• Twitter thread from Zeke Hausfather

Hurricane Harvey - realising the worst

Hurricane Harvey is fulfilling the worst case predictions and is now a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale. This is equivalent to a Category 5 cyclone on the Beaufort scale, used to categorise cyclones in Australia.

Hurricane intensity is measured by wind strength. Although winds are hugely destructive, Harvey brings bigger problems. As with all hurricanes, Hurricane Harvey is likely to dump huge amounts of rain and bring storm surges. Harvey will be worse than most because it is expected to hang around for several days. Below is the quantitative prediction forecast from the National Hurricane Center of NOAA as at 4:08 pm Central Daylight Time (USA). It shows horrific rain in Texas. Although the scale goes to 20 plus inches (500 plus mm), see how big that area is. There are warnings that the rainfall may be much higher in parts of that purple area. (I wouldn't want to be in the middle of it.)

Figure 1 | Rainfall potential from Hurricane Harvey: 120-hour Day 1-5 rainfall forecast (inches). Source: National Hurricane Centre, NOAA.

When extreme weather hits these days, it often breaks all records. This prompts science deniers to become more vocal, shrieking their denial of science. They seem to think that if they yell loudly enough, then some idiot will believe them and they'll be able to keep the coal fires burning a bit longer.

I'll write more about this, with despicable examples, shortly. (I am only able to write in short bursts at the moment, as I am dealing with other commitments. This might be a good thing, as some articles in the past have ventured into the TLDR category.)

Meanwhile, you can read more from the Cat6 team at Wunderground.com.

My thoughts are with everyone in the path of the hurricane and its effects, and with all the volunteers and agency workers who will be assisting with response and recovery.

Anthony Watts is foxed yet again by temperature anomalies

I read the latest article from Anthony Watts at WUWT. It reminded me that he really is dumb as an ox and blind as a bat.

Now you and I know that temperatures have been going only one way - up. And it's been getting really hot these past few years. Last year was the third year in a row that was the hottest on record. This year is shaping up as possibly the second hottest.

So what does Anthony Watts do? He plunges deep into idiocy with a most ridiculous article today (archived here).

Anthony Watts publishes another recklessly defamatory article about NOAA scientists, by Tim Ball

Anthony Watts has published another defamatory article on his blog (archived here). I use the term without it being proven in the courts, but if one of the retired scientists mentioned wanted to take him and Tim Ball to court, he'd surely be able to make a case to be heard. Tim Ball started his false claims in the very first sentence.

Some key points about the NOAA temperature reconstruction paper, Karl15

Before going into the despicable actions of Tim Ball and his publisher Anthony Watts, let me remind you about the NOAA work that they don't understand, but dislike so much they'll risk being sued (yet again, in the case of Tim Ball).

The work was built from two main pieces of research. One was an updating of a sea surface temperature record, which was in turn built from zillions of records from different sources, carefully analysed in great detail. The scientists re-aligned the data from different sources so that it provided a more accurate account of how the temperature of the sea surface has changed over time. As an example of this, the authors of Karl15 wrote:

David Rose doubles down on #climate disinformation about NOAA. Let's get some perspective

I've had a post in train for a week now, after last week's ridiculously wrong article from David Rose in the Mail on Sunday. He based it on another ridiculous article, that one from John Bates on Judith Curry's climate disinformation blog. David Rose has followed it up with another ridiculously wrong article, which says nothing new and in which he's just trying to justify all the mistakes and lies in his first article.

John Bates is a meteorologist turned computer data person whose nose was out of joint because he didn't always get his way when he used to work at NOAA. It was a sour grapes whine from someone who wanted attention. That's all. However his attention-seeking moan had major repercussions through the deniosphere.

2016 is the hottest year on record - three in a row now

A short while ago the data showed that 2016 temperatures for the troposphere (upper air) were the highest on record. Today, we've got results for the surface, from NASA and NOAA.

You will not be surprised to know that 2016 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2015 by 0.12 °C.

That's more than I expected. (2015 beat 2014 by 0.13 °C and that seemed a big jump.)

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Deke Arndt, Chief, Climate Monitoring Branch, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina are currently giving a press conference to announce the annual average global surface temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

Dumb as: Anthony Watts complains Hausfather17 authors didn't use FUTURE data

Anthony Watts is complaining that scientists didn't use data that has yet to be published. What?

He did post an article about Hausfather17, which I've just written about.  Anthony's almost as nuts about this one as he was about the NOAA paper, Karl15. His headline was: Yet another study tries to erase “the pause” – but is missing a whole year of data.

The new paper uses latest available data

The new paper uses data to the end of the full year that's currently available - 2015. Since the paper would have been completed some months ago (it's just been published), not only would December 2016 data not have been available (it isn't yet), but the most recent months this year would not have been available to the authors, unless they had a Tardis.

The winner is NOAA - for global sea surface temperature

There's a new paper out that shows that, contrary to what you'll read on denier blogs, NOAA's latest version of global sea surface temperature is probably the best and most accurate around. It's the closest to observations, when you compare it to measurements from moored and floating buoys, Argo floats and radiometer-based satellite records of sea surface temperature.

Umpteen denier protests

Lamar Smith

You might remember how climate hoax conspiracy theorists, professional disinformers and other deniers protested loud and long when NOAA scientists published a paper about the revised NOAA temperature data. The US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, led by arch denier Lamar Smith, harassed NOAA endlessly with subpoena after subpoena. A lot of the changes to the NOAA temperature record were a result of a new version of the global sea surface temperature data set, known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature, or ERSST v4. The papers on that were published in February 2015 (see below). The protests only came, though, in June 2015 when there was a paper by Karl et al. That paper pushed denier buttons because it challenged the so-called "hiatus". You can read about Karl15 here, and the paper itself is here.

No, there's no La Niña. BoM has announced ENSO inactive

Some of you might have noticed the changed picture in the ENSO report in the side bar. Today the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has announced that ENSO is inactive. There is no La Niña expected in the near term.

Figure 1 | ENSO dial - derived from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology graphic.

From the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM):

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the tropical Pacific Ocean remains neutral (neither El Niño nor La Niña). Although some very weak La Niña-like patterns continue (such as cooler than normal ocean temperatures and reduced cloudiness in the central and eastern Pacific), La Niña thresholds have not been met. Climate models and current observations suggest these patterns will not persist. The likelihood of La Niña developing in the coming months is now low, and hence the Bureau’s ENSO Outlook has shifted from La Niña WATCH to INACTIVE.

Losing his grip on ENSO: Bob Tisdale thinks he's an expert, and yet...

Bob Tisdale fancies himself as an ENSO expert, yet he doesn't show that in his WUWT article today (archived here). He's complaining that a couple of days ago NOAA removed the "watch" status for La Nina. Bob's headline was "NOAA Cancels La Niña Watch While La Niña Conditions Exist". Well, he seems to be the only person who thinks La Nina conditions exist. Oh, except maybe for Anthony Watts who, way back in June, declared that we are already having a La Nina.

Today Bob Tisdale wrote:

Regardless of the existing (and strengthening) La Niña conditions, NOAA has canceled its La Niña Watch, which had been in effect since April.

Except there are not conditions currently existing for La Nina. Bob's wrong. This is where he was wrong - almost everywhere:

1. Bob didn't base his assessment on the ENSO definition's standard of the ONI, which is a 3 month running mean;
2. He based his current sea surface temperature anomaly in the Nino 3.4 region on the wrong average baseline, making it appear approx 0.4 C colder than it is (the cutoff is -0.5 C) (h/t Rattus Norvegicus);
3. He used the wrong dataset (Reynolds OI v2), not the one used as standard for ENSO estimates (ERSST v4).

Summary added by Sou 4:57 pm 10 September 2016

NOAA's Climate Explorer fools climate quack Bob Tisdale at WUWT

Bob Tisdale has just discovered a terrific new NOAA web tool that is designed to help communities in the USA adapt to climate change (archived here). Naturally enough, Bob doesn't bother to find out the first thing about the tool or the data that underpins it. Instead he all but accuses NOAA of fraud and fakery in his usual "climate hoax" conspiratorial manner.

Climate Explorer - for the USA

First lets look at what the collaborative effort (NOAA plus more) is offering planners and communities in the USA. It's called The Climate Explorer. You can choose a city and see what may happen to your temperature and rainfall over time, under different scenarios. There are two scenarios: high emissions and low emissions. If you choose Chico, Butte County, California, you'll see the following options, each having more options:

• temperature
• precipitation
• other:- heating degree days and cooling degree days.

Anthony Watts: Loopy and out of the loop. It's been noticed.

Tom Karl has retired from NOAA after more than 40 years of dedicated service. At HotWhopper, let's wish him well in his retirement and thank him for his valuable contribution, helping everyone understand better how we are changing climates around the world.

I woke up to see an article by Anthony Watts at WUWT (archived here). That's still a rare occurrence. It wasn't so much an article by Anthony as a misleading headline on top of a copied and pasted press release, with Anthony Watts' conspiracy theorising added underneath. At around the same time I got some messages from people who noticed that Anthony is very much out of the science loop.

The press release was to let people know that Tom Karl of NOAA has retired. Anthony's headline was "resigned", probably so that his obedient fans would make up some conspiracy theory about nefarious goings on. Or it could just be another example of Anthony Watts' ignorance. (So far most of his dim deniers have just stuck with Anthony's own conspiracy theory.)

La Niña or no, nada?

Now that El Niño has shut down, people are wondering if a La Niña will develop this year. Anthony Watts has been egging it on. Way back in March, before the El Niño had finished, he was predicting a La Niña. Today he's quoting a report from NOAA from a couple of weeks ago (9 June), in which the prediction was 75% in favour of La Niña:

Overall, ENSO-neutral conditions are present and La Niña is favored to develop during the Northern Hemisphere summer 2016, with about a 75% chance of La Niña during the fall and winter 2016-17.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been much more conservative, with all its forecasts so far being only 50:50 in favour of La Niña. In its latest ENSO wrap-up yesterday, BoM stated:

Recent observations and climate model forecasts continue to suggest La Niña may develop in the coming months, hence the Bureau’s ENSO Outlook remains at La Niña WATCH level. A La Niña WATCH means there is a 50% likelihood of La Niña developing during the second half of 2016.  If La Niña does develop, climate models suggest it is unlikely to reach levels seen in the most recent event of 2010–12, which was one of the strongest La Niña events on record.

Extending the climate conspiracy: Anthony Watts accuses US volunteer weather observers of fudging temperature records

Anthony Watts has written about some research that shows that when weather observers estimate wind speed, they usually overestimate it. In April this year a team, led by Paul W Miller of the University of Georgia, published a paper in the American Meteorological Society Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. The researchers reported that "As a general rule of thumb, humans overestimated nonconvective wind GFs [gust factors] by approximately one-third."

In the USA, the scientists said that automated weather stations were relatively sparse, so weather observers apparently typically estimate wind speed. By comparing estimates made by observers with instrumentally recorded wind speeds in the GHCN network, the researchers concluded that the estimates were typically too high.

That's interesting. But wait. There's more. Anthony uses this research to accuse the thousands of volunteer weather observers of fudging temperature data. That's right. This is data that is read, not estimated. This is the "raw data" that deniers usually staunchly defend.

Dave Burton wants to level the seas at WUWT

Over at WUWT, deniers are clutching at straws to continue to reject science in the face of all the "hottest evers". They really, really liked the last big El Nino in 1997-98, but they really, really dislike this current El Nino of 2015-16. It means they'll have to wait a while before they can start pointing to a drop in the surface temperature although Anthony Watts keeps jumping the gun and is excitedly telling his readers that a La Nina is just about here.

Here is some of what they got up to today, with a moan and lots of misdirection from a WUWT regular commenter called Dave Burton about another bane of deniers' existence - rising seas (archived here). But first, what's been happening...

Another low: Richard Verney's Arctic sea ice fudge at WUWT

Some of the "thoughts" of deniers at WUWT defy belief. I'm talking about a comment from WUWT regular Richard Verney today under an unusual article (for WUWT). The WUWT article was unusual because despite being posted by Anthony Watts, and despite it being a press release from a scientific organisation, and despite it being about how winter sea ice hit another record low maximum this year - there was no "claim" in the headline (archived here, latest here).  There was even a link to the NASA press release.

This is the comment that I'm talking about, from richard verney on March 29, 2016 at 1:48 am

They have satellite data going back to the early 1970s. They should use all the data, not just that post 1979, but then again the early 1970s would be inconvenient especially since the amount of ice observed today is more than in 1974.

He's wrong in his conspiracy ideation. The amount of Arctic sea ice observed today is a lot less than it was in 1974. Here are some plots of sea ice extent going back as far as the satellite era will travel.

Too much heat: Anthony Watts is becoming a greenhouse effect denier

Anthony Watts is protesting the record heat so much his brain must be hurting. He's been stuffing his blog with protests. I can't tell if it's because he's got nothing else to fill up his daily quota, or if it's that he's really disturbed by the record heat. In a very mixed up article (archived here), Anthony once again protests. He keeps mixing up USA surface temperatures with global. I wonder does he know the difference? He is also starting to show strong signs of denying the greenhouse effect, which up till recently he vowed he "believed" in.

Yesterday he posted another dumb article (archived here) protesting the record hot year, using a tweet from Andy Revkin about an article by Seth Borenstein as his excuse. He didn't post a link to either the tweet or the article. All he did was post an image of the tweet. So it's a fair bet that he didn't want his readers to read it.

Today he's made up two lies in his headline:

NOAA declares current El Niño stronger than 1997-98 event, then says record warm temperatures have little to do with it

First of all, NOAA didn't declare that the current El Nino was stronger than the 1997-98 event. Secondly, it didn't say that record warm temperatures had little to do with the El Nino (which I think was Anthony's meaning). On the contrary, the article he was referring to said that El Nino did contribute to the record warmth in the USA this winter.

Sheldon Walker gets into a pickle picking pauses at WUWT

Sheldon Walker has written another two articles for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT (archived as Part 1 and Part 2). What Sheldon was trying to do was prove there was a Pause (with a capital P) in global surface warming recently. He didn't manage that, though he thinks he did. What I'm going to show is that in order to pick a Pause, Sheldon had to:

• carefully select a 13-year period for a linear trend (aka cherry-pick)
• avoid an interval just two years longer
• ignore a finding he started out with, that even 15 years is too short to be assured of a meaningful trend
• ignore another finding that non-overlapping trends suggest real differences
• accept that a Pause is not the same as a stop!

Desperate Deniers Part 5 - Anthony "surface station" Watts flunks NOAA temperature chart 101

Just when you think that Anthony Watts couldn't make a bigger fool of himself, you find out that he can. This is more properly an update to the previous article, but given the crazy reaction to the hottest year on record, it's worth a separate article. In that article I groaned at Anthony saying it couldn't be the hottest year ever globally because in the USA it was "only" the third hottest year ever.

I should know by now that with Anthony Watts you have to check every little thing. Thanks to Mark in the comments, I've discovered that Anthony "surface station" Watts can't even read a temperature anomaly chart.  Harbouring all sorts of paranoid conspiracy theories, he wrote:

When you look at temperature that isn’t biased by continuous adjustments, such as NOAA’s highly questionable fiddling with sea surface temperature data this year, you find that 2015 was not the hottest record at all according to the U.S> Climate Reference Network data, which is a state of the art system designed to need no “corrections” of any kind. 2015 comes in third for the USA:

Let's not dwell on Anthony not wanting sea surface temperatures to contaminate the US land surface data (come again? Are there ships and buoys on land now?).  Let's look at his evidence...