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".

On Seeps and SCAMS Part II: Pat'n Chip'n David Fake a Debate.

In Part I of On Seeps and SCAMS, I wrote about the new paper on how denialist talking points can influence climate science. A day or so ago, there was an article at WUWT (archived here), by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger (Pat'n Chip), in which they commented on that paper. Their WUWT article had the title: Lewandowsky’s Competing Theories for Source of Bias in Scientific Research. [This is Part II of a three part series. Click for Part I and Part III.]

The title was misleading. Pat'n Chip's WUWT article was more a promo for another article by David E. Wojick and Patrick J. Michaels. Their's is not a scientific paper, it's a CATO article. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to consider the denier lobby group, CATO, to have any relation to science.

What they wrote about could have been an interesting topic I suppose, though it demonstrates a naive view of the world on the part of the authors. They were ostensibly exploring whether or not government funding can bias research. Their paper had the title:

Is the Government Buying Science or Support?

A Framework Analysis of Federal Funding-induced Biases

They claim:

The research question is clear: does biased funding skew research in a preferred direction, one that supports an agency mission, policy or paradigm?

The reason I say it could have been an interesting topic is that research that is primarily funded by government is subject to the vagaries of government priorities. Not in the results, but in what areas research is undertaken.

A silly poster by Pat'n Chip at AGU14 provides a learning experience

Anthony Watts has reported a poster (archived here). He doesn't comment on it. I doubt he understands it. Most of the people commenting at WUWT don't understand it either. And I don't blame them.

Now I'm no Tamino, however in my view, what Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger have done, ostensibly, is flawed from the outset and demonstrates that they don't understand the CMIP5 climate models.

Rather than show a chart with observations vs models (combined), what they've done is show a chart of trend changes. That's fine, but further down I'll explain why I believe the conclusions they draw are flawed.

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

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

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

To summarise

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

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

Initial impressions

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

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

Heat kills! Pat'n Chip argue for survival of the wealthiest at WUWT

Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels (Pat'n Chip) keep plugging away at their weird notion that no matter how hot it gets, humans will adapt and fewer will die from heat-related causes.  Here is part of what they write at WUWT (archived here):

The cause of the observed decline in the sensitivity to extreme heat in the face of rising heat is likely found in a collection of adaptations including increased access to air-conditioning, better medical care, improved building design, community response programs, heat watch/warning systems, and biophysical changes. There is no reason to think that such response measures won’t continue to exist and be improved upon into the future.In our recent study summarizing the findings on declining heat-related mortality trends in both the U.S and Europe, we made this observation (Knappenberger et al., 2014):

Credit: Plognark

So everyone who lives somewhere that's affected by heatwaves, make sure you upgrade your air conditioner and try to find one that will work at 47°C plus. (I picked that number because I once had to drive my car in 47°C heat for half an hour or so to try to get the air conditioner fixed. I don't know how I made it without passing out. Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one whose home air conditioner is only rated to 43°C, the best we could find at the time.)

Not that your air-conditioner will do you much good when the power goes out because either it's broken down or can't cope with the stress on the system, caused by the heat wave. Heat can kill hundreds of people in a single heat wave. Maybe Pat'n Chip live in a very mild climate.

Make sure your local hospital is equipped to cope with the influx of people who get caught in future heat waves (those that don't collapse and die on the spot). And don't forget to boost your paramedic services. Hospitals won't help if you can't get there.  Stuff more insulation in your ceiling space and walls and don't go outside, whatever you do. Even if that means you get the sack from your job or your sports team (see also here).

I really don't know why Pat'n Chip keep beating this dead horse. Where I live there is a big spike in the number of deaths in a heat wave. Horrid heat is not something you want to inflict on anyone, unless you're like Pat'n Chip who don't care about those suffering the heat in India or South America or Australia or elsewhere.

Although it hasn't happened yet, as the world warms it's conceivable that large areas could become uninhabitable. That's not because of heat alone. It's because when temperatures soar enough alongside humidity then it exceeds the physiological tolerance of humans. This was described by two researchers a few years ago. Stephen Sherwood from the University of New South Wales and Matthew Huber from Purdue University did the maths and this is documented clearly and succinctly in their abstract:

Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wetbulb temperature TW, is surprisingly similar across diverse climates today. TW never exceeds 31 °C. Any exceedence of 35 °C for extended periods should induce hyperthermia in humans and other mammals, as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible. While this never happens now, it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 °C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed. Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel burning. One implication is that recent estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change are too low unless the range of possible warming can somehow be narrowed. Heat stress also may help explain trends in the mammalian fossil record.

So although it would be quite a few decades before global temperatures rise 7 °C, there will still likely be parts of the world where those conditions could arise for short periods of time later this century. Particularly if we don't reduce carbon emissions enough.

Heat waves don't just kill people directly. They also affect the ability to supply electricity, they spark fires and cause them to turn into catastrophic killers, they dry up bodies of water and exacerbate drought. Heat is very pleasant in moderation. Too much of a good thing will kill.

I consider people like Pat'n Chip a menace to society.

From the WUWT comments

Eve doesn't give a rats for people who die in the heat and says:

June 20, 2014 at 7:36 pm
I have been freezing in Canada since I returned from the Bahamas. I have not had the quilt off since I arrived, plus having to wear long pants, long sleeves, no heat wave, just cold. Where is Obama that he is so hot? Tell him to turn down the heat.

Tom Harley is deluded about southern Australia. It can get much hotter down south than it does in the tropics. He says:

June 20, 2014 at 9:21 pm
Majormike1 is right, here in the tropical north of Australia, thousands of climate refugees are towing their camper vans, trailers and wotnot all over the region, clogging up the roads, hotels, resorts and camping grounds, just to get away from ‘the cold’ in the ‘Southern Australian States’.
Those of us who have lived here long enough, hate to leave here, even in the summer.
If you want your cold, you can keep your cold. Stay away Mr President. Bring global warming back, now. 

Eric Worrall suggests everyone move to beautiful Hervey Bay and says:

June 20, 2014 at 9:28 pm
I’ve got good news – when it gets too hot, here in Sunny Hervey Bay, 25 degrees south of the Equator, we wear shorts and t-shirts.
Hervey Bay has a lot of retired people, because of the year round pleasant climate, a lot like Florida. So far, heat related mortality does not seem to be an issue. 

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Sherwood, Steven C., and Matthew Huber. "An adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 21 (2010): 9552-9555. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0913352107

Same old, same old from WUWT deniers

There's not been much happening in the climate denier blogosphere worth writing about with some exceptions, which I'll address in a future article.

Anthony Watts is copying and pasting some stuff from WUWT deniers like Larry Hamlin and paid disinformers like Pat 'n Chip, wailing that "all the models are wrong".  The same nonsense that Anthony wheels out when he runs out of ideas for new material.

It's nothing new.  They are trading on the false idea that global warming has stopped.  I guess they figure that they need to get in while they can because the slow down in global surface temperatures won't last.  And if the anticipated El Nino eventuates and it follows the pattern of previous ones, then next year would be hotter than any previous El Nino year, which would make it the hottest year on record. Hotter even than 2010. Which would mean the deniers would have to write about something else altogether to try to persuade the public that:

• global warming isn't happening, or
• if it is it's not bad, or 
• if it is bad, we'll adapt, or 
• if it is bad, some of us will adapt and
• if it is bad and some of us manage to adapt, it won't cost much to adapt, or 
• if it is bad and some of us manage to adapt and it does cost a lot to adapt then taxpayer's shouldn't have to pay to adapt - or 
• something.

I'm a bit too busy to go through their articles and arguments line by line, so I'll just put up a couple of charts that highlight the problem we are facing.  First, earth is still getting hotter as seen in multiple ways:

Next, we're not even close to cutting CO2 emissions yet.  And time is running out:

Adapted from IPCC AR5 WG1

Finally, from WGIII Summary for Policy Makers, the longer we wait the fewer options we'll have:

Delaying mitigation efforts beyond those in place today through 2030 is estimated to substantially increase the difficulty of the transition to low longer‐term emissions levels and narrow the range of options consistent with maintaining temperature change below 2°C relative to pre‐industrial levels.

From the WUWT comments

You'll all have read the empty protests, like those archived here and here before.  I won't bother picking holes in them - the IPCC reports themselves do that.  Here are some choice comments from the WUWT deniers to Pat 'n Chip's article (archived here):


Latitude opts for the fantastical climate hoax conspiracy theory favoured by many science deniers and says:

April 16, 2014 at 6:10 pm
Why do so many people discuss the science or computer models…without first acknowledging they are all based on fraudulent temperature records that have been fudged.
Even if they had invented the perfect model…they would never know it….because the models are all tuned to temp histories that have made the past colder and the present warmer….to show a faster rise in global warming…

They cooked their own goose with this one…they will never get an accurate computer model…with out first admitting they cooked the temp record

SIGINT EX is, I think, trying to be clever or funny or something and says:

April 16, 2014 at 7:42 pm
IPCC Titanic.
Do not trust the … “Captain” !
The “Watch Maker” turned “Ship Designer” on 2nd Deck standing by the spiral staircase and looking at the Ship-clock and glancing to his Swiss Chronograph on his wrist … knows !

Joel O'Bryan opts for ethno-religious imagery and says:

April 16, 2014 at 9:29 pm
This analysis is devastating to the “CO2 is evil” CAGW believers.
Ayatollah Al “Jezeera” Gore will issue a Fatwah against this blasphemy any day now.

Bob Greene's intuition is off.  Climate models are geared for long range not short range.  In the short term, random weather fluctuations can dominate. In the long term, these even out.  And like many others, he seems to be held in thrall by the mighty dollar and says:

April 16, 2014 at 9:15 pm
Results of 108-114 models were compared to actual temperatures. The models give a wider spread of results (0.4°C) for shorter time periods (Fig. 1 a and b) and a narrower spread for the longer time period. This seems to be intuitively wrong if the models had any capability to match reality.

Models that don’t work so large numbers are used to create reality. How many wrongs do you have to use to make a right? The ensemble doesn’t do too well at matching reality. It’s total gibberish. How many billion dollars were poured down this rat hole? And they give advanced degrees and nice tenured professorships for this?

norah4you says something about "courses to learn".  It looks as if she could do with some "learning" herself:

April 16, 2014 at 9:59 pm
Had been better had IPCC sent their so called experts on courses to learn by understanding Theories of Science what they forgot to learn during attending same courses once upon a time….

Peter Miller brings up the subject of satellites and says:

April 16, 2014 at 10:40 pm
And let’s not forget our gratitude for the satellites which measure global temperature, for they have kept the statistics reasonably honest for the past 35 years. Prior to the late 1970s, the manipulation/torture/homogenisation of temperature data has run riot, especially the GISS numbers.

Without the satellites acting as the police, the IPCC models would have undoubtedly been shown to be ‘correct’. 

Not a bad note to end on. Let's compare the two satellite records of lower troposphere temperatures (UAH and RSS) with that recorded below on the surface (HadCRUT4 and GISTemp). Click for larger view:

More of the Ludicrous: Judith Curry's Eye-Catching Merchants of Doubt

Talk about ludicrous. While Anthony Watts and his WUWT followers are obsessed with a ship stuck in ice, with 16 of the past 47 articles devoted to that subject, I see that Judith Curry has gone into full-on science denying mode with her weekend "things that caught her eye".

Just look at what has caught her eye.  It's a short "who's who" of Merchants of Doubt. (Archived here.)

Richard Lindzen - fake sceptics are disorganised

The first thing that caught Judith's eye was a puff piece on Richard Lindzen, who has "gone emeritus" at MIT.  In the article it has such gaffes as this:

Judging by where we are now, he appears to have a point; so far, 150 years of burning fossil fuels in large quantities has had a relatively minimal effect on the climate. By some measurements, there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than there has been at any time in the past 15 million years. Yet since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the average global temperature has risen by, at most, 1 degree Celsius, or 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Relatively minimal effect?  If you call global surface temperatures rising faster than ever and on pace to rise ten times faster than in 65 million years as "relatively minimal" - right!  How's this for a "relatively minimal effect" - blue and green is where we've been and red is where we are heading:

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

John McLean - of "2011 temperatures will be lower than 1956" infamy

Next Judith says that John McLean's article in the Age "caught her eye".  This is the same John McLean who co-authored the thoroughly discredited paper about ENSO and who predicted, in 2011, that surface temperatures in 2011 would drop to or below those of 1956!  Judith quoted this paragraph (just in case you doubted how far she's slithered):

The reality is that the IPCC is in effect little more than a UN-sponsored lobby group, created specifically to investigate and push the ”man-made warming” line. With no similar organisations to examine other potential causes of climate change, it’s only the IPCC voice that is heard. But the IPCC’s voice isn’t heard in context and with all the necessary caveats; it’s distorted via the UNFCCC and others who imply that the IPCC is the sole scientific authority on climate matters.

Goodness only knows why The Age gave John McLean a voice.  It doesn't make a habit of giving column space to cranks.  The article is archived here.  No point encouraging The Age.  It is just a muted conspiracy theory about the UN and the IPCC playing a giant hoax on the human race.  (Are all fake sceptics sexist? I hate to admit it, but I reckon women have something to do with "keeping the coal-fires burning".  It's not all man-made.)

Pat Michaels - science is "flashy" therefore wrong

Next Judith hails professional disinformer Pat Michaels, who writes an article with no substance and lots of innuendo - re-published on the Cato Institute website. He's arguing that because the flashy journals publish flashy research, then denier research doesn't get a guernsey or some such nonsense. His logic goes like this:

• Science and Nature are biased to the flashy
• Pat Michaels sorted the climate articles in these journals into piles and decided that most climate articles were "worse".
• Therefore, he argues, all climate papers are biased into "worse"
• Therefore, he argues, this "creates horrific effects, especially when the issues are policy-related."

Empty nonsense. No-one but the Judith Curry's of the world would promote Pat Michaels gumpf.

David Gelernter likens science to the Catholic Church of the 16th century 

Can it get more ludicrous?  Yes, indeed.  Judith's eye got caught on an article in CommentaryMagazine by David Gelernter. (Judith left her reading glasses behind and called him David Gelemter, twice).  David is a computer scientist working at Yale.  He was attempting to wax philosophical about the human brain or the mind and how it's different from a computer.  Fair enough - it is.  But the wax melts and runs randomly in weird directions when David writes a lot of stuff and nonsense like this:

That science should face crises in the early 21st century is inevitable. Power corrupts, and science today is the Catholic Church around the start of the 16th century: used to having its own way and dealing with heretics by excommunication, not argument.

Science deals with heretics by excommunication?  I guess Judith is feeling the pain of heresy.

Science needs reasoned argument and constant skepticism and open-mindedness. But our leading universities have dedicated themselves to stamping them out—at least in all political areas. We routinely provide superb technical educations in science, mathematics, and technology to brilliant undergraduates and doctoral students. But if those same students have been taught since kindergarten that you are not permitted to question the doctrine of man-made global warming, or the line that men and women are interchangeable, or the multiculturalist idea that all cultures and nations are equally good (except for Western nations and cultures, which are worse), how will they ever become reasonable, skeptical scientists? They’ve been reared on the idea that questioning official doctrine is wrong, gauche, just unacceptable in polite society. (And if you are president of Harvard, it can get you fired.)

I bet that para got Judith all tingly, especially the bit about "the doctrine of man-made global warming" - which is kinda funny since it shows how gauche is David Gelernter.  Now I don't know anything about the main contention of David Gelernter, but I did come across a blog article that had a different take on the events he is so up in arms about:

Finally, have a look at this piece, in Commentary by Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. It’s a long and angry rant about materialist approaches to consciousness and philosophy of mind. The part that really jumped at me is this, which I’ll quote at length:

(I'll skip over most of the quote - and just post these bits. You can read the full article here:)

the chaos was on display in the ugliness occasioned by the publication of Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos in 2012....Nagel was immediately set on and (symbolically) beaten to death by all the leading punks, bullies, and hangers-on of the philosophical underworld. Attacking Darwin is the sin against the Holy Ghost that pious scientists are taught never to forgive. 

And here is how Jason Rosenhouse sees it:

From reading that description, you could be forgiven for not realizing that the actual sequence of events surrounding Nagel’s book was this:

Nagel published his book.

Various knowledgeable people wrote critical reviews of the book, in which they pointed out the many flaws in Nagel’s arguments.

Whiny right-wingers likened this to a lynch mob that beat Nagel to death (if only symbolically).

Actual lynch mobs were in the habit of torturing and murdering people. Nagel’s critics merely wrote essays suggesting that he wrote a bad book. Those behaviors do not seem comparable to me.

Why do so few academics want anything to do with modern conservatism? Because being a conservative nowadays requires denying reality, and having a sense of victimization so profound that seeing your book criticized is the same as being lynched. That’s why.

Remind you of anyone?  Fake sceptics often complain long and loudly that they are wronged for rejecting science. Judith Curry herself, you may recall, complained that "Hotwhopper's interpretation of pretty much anything I say is IMO ludicrous."  This despite the fact that I unwittingly said pretty much the same as Bart Verheggen about which Judith apparently had no complaint.

Just look at the Lindzen puff piece above for another example.

A need to generate fear, in Lindzen’s telling, is what’s driving the apocalyptic rhetoric heard from many climate scientists and their media allies. “The idea was, to engage the public you needed an event .  .  . not just a Sputnik—a drought, a storm, a sand demon. You know, something you could latch onto. [Climate scientists] carefully arranged a congressional hearing. And they arranged for [James] Hansen [author of Storms of My Grandchildren, and one of the leading global warming “alarmists”] to come and say something vague that would somehow relate a heat wave or a drought to global warming.” (This theme, by the way, is developed to characteristic extremes in the late Michael Crichton’s entertaining 2004 novel State of Fear, in which environmental activists engineer a series of fake “natural” disasters to sow fear over global warming.) 

Lindzen also says that the “consensus”—the oft-heard contention that “virtually all” climate scientists believe in catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming—is overblown, primarily for structural reasons. “When you have an issue that is somewhat bogus, the opposition is always scattered and without resources,” he explains. “But the environmental movement is highly organized. There are hundreds of NGOs. To coordinate these hundreds, they quickly organized the Climate Action Network, the central body on climate. There would be, I think, actual meetings to tell them what the party line is for the year, and so on.” Skeptics, on the other hand, are more scattered across disciplines and continents. As such, they have a much harder time getting their message across.

Lindzen is arguing, I think, it's not logical at all - that "bogus" science is better organised than fake sceptics' "science".  (Like ecologists and biologists are better organised than creationists.  And round-earthers are better organised than flat-earthers. And immunologists are better organised than anti-vaxxers.)  What he probably means is that most fake sceptics don't do science therefore they don't feature much in the scientific literature. He uses words like "bogus" and "apocalyptic" and argues that fake sceptics can't get access to funding.  And he implies that the Climate Action Network leads the science, instead of responding to the science.

To Bob Tisdale - thanks for the magical oceans hypothesis

Next to last, Judith thanks Bob Tisdale for his careful analysis underpinning his magical ocean hypothesis and his rejection of the greenhouse effect.  She doesn't use those words, but since that's what Bob is all about, that's what she is thanking him for.

Climate Science and Eugenics

To cap it off, in the comments Judith links to this article by Ben Pile, in which he compares climate scientists to "eugenicists of mid 20th Century Europe and America", writing: "Ben Pile has a very interesting addition to the scientist-advocacy debate."

Yeah - about as interesting as an article by dilettante "interpreter of interpretations" James Delingpole. (I've written about Ben Pile's fantastic hypotheses before.)

On Merchants of Doubt

Finally and fittingly, the last thing that caught Judith's eye is Merchants of Doubt (as are all the previous people who caught Judith's eye).  Judith is flummoxed by the fact (saying "I kid you not") that Jeff Skoll is making a film about Merchants of Doubt.  Why is she "not kidding you"? She doesn't say, as usual, leaving it up to the imagination of her coterie of fans.  Judith is a latecomer to that news.

The Balance

If you were waiting for Judith Curry to inject some balance to counter the false balance - she disappointed.

Th-th-th-that's all folks!

Pat 'n Chip play with climate models at WUWT

Updated - See below to find out just how wrong Pat'n'Chip are.


Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels are at it again at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT.  I don't think anyone else would have them apart from some right wing rags.

They are claiming that the models are all wrong.  They said they used the model runs as provided on the KNMI Climate Explorer website.  So I went to Climate Explorer and just downloaded the data for RCP8.5 and RCP2.6 and compared it to GISTemp.  This is the result:

Data Source: NASA and Climate Explorer

You'll notice there's little difference between RCP8.5 and RCP2.6.  They don't start to diverge for a few more years.

Bearing in mind there are no error bars shown and that the errors in the observations increase as you go back in time, what strikes me is how darn close the modeled surface temperature is to the observations.

So then I went back to WUWT to see why Pat'nChip say the models are "all wrong".  They wrote:

But very few  people know that the same situation has persisted for 25, going on 35 years, or that over the past 50-60 years (since the middle of the 20th century), the same models expected about 33 percent more warming to have taken place than was observed.

33% more warming since the 1950s? Now that's not what the data shows above.  The observations are fairly closely aligned to the model mean.

---

Update

Here are two more charts.  I've started them at 1951 because Pat'nChip say that "over the past 50-60 years (since the middle of the 20th century)" the models expected 33% more warming.  That's balderdash as you'll see in these charts:

Data Source: NASA and Climate Explorer

Look at the above chart from 1951 to 2001.  The linear trend in the observations is almost indistinguishable from (and slightly steeper than) that of either of the two RCPs.  This completely contradicts the claim of Pat'n'Chip about the "situation has persisted" for last 50-60 years.

Next is 1951 to 2012.

Data Source: NASA and Climate Explorer

Over the period 1951 to the present, the trend for the models is slightly steeper than that of the observations. But certainly not by 33%! It's not even half that. The divergence is from around 2005 onwards.

End Update.

---

So what did Pat 'n Chip do?  They haven't compared the models to the observations directly.  What they did was this:

We’ve calculated the trend in the global average surface temperature simulated to have occurred starting in every year since 1950 and ending in 2012 for every* run of every climate model used in the new IPCC report. In Figure 1, below, we compare the average (and spread) of these 106 model runs with the observed trend during each of the same periods.

They say they calculated the trend in °C/decade, rather than plotting the straight temperature.  I've played with the data a bit but I can't get anything like their chart shown below. (click to enlarge):

I'm guessing they've smoothed the derivatives for starters. However I don't understand how they got such different rates of warming between models and observations.  If you compare it to the result in my first chart, the models and observations correspond well, particularly in the period from around 1930 to around 2004-05.  (The observations show more variation because the model plot isn't a single run, so any variation is averaged out.)

Maybe someone can help me out here and tell me how Pat 'n Chip calculated the rate of warming, and why it appears to be different to what I, at least, would expect.

Curry and Watts - dejected, rejected

The deniers really are running out of stuff to complain about.  Judith Curry is getting nuttier by the day (archived here) and now anti-science blogger Anthony Watts has joined in the fray at WUWT (archived here).

Three out of five GRL papers get rejected

Three years ago a paper got rejected by Geophysical Research Letters.  GRL is quite a prestigious publication and according to a paper in BAMS by David M Schultz, it rejects 59.2% of submissions.  That's not counting author withdrawals or submissions transferred to other journals.  That means that just going by odds, if you submit a paper to GRL it's more likely to be rejected than published.

A motley lot of deniers

The paper purported to be a comparison of climate models with observations.  The authors of the paper are a who's who of deniers - Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger (Pat 'n Chip), John R. Christy (who tells fibs to US Congress), Chad S. Herman (who I don't know) and Lucia M. Liljegren (a nitpicking blogger who is a science denier of the "lukewarmer" variety).

After the first rejection, this motley lot called in James D. Annan to try to resurrect the paper and package it in way that would be acceptable to the journal.  This didn't succeed either.  I've no idea why James decided to throw in his lot with that lot.  According to Judith Curry he was one of the reviewers for the first draft.  Maybe he thought he could turn it into something useful.  But again according to Judith Curry, the next draft was reviewed by four people, all of whom recommended it not be published.

An excuse for Judith Curry to unfairly wail "not fair"

Judith Curry, who converted to denialism some time ago, has decided to make a big deal out of this, acting as if the journal is 'gatekeeping' against sceptics.  She won't entertain the notion that the paper didn't meet the requirements of GRL, which it obviously didn't.  Although she says she "couldn’t see why it was rejected", she's not a climate modeler nor is she a statistician, so what would she know?  And even if there were "nothing wrong with it" that doesn't automatically mean that GRL would have accepted it.  Journals reject papers for many reasons other than being "wrong".

Anthony Watts has picked up the story too.  (Archived here.)  He's always keen to promote the "gatekeeper" myth that papers get rejected because they are written by fake sceptics rather than because they don't meet the standard or other criteria of the journal.  He's also probably preparing his readers that his own still pending paper won't meet the criteria of any decent journal.

Remember, this all happened three years ago.  James Annan wrote about it on his blog back in May 2010. Why they didn't bother to try another journal is anyone's guess.  Maybe the feedback from reviewers discouraged them from doing so.  Or maybe they just wanted an excuse to cry "gatekeepers".

An excuse for Judith Curry to sing the praises of disinformers

The reason for Judith bringing all this up seems to be so that she can once again sing her praises of disinformation peddlers - David Rose and John Christy.

Judith Curry "came out" as a science denier quite a while ago.  She no longer pretends to be "building bridges".  She's pitched her tent with the disinformers and is now a disinformer in her own right.  Anthony Watts, needless to say, welcomes her with open arms.

If you want to read the paper itself you can do so here to save you having to wade through the nonsense on Curry's blog.  James Annan's blog includes some discussion of the analysis if anyone is interested in the unpublished work.

Just another nutter

I'll leave you with what is probably the denier quote of the day, from Judith Curry this time:

And we see where ‘pause denial’ has led the IPCC, potentially to a crisis point in the AR5.  It will be very interesting to see how this plays out in Stockholm next week.

Crisis point?  Judith Curry really is just another nutter of the David Rose  and Heartland Institute variety.

Approaching crisis point

There is no 'crisis point' yet - although we are rapidly approaching it.  The sooner we act the less it will cost and the greater the likelihood that human civilisation will survive. The latest cost estimate is one per cent of GDP but the cost will rise the longer we leave it.

From the WUWT comments

Just a couple, because they typify WUWT denier weirdness and paranoid conspiracy (archived here):

gopal panicker says:

September 20, 2013 at 10:05 am
cooling started three years ago…have fun

GunnyGene says:

September 20, 2013 at 10:16 am
It was obviously rejected because it doesn’t support the political agenda of global domination by Progressives,etc. You are familiar with Agenda 21, I presume?

Pat Michaels is full of crap (again)

Dr Patrick J Michaels, the chief science disinformer from the Cato Institute, tells WUWT-ers what climate hawks already knew, that during the Eemian, it's likely that Greenland ice sheet only contributed maybe a couple of meters of the large sea level rise.

The good news...?

From ScienceDaily back in January this year:

Jan. 23, 2013 — A new study provides surprising details on changes in Earth's climate during the last warm period (120,000-128,000 years ago). Even though temperatures in Northern Greenland were 5-8 degrees Celsius higher than today, the thickness of the ice sheet was only a few hundred meters lower. And this despite the fact that sea level was 4-8 metres higher than today.

This indicates that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet may have contributed less than half of the total sea level rise at the time. This interglacial period (the so called "Eemian") may be a good analogue for where the Greenland ice sheet is heading today in the face of increasing greenhouse gases and warming temperatures.

But then Michaels writes a load of crap that he's tried on before:

Whew! Thus does one revolutionary paper shoot pretty much the entire global warming sea-level catastrophe—the one worth being concerned about—through the heart. Antarctica is so cold that it is projected to gain ice in the coming century, as slightly increased precipitation—which may have recently been detected—falls as more snow, which compacts into more ice.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

The bad news!

Back to ScienceDaily (my bold):

"A thick Greenland ice sheet connected to much warmer conditions in Greenland is astounding but no reason to relax and watch what the future of human-made warming has in store for us," says Prof. Hubertus Fischer, ice core scientist at the University of Bern. "Fact is that the warming was accompanied by a sea level rise of 4-8 metres. Such a sea-level rise would be a disaster for the more than 7 billion people living on this planet today, even if it takes a couple thousand years to be reached."

The apparent good news from this study is that the Greenland ice sheet may not be as sensitive to temperature increases as previously thought. However, the bad news is that if Greenland did not disgorge larger parts of its ice into the ocean during the Eemian, then Antarctica and here especially the more climate sensitive West Antarctic Ice Sheet must be responsible for a significant part of the 4-8-metre sea level rise and may be even more sensitive to climate warming than previously thought.

D. Dahl-Jensen et al. Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core. Nature, 2013; 493 (7433): 489 DOI: 10.1038/nature11789

About Antarctica

Yes, there were some heavy snowfalls in East Antarctica for a couple of seasons last decade.  But that's more than offset (times over) by West Antarctica and the Peninsula, which have always been regarded as where the first sea level rise will come from in Antarctica.  And the way we're going it will probably start in earnest before this century is done.

You can read some recent papers on Pine Island glacier here courtesy Google Scholar.

I wrote recently about a new paper on Antarctica that studies the pattern of melting ice shelves around the entire continent. Ice shelves slow the flow of the rivers of ice. (Click for larger version.)