Desperate Deniers Part 4: Anthony Watts is shame-proof despite all his bloopers about NOAA

I would have missed this example of sad desperation, except that Anthony Watts himself highlighted it in a dumb cartoon. One is almost tempted to pity him, except that the real wonder is that he seems to be unable to feel shame or embarrassment. Any normal person would have deleted the article (archived here) after discovering they'd made so many bloopers, hoping that no-one would notice. Not Anthony. Even after he discovered almost everything he wrote was wrong, he kept on lashing out at all and sundry, flinging empty accusations left right and centre. Yet all the while it was Anthony himself who kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. I think he still doesn't realise that his whole article is nothing but one giant bungled mess from beginning to end.

It started with a dumb tweet from a twit called Tom Nelson

What seems to have happened is that Anthony saw a silly and wrong tweet from a rather dim conspiracy freak who denies under the name "Tom Nelson",  I'm a bit surprised that Anthony fell for it. He ought to know that "Tom Nelson" is a raving ratbag when it comes to anything climate.

It looks to me that Anthony has probably permanently tipped over the edge, and will grab hold of anything, not matter how wrong and stupid, in his effort to stop anyone from taking action to slow the warming. His original headline was:

Failed math: In 1997, NOAA claimed that the Earth was 5.63 degrees warmer than today

After someone pointed out one of his errors in the comments, he changed it to:

Failed Math: In 1997, NOAA claimed that the Earth was 3.83 degrees warmer than today

Both his headlines are way wrong. For one thing, in 1997 NOAA said nothing about what the temperature was today in 2016 - or not on the pages Anthony linked to. NOAA most certainly didn't say in 1997 that 1997 was 5.63 degrees or 3.83 degrees hotter than it was or would be in 2016. I doubt there were too many people employed by NOAA back in 1997 who thought at the time that the planet would cool at all, let alone cool by 5.63 degrees or 3.83 degrees between 1997 and 2016. I strongly doubt that any scientists who collated, analysed and reported global temperature changes would have thought the Earth was about to cool down suddenly.

[At this point, if you are going to read on, I suggest getting yourself a mug of hot coffee or a glass of wine or whatever you usually sup on at this hour, and settle down. Careful with it, though. You don't want coffee (or wine) splurted all over your keyboard.]

2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Dr Thomas Karl, Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA have just given a press conference to to announce the annual average global temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

You will not be surprised to know that 2015 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2014 by a huge 0.13 °C. It was 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial. It is now 106 years since there was a "coldest year on record". (Gavin Schmidt said that 2015 would have broken the record even without the El Niño, though presumably by not as much.)

Anyone who tries to tell you it hasn't warmed since 1996, or 1997, or 1998, is dead wrong. See for yourself:

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature. Anomaly from the 1881-1910 mean. Data source: GISS NASA.

The average global temperature in 2015 was:

• 0.13 °C hotter than in 2014
• 1.33 °C hotter than the coldest year in the record (1909)
• 0,24 °C hotter than the average for 1998
• 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial (ballpark)

Note about the ballpark: I took the pre-industrial benchmark to be 0.3 °C cooler than 1900, from this recent article by Professor Michael Mann in Huffington Post.

Blistering letter from House Committee member to Lamar Smith about his baseless smear campaign against NOAA scientists

You may have read about US Congressman Lamar Smith's ongoing vindictive harassment and smear campaign against scientists at NOAA. You might have also read about his latest allegations of "whistleblowers". If you are wondering if there is anything behind this, other than a deranged attack on science, scientists and the NOAA, then wonder no more.

There is not.

To prove this point, just read the letter to Lamar Smith from Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a member of the committee of which Lamar Smith is chair - the Committee on Space, Science and Technology.

I'll quote some segments damning the unconscionable actions of this vindictive, out-of-control, grandstanding US congressman, Lamar Smith. The bolding and some paragraph breaks are mine.

Anthony Watts tells more fibs about NOAA

There's a US congressman who's out of control when it comes to things environmental and climate. His name is Lamar Smith. Not satisfied with data, he wants NOAA to provide him with emails and stuff. The general consensus is that Lamar Smith isn't capable of assessing data. He can't tell one number from the rest. And he's a conspiracy nutter of the type that Peter Sinclair found when he and greenmanbucket installed a hidden camera to record the Science Committee:

Lamar Smith has been vindictively harassing scientists for some time now, in a clear abuse of power. Weirdly, the US legislators have made him, an anti-science advocate, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Smith gets lots of money from oil and gas companies, and from that perspective some would argue he's only doing what he's paid to do. But that would be wrong. He gets paid to represent the American people, not the oil and gas sector. His job is to do what is right for Americans, not to line his campaign chest with donations from lobby groups.

Anyway, he's been on a wild rampage trying to stop climate science from progressing. He's another one who can't wait for the world to burn. As Ars Technica reports, he's also falsely and maliciously accused scientists of "altering data".

Reminds me of James Inhofe, who wanted to send climate scientists to gaol because he didn't like what the research was showing.

Improving the temperature record vs conspiracy theories at WUWT

Over the years, scientists in different parts of the world have worked hard to get a more accurate picture of the change in global surface temperature over time. This is slow painstaking work. Initially it would have meant working with written records, with people trying to decipher handwriting of the tens of thousands of people who wrote down readings of temperature and rainfall, and other weather indicators, from all the weather stations around the world. Over time the data was digitised - another extremely laborious task.

I'm not going to write about all that's been done. It's a mammoth ongoing effort involving people from all around the world. What I'm writing about are the ignorant scoffers. You know the people I mean. The ones who sit at their keyboards all day to snipe at the work done by scientists.

Anthony Watts has put up three articles from one chap who's been looking to see the extent of this careful work, as measured by adjustments to the original data. He's only looked at two data sets. One which is used by NASA and NOAA for global land surface temperatures. The Global Historical Climatology Network Data or GHCN. This was first developed in the early 1990s, with the current version 3 released in 2011. The other is the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), which is the high quality dataset used by NOAA for USA temperatures since 1987.

Biased Bob Tisdale is all at sea

Bob Tisdale is one of the pseudo-scientists who frequently writes articles for Anthony Watts' climate conspiracy blog, WUWT. His articles are often overly long, overly tedious and overly wrong. He is also a greenhouse effect denier. He thinks that it's the sun that's causing global warming through El Ninos and blobs. He's wrong.

Bob's what you'd might regard as a plodder. Not a quick-witted chap. He's not a research scientist and has never boasted of any educational qualifications. Where his expertise lies, if you can call it that, is in regurgitating the same mix of pseudo-science tinged now and again with real science - over and over and over again.

Willis Eschenbach turns on the charm for NOAA's coral watch crew

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is giving us all a lesson in how to win friends and influence people. The lesson came about because he was wondering why NOAA gave some rough estimates to the Guardian without asking his permission first. The numbers were about the global coral bleaching event that's on the cards. Willis wrote a courteous email to NOAA as follows (archived here):

Hottest May on record at NOAA. Has the "pause" gone for good?

NOAA has released the global analysis for May 2015. It reports that May was the hottest on record, beating the 2014 record by 0.08°C. NOAA has May higher than GISTemp, but that doesn't mean a whole lot.  For one thing it's only one month. For another, GISTemp does change as it receives reports from around the world. Not all data comes in at the same time.

Here is a chart with both GISTemp and NOAA data. The chart includes 2015 year to date average, which might or might not drop as the year progresses.

Data sources: NOAA and NASA GISS

You'll notice that the Y axis is shifting higher. If it stays hot this year, any "hiatus" looks as if it will be nothing but a memory soon, with all the other hiati, sorry, I mean hiatuses of the past.

Anthony Watts publicly accuses NOAA scientists of fraud (again) - plus his "people go to jail"!

If you mistakenly thought that deniers like Anthony Watts might have some ethics or even a tiny shred of decency hidden very deep, you're wrong. In a topsy turvy and ugly article at WUWT today, Anthony Watts has someone trying to defend his appalling email to Tom Peterson of NOAA, in which he accuses Dr Peterson of fraud. Kip Hansen (archived here) tries to twist this into it being Andy Revkin who committed "a public journalistic offense". (I did say "that's gotta hurt".)

Andy Revkin wrote this after learning about Anthony's defamatory email:

Any notion that Watts is interested in fostering an atmosphere of civility and constructive discourse evaporates pretty quickly in considering how he handled his questions about that paper. Alternating between happy talk about rooftop solar and slanderous accusations is not constructive or civil.

Anthony Watts has discovered pristine US temperature (and MS Excel)

Today, after having no opinion on whether or not greenhouse gases work, Anthony Watts has decided to get an opinion. In his opinion the US temperature record maintained by NOAA is pristine. That is, the NOAA Climate Reference Network is pristine. Just how long he'll think it will remain pristine is the question. He wrote an article (archived here) with the headline: "Despite attempts to erase it globally, “the pause” still exists in pristine US surface temperature data"

This time Anthony had nothing but praise for the scientists who work at NOAA. (He did sneak in some snide comments verging on the defamatory by implication. He's got to keep his disreputable reputation intact.) His praise was only because he liked what he saw or he would have hidden it from his readers. He saw a temperature chart from 2005 to 2014 and figured that was good enough for his purposes. Anthony wrote:

But, what if there were a dataset of temperature that was so well done, so scientifically accurate, and so completely free of bias that by its design, there would never be any need nor justification for any adjustments to the data?
Such a temperature record exists, it is called the U.S. Climate Reference Network, (USCRN) and it is also operated by NOAA/NCDC’s (NCEI) head administrator,Tom Karl:

Given that Anthony has been busy for years trying to prove that the record isn't pristine, this is a bit of an about face. Is he admitting defeat? You might think so, mightn't you. Let's come back in five years time, and see if Anthony still says the data is pristine.

Data source: NOAA

Here is a comparison of the pristine with the non-pristine, on an annual basis. I'll let you spot the difference:

Data source: NOAA

OMG. Anthony Watts is right. The USA temperature has paused! Ooh, it's worse than that - it's cooling!

Let's just see how much the USA has cooled over the past 120 years. If you read WUWT you'll probably think the USA is practically in an ice age.

The perversity of deniers - and the "pause" that never was with Tom Peterson

Below is a TedX talk from Dr Tom Peterson on "What is Science: How it Differs from Art, Law and Quackery":

Tom quoted Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard geologist, from the video (which provided the title for this article):

Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.

What follows is copied from a comment posted here at HotWhopper, from Tom Peterson of NOAA, co-author of the new paper in Science, and President of the WMO Commission for Climatology. The email exchange is about a subject of much recent discussion - the new Science paper, which I described here (with lots of links at the bottom for further reading).

Tom has subsequently confirmed the email exchange and kindly gave me permission to repost his comment as a blog article. Apart from remarking on Anthony's conspiracy ideation, there's not really anything more I need add. The exchange speaks for itself - and speaks volumes.

Email exchange between Anthony Watts and Tom Peterson

Dear Sou et al.,

I thought you might find an email exchange I had yesterday with Anthony Watts interesting. 16 hours ago I received this email from Anthony Watts:

NOAA global temperature paper prompts a torrent of paranoid conspiracies at WUWT

If you ever want to get overloaded with conspiracy ideation, just go to a denier blog. It's almost unbelievable that there really are people whose first thought, when they think "climate science" is: it's a hoax; scientists are faking it. Some might argue that it's just that gullible people who are fed lies are being deceived. I don't see it as that. It's that people go to disinformation sites because it's only there that they will find what they want to believe. The visitors to conspiracy theory sites are by nature prone to conspiracy ideation.

This article won't interest everyone. It documents the conspiratorial and illogical reaction to climate science that you read every day on anti-science blogs. This article is a record of some of the reaction to the new NOAA paper on global surface temperature. You can read the main article about Karl15, if you want to know what caused such a knee-jerk response of conspiratorial thinking in the deniosphere.

No pause in the frenzy of denial: at WUWT

Anthony Watts wrote about the new NOAA paper in Science that: "WUWT has already found the fatal weakness in the paper". Already he's published two protest articles. We're still waiting. There's not a mention of any "fatal weakness".

As I wrote in the main article about it, the new paper describes an analysis of global surface temperature trends, and shows that the trend in surface temperature this century is indistinguishable from that for the second half of last century. Global warming continues at the surface. There is no "hiatus".

No pause in the frenzy of denial: S. Fred Singer

The new paper published today in Science, by researchers at NOAA, shows that global temperatures have continued to rise at the same rate this century as they did in the second half of last century. I've discussed that paper already, in a separate article.

This article is (probably) part of a series of the "frenzy of denial" by science deniers. They really don't want to read anything that shows the world continues to warm.

Deniers are "Wow-ed"

Anthony Watts was the first out the gate, arguably breaking the embargo on the Science paper. He made no impression the first time, so he tried again. Maybe Daily Mail reporter, David Rose, beat his second article by a nose. Fred Singer from the denier lobby group, the Heartland Institute, was the first to convincingly break the embargo, with an article at some extremist right wing website, that began with the exclamation "Wow!"

Fred's article isn't fit for publishing anywhere else. It was nothing more than red herrings, squirrels and waffle, sprinkled with lies. He wrote rather enthusiastically in a style I've never seen from him before, with his "wow's" and "oh boy's". Not that I've read much of what he's written. Who would bother? Here's his opening paragraph, retaining the poor spacing:

 Wow!Science mag is publishing a blockbuster paper today, June 4.Oh boy!Get ready to watch yet another big fight about climate change -- this time mainly among different groups of climate alarmists.Is there a “pause”?Did global climate really stop warming during the last dozen years, 18 years, or even 40 years, in spite of rising levels of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide?

Sorry Fred. There won't be any big fuss about this from scientists. I doubt too many will be saying that the paper is wrong. Not that I've seen at any rate. The world continues to warm and the only people who dispute that are deniers.

NOAA: No pause in the global surface temperature

Anthony Watts prepared the ground on Monday, with an article, in which he alleged fraud and skulduggery at NOAA. At the time I wrote the response, I didn't know what he was referring to (and neither did anyone at WUWT). Peter Thorne was awake to it, however, and gave me time to prepare for the upcoming "frenzy of denial". He was coyly referring to a new Science paper about global surface temperature.

Anthony Watts has since written another article, breaking the embargo on this new paper, which was published in ScienceXpress today. He rationalised his behaviour by saying that "multiple sources have sent me a press release and advance copies of a paper", meaning maybe two people.

The new paper is by a team of scientists, mostly from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The title is:

Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

The paper describes an analysis of global surface temperature trends, using much more data from land stations in particular. It also includes corrections, particularly for time-related bias in sea surface temperatures. The main finding is that the trend in surface temperature this century is indistinguishable from that for the second half of last century. Global warming continues at the surface.

Update: I've added more links to blog articles elsewhere about this new paper.

WUWT proposes harassment and lawsuits to stop climate research

Matt Manos is going great guns with his conspiratorial thinking over at WUWT (archived here). He comes across as a real nutter, albeit one who can manage to write an entire sentence with proper use of nouns and verbs. Flush with his success at flushing out all his fellow WUWT conspiracy theorists, today he's urging WUWT-ers to spam governments with FOIA requests. Matt wants to get to the bottom of what he thinks is a giant climate conspiracy. He wrote, using the same "sheeple" concept from his last article:

In my previous post, Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists, I introduced the concept of bellwethers and rational ignorance to explain why it’s so hard to convince warmists using empirical evidence. 

How not to frame an FOI request - if you really want information

I don't normally bother too much with the denier blogger "Steve Goddard". Even among mainstream deniers he's viewed as shonky. However, something popped up at WUWT today (archived here) which is a great example of how deniers manufacture situations to suit their message, and how some disinformers (like Eric Worrall) misrepresent other deniers when it suits them.

This is what happened. "Steve Goddard" and someone I've never heard of, Kent Clizbe (a shady character), submitted an FOIA request to NOAA (the "Steve Goddard" version is archived here). They asked for a huge amount of information going back in history, minus the kitchen sink.

Bob Tisdale is confused, miffed and bewildered by record hot seas at WUWT

Update - see below - plus there's also an addendum with a map showing all the places which broke new heat records in 2014.


The record heat is causing much confusion at WUWT. Bob Tisdale in the comments invited me to write an article about his latest protest at the record hot 2014 (archived here). Well, not exactly invited, what he suggested was that rooter come here to make his points about Bob Tisdales article - twice - here and here. (Both times he finished in passive-aggressive fashion in the style of Willis Eschenbach, writing through gritted teeth "have a good day" after calling rooter a "troll".

Confirmed - 2014 was the hottest year on record

NOAA and NASA have jointly confirmed 2014 as the hottest year on record. Here is the chart of GISTemp, including the latest data for December 2014:

December came in at 0.72°C, the second hottest December on record. 2006 (0.74°C), was the hottest. The previous second warmest was 2003 (which was 0.71C).  (Corrected from earlier version h/t Jim Milks). The previous hottest calendar years were 2005 at 0.65°C and 2010 at 0.66°C above the 1951-2010 mean. This year was 0.68°C above that mean, despite there being no (official) El Nino.

Andrew Freedman reported that "There is less than a 1-in-27 million chance that Earth's record hot streak is natural". Nature News has a report about the hottest year, as does Justin Gillis of the New York Times, and Chris Mooney at the Washington Post. While the Union of Concerned Scientists pinched my line about how 65% of people living today have never ever experienced a year where the global average temperature is less than the twentieth century average.

Here's a video from NASA showing how Earth has warmed since 1880 :

You can read the NOAA global report here. Some highlights:

• During 2014, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.24°F (0.69°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all 135 years in the 1880–2014 record, surpassing the previous records of 2005 and 2010 by 0.07°F (0.04°C).
• Record warmth was spread around the world, including Far East Russia into western Alaska, the western United States, parts of interior South America, most of Europe stretching into northern Africa, parts of eastern and western coastal Australia, much of the northeastern Pacific around the Gulf of Alaska, the central to western equatorial Pacific, large swaths of northwestern and southeastern Atlantic, most of the Norwegian Sea, and parts of the central to southern Indian Ocean.
• During 2014, the globally-averaged land surface temperature was 1.80°F (1.00°C) above the 20th century average. This was the fourth highest among all years in the 1880–2014 record.
• During 2014, the globally-averaged sea surface temperature was 1.03°F (0.57°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all years in the 1880–2014 record, surpassing the previous records of 1998 and 2003 by 0.09°F (0.05°C).

If you're wondering how WUWT will handle the news, well Bob Tisdale promised an article showing how it was nothing but sunlight-fueled oceans that caused the warming, or because the oceans were hotter, or some nonsense like that. He can't or won't explain why or how this can happen when the sun isn't putting out any more energy than before. His main concern is to try to persuade anyone who'll still read his tripe that it's got nothing to do with CO2 or the greenhouse effect. His article hasn't appeared yet, but that will be the gist of it, though I expect he'll say it in many more words.

Bob Tisdale is in a tizz over record hot seas

Update - I've added a bit on trends and anomalies, highlighting Bob's deception - just in case a stray arrives from WUWT. Sou 15 Dec 14.


Bob Tisdale has got himself into a real tizz over the record hot seas. He's posted several articles about how the seas are only getting hotter because they are getting hotter. Six just in the last week at WUWT, would you believe! It's not that they are getting hotter from global warming. They just happen to be getting hotter. Bob seems to think it's got nothing to do with global warming. It's just warming.

Bob's article had the rather long title: "The Nonsensical “Just What AGW predicts” and Other Claims By Alarmists about “Record-High” Global Sea Surface Temperatures in 2014"

Be warned - this article is a bit long-ish. While it's too, too easy to ridicule Bob's stupid greenhouse effect denial, that's not what made this article long. What happened was that I got sidetracked down various other sea surface temperature pathways.