WUWT shows that 99.9% of recent papers don't dispute mainstream climate science

Scientists will be surprised to find their papers featured on a list that claims they are science deniers. They won't be surprised to find that the list is being circulated by disinformer Anthony Watts and a rabid denier, Pierre Gosselin (archived here and here and here).

Pierre is the same person who, eight years ago in 2008, predicted that by 2020 the surface temperature would have dropped by 2.5 °C. That prediction isn't looking too hot right now. It would have to drop by 2.83 °C from 2015.

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature (blue) and Pierre Gosselin's 2008 prediction (red). Data sources: GISS NASA and WUWT

Pierre is as woeful at understanding science papers as he is at predicting global surface temperature.

Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog and distorted representation at Spiegel Online

Several days after the article appeared in Der Spiegel, Anthony Watts found out about it (archived here). After months of drought, he finally got another mention in mainstream media. In an article by Axel Bojanowski in Der Spiegel - or more correctly, in Spiegel Online. That's as big a deal as getting a mention in one of Rupert Murdoch's papers, like the Australian. Or a mention in the Herald-Sun on the blog of Australia's Andrew Bolt. Der Spiegel has not got an unblemished reputation when it comes to climate science.

WUWT is accused of distorted representation

Still, Anthony thinks he's got reason to celebrate, writing a headline: "German newspaper Spiegel names WUWT the most prominent climate skeptic blog".  He didn't seem to notice that Axel Bojanowski wrote about the distorted representations from denier blogs:

Sogenannte Skeptiker (siehe Grafik) sorgen besonders in den USA mit verzerrten Darstellungen von Forschungsergebnissen dafür, dass Warnungen aus der Klimaforschung als übertrieben gebrandmarkt werden. 

Which Google translated as:

So-called skeptics (see chart) provide particularly in the US with distorted representations of research results that warnings of climate change research are branded as exaggerated.

Faint praise indeed.

Denier weirdness: how an old block of wood changed climate physics forever, not!

There's an article that's been doing the rounds of denier blogs over the past few days. It finally was picked up by Anthony Watts and copied and pasted onto his blog, WUWT. It's a two part copy and paste - of something science denier Larry Bell wrote and something that climate crank Pierre Gosselin wrote. (Archived here.)

The article is about what could be Germany's version of Denier Don Easterbrook, or not as the case may be. The article is about Christian Schlüchter, an emeritus professor with the Institut für Geologie at Universität Bern. According to the article at WUWT, the good professor is a climate science denier. I'm not so sure about that.

A find that was heralded by scientists

The article starts with this odd sentence:

Dr. Christian Schlüchter’s discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.

Now the reason I say the sentence is odd is not simply because scientists usually are delighted with new discoveries. There were two more reasons. Firstly, when I did a search to see if I could find a paper on the subject, I found that it was cited no less than 123 times according to Google Scholar. That doesn't signify the paper being "not cheered". Quite the reverse. Particularly since it was published in The Holocene, not the highest profile journal, though a very respectable publication.

Christian Schlüchter collaborates with Thomas F. Stocker - Co-Chair of IPCC WG1

The second reason I found the sentence odd was that the paper by Christian Schlüchter was coauthored by Ulrich E. Joerin and Thomas F. Stocker. I'm not familiar with the work of Ulrich Joerin but most readers will be familiar with Thomas Stocker. He was co-chair of Working Group 1 of the IPCC. A "warmist" if ever there was one. That would be particularly galling to Pierre Gosselin, whose blog article was copied and pasted at WUWT below Larry Bell's. If he knew about it. Pierre has written rants about Thomas Stocker in the past.

Totally Bat-Shit Crazy: Anthony Watts and his "failed" climate predictions

You'll see these silly lists pop up from time to time on denier websites all over.  A list of supposedly "failed" climate predictions.  Many of them you won't find anywhere else at all.  It's as if the deniers just made them up.

"Surely they wouldn't stoop so low", I hear you say.  Oh, you didn't say that at all?

Anthony Watts has just put up such a list (archived here).  He said it was a list to answer the question of "what was predicted by scientists and activists 25 years ago that would be a result of global warming." and "The original post was asking for a list of failed climate predictions".

Thing is, I only counted fifteen of his 107 predictions that were made 25 years or more ago.  All the rest were more recent.  And of those fifteen, only eight were about global warming.  In fact quite a few of them were about global cooling and some weren't about either warming or cooling but something completely different.  So not only does Anthony fail arithmetic but he can't even stick to the subject he himself chose.

Here are some others that he reckons are failed predictions.  Let me know what you think of their failure:

1. “Due to global warming, the coming winters in the local regions will become milder.”
Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, University of Potsdam, February 8, 2006

I couldn't find any trace of Professor Rahmstorf saying this, though it was plastered all over a lot of denier websites.  I can say, without a shadow of doubt, that winters in my local region have become milder.  I don't know about yours.

Data Source: Bureau of Meteorology Australia

If he did say it, then I'd rate this as scientist pass; deniers fail.


Here's another prediction that Anthony Watts (and a zillion other denier websites) say has failed:

3. “More heat waves, no snow in the winter… Climate models… over 20 times more precise than the UN IPCC global models. In no other country do we have more precise calculations of climate consequences. They should form the basis for political planning… Temperatures in the wintertime will rise the most… there will be less cold air coming to Central Europe from the east…In the Alps winters will be 2°C warmer already between 2021 and 2050.”
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, September 2, 2008.

Between 2021 and 2050?  How do they know it has failed? Perhaps these deniers have a time machine.  Incidentally I did a search of www.mpimet.mpg.de for that quote. I couldn't find it.  That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  The deniers have obviously chopped so much out of it to try to squeeze it into a "failed" prediction.  Strange they left in the part about 2021 and 2050 though.

The European Alps are certainly getting hotter.  In the Executive Summary of this OECD report, is written:

The Alps are particularly sensitive to climate change, and recent warming has been roughly three times the global average. The years 1994, 2000, 2002, and particularly 2003 have been the warmest on record in the Alps in the past 500 years.

Scientists pass; deniers fail.

There are lots more like the above.  There are also lots of quotes from magazines and newspapers.

I have to say that most of the quotes Anthony Watts seems to regard as being a failed prediction are either or both:

• predictions about the near or far future ranging from 2030 to 2100
• already happening.

I saw a tweet today that made me wonder if I should take the first step towards forgiving WUWT:

Freedom means this > pic.twitter.com/zS1ULl56SL
— Girl Futurist (@GirlFuturist) April 3, 2014

From the WUWT comments

Lots of them aren't buying the list.  Some are falling for it, but they are as bad as Anthony Watts or even worse, if possible.

Richard says:

April 2, 2014 at 11:20 am
Wow.. this post is of a quality that I’d expect from spam email. It is extremely poorly sourced. Most entries are completely devoid of context about the range of time these predictions are supposed to occur by, and there are even predictions that specify ranges of years that are still decades away, yet are somehow already considered “failed.”

Bruce Cobb says:

April 2, 2014 at 11:21 am
You can’t know that those are failed predictions. They might have come true in an alternate universe.

LB says:

April 2, 2014 at 11:23 am
“In the UK wetter winters are expected which will lead to more extreme rainfall, whereas summers are expected to get drier. However, it is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying.”
Telegraph, Dr. Peter Stott, Met Office, 24 July 2007
==============
About the only one correct, for this year at least

Patagon says:

April 2, 2014 at 11:33 am
They seem to dislike skiing very much. I would like to know the actual impact of those failed prophecies on the skiing industry. Calling to stop investment on the basis of unsupported regional models is a bit nasty (number 26).

The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:

April 2, 2014 at 11:38 am
Number 98: has anyone checked this (partial pun)? There is the Czech physicist Lubos Motl, but he wasn’t born until 1973. I can find no reference for a ‘Lubos Moti’ – note the ‘i’. 

He's talking about this one, which is pretty funny:

 98. 1969, Lubos Moti, Czech physicist: “It is now pretty clearly agreed that CO2 content [in the atmosphere] will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter.”

JimS says:

April 2, 2014 at 12:10 pm
Rarely do I side with the AGW point of view, but to call these “failed predictions” is really stretching it. Some are notable, but very few.

G. Karst makes an astute observation.  The list of "climate fails" from deniers is getting bigger all the time while that from scientists is, sadly, almost non-existent.  G Karst says:

April 2, 2014 at 12:10 pm
Should’t these be filed under the “Climate Fail” tab on the site banner. After all, it is sparsely populated at the moment (2). GK

Surprisingly, there were a few deniers who thought the list was silly.  But most people who comment at WUWT are, as expected, fake sceptics or weirdos who can't see that the listed predictions had either already come to pass or were about the future.


Resourceguy apparently reckons WUWT is a den of illiterati. At least I assume he's talking about WUWT when he mentions anti-learning and says:

April 2, 2014 at 12:10 pm
Definitely a keep, but the failed predictions after this point will still grow exponentially anyway because we live in the era of anti-learning and anti-empirical evidence, right NYT, BBC, and others?

groovyman67 wants every high school, college, university, news station, et al to know how dumb they are at WUWT and says:

April 2, 2014 at 12:58 pm
This list should be more thoroughly completed, continually updated, and have the names and employer of each listed. Then nailed on the door of every high school, college, university, news station, et al as the ’107 theses’. If there is no accountability for these predictions there is no stopping them.

Since there is no desire for accountability, rather a desire to cover up, among the warmists (formerly coolists) perhaps the route to go is loud, obnoxious and ongoing predictions of 0 degree temperature change by 2034, ice caps will be almost exactly the same in 2064. This will only work if the manner in which it is presented draws attention, since it’s not fearmongering it will be considered non-newsworthy. 

PaulH says it's important to remember the names and faces of people like Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, Christopher Monckton, Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, Matt Ridley, Nigel Lawson, Benny Peiser, John Christy, Ian Plimer, Bob Carter, James Delingpole, David Rose, Andrew Bolt, Jo Nova and all the others who are working hard to make sure the world gets hotter and hotter, faster and faster. Perhaps he's right:

April 2, 2014 at 1:03 pm
It is important to remember the names and faces of the people who caused all of this CAGW mayhem.

JohnWho says:

April 2, 2014 at 1:56 pm
Great information from the OP and other posters.

Question:
Is there a similar list of skeptical failed predictions or are the climate skeptics too “proper science minded” to make unfounded predictions?

John, if you're over this way, check this out!  This one by Pierre Gosselin who predicts minus 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2020 is up there with the best of them. It's not 2020 yet, but I think it's fair to say that unless there's an asteroid strike or a supervolcanic eruption, it will fail.  Back in 2008 he wrote:

My prediction is we’ve started a nasty cold period that will make the 1960s look balmy. We’re about to get caught with our pants down. And a few molecules of CO2 is not going to change it.

Yet only two years later, we had the equal hottest year on record. Here's what his prediction would look like in the context of the prior 140 years.

Denier weirdness: The crank blog popularity contest

A commenter alerted me to a post by science denier Pierre Gosselin (archived here).  He reckons that because there are quite a few climate cranks who run blogs, it disproves the fact that 97% of science papers on the topic find that humans are causing climate change.  Or something like that.  Which of course it doesn't.

Pierre Gosselin, you may recall, back in 2008, two years before the equal hottest year on record so far, said he thought that Earth would become icy cold by 2020, writing (archived here):

Pierre Gosselin says:

October 23, 2008 at 2:03 am

-2.5°C by 2020!

Some powerful cycles appear to be aligning to deliver a vicious deep freeze.

- Solar cycles

- Ocean cycles – PDO, AMO, etc.

- and the 100K year ice-age cycle

There are some things to keep in mind:

1. Climate does not change gradually.

2. Climate changes abruptly, without warning.

3. Temperatures over the last 2 million years have been colder than today’s 95+% of the time.

4. Warm, like today, is in fact highly unusual.

5. Our current interglacial has been abnormally long.

6. Interglacial are more often much briefer, short-lived spikes.

6. Thus, the climate dice are not in our favour!

Ice ages have occurred right ON SCHEDULE for the last 3 million years.

And if you examine the interglacial temperature peaks, i.e the brief optimums between the cold intervals, you’ll see our modern optimum is indeed prolonged. More often the interglacials are just brief spikes that suddenly nosedive back into prolonged deep-freezes. Now the sun is going to sleep, and the oceans are reversing to boot!

My prediction is we’ve started a nasty cold period that will make the 1960s look balmy. We’re about to get caught with our pants down.

And a few molecules of CO2 is not going to change it.

Here is what Pierre's prediction looks like.  In six years from now, according to Pierre Gosselin, the temperature will drop to 2.5 degrees Celsius below that at the beginning of the 20th century:

Data sources: NASA and WUWT

Now we've established Pierre's credentials, let's look at how he measures scientific acumen.  He was referring to a list of mostly climate disinformers, made up on a blog called "ScottishSceptic" (archived here) and made an odd observation.  He wrote at Notrickszone (archived here):

Having done a quick count of the warmist sites, I came up with 48 from a total of 137. That’s crunches to be only 35%. That’s a far cry from the 97% the warmists like to try to have the rest of the world believe.

He thinks that because ScottishSceptic found a whole bunch of crank climate disinformation blogs that somehow PROVES that only 35% of the scientific literature on the subject finds that humans are causing climate change.

Credit: Plognark

You think that's weird?  He goes even further and writes:

That means that almost two thirds of all climate science blogs are very skeptical or somewhat skeptical of the IPCC science (skeptic or luke-warmer). That’s hardly a consensus! Many of the skeptic sites are run by scientists and meteorologists…also showing that that “consensus among experts” is a complete myth.

Moreover, the top 20 sites are clearly dominated by skeptics.

I'd love to know which "skeptic" sites are run by "scientists and meteorologists".  Anyone?

The list puts websites like Jeff Masters at Wunderground.com and ClimateProgress, which would both beat WUWT readership by a mile, way down in the rankings.  That's because ScottishSceptic used wrong and outdated addresses.  The list doesn't rank any of the scienceblog blogs because they aren't shown separately in Alexa.  It leaves off the really popular blogs such as the BadAstronomy on Slate.com, and the myriad of general and specialist science websites that post articles on all sorts of topics, not just climate science.  All of which, like Carl Zimmer on the Loom and Ed Yong at National Geographic would leave Anthony Watts' pitiful effort at WUWT in the dust.  And it doesn't include discussion boards like Reddit, which was the subject of my last article.

Thing is, fake sceptics have very little choice when it comes to quack websites.  They have blogs run by cranks like Anthony Watts and Pierre Gosselin and that's it.  Their choice is very limited.

Pseudoscience nutters don't have science blogs or specialist climate science blogs.  They don't have quality websites like ArsTechnica.com or Smithsonian.com or Scientific American or National Geographic.  They don't have science and environment sections in mainstream media, like at the Guardian or the Sydney Morning Herald.

And there is no such thing as in-depth discussion of pseudo-science, which is why they are stuck with the sort of quackery you read at WUWT and notrickszone and similar.

There are no equivalents in pseudo-science land of climate websites run by scientific organisations, like NASA, the CSIRO, all the universities and meteorological offices around the world.  They would get vastly more web traffic than the piddly little anti-science blogs at which science deniers congregate - and from a much better educated and informed class of visitor, too.

Of course, one big information source the fake sceptics lack is pseudo-scientific journals.  They is no pseudo-science equivalent of Nature, Science, PNAS, the Journal of Climate or any of the dozens of other high quality scientific journals. Fake sceptics and contrarians have a few, like Energy and Environment and the dog astrology journal.  But not many fake sceptics bother with getting their pseudo-science published.  Why would they when it's so much more fun to attack scientists personally and make silly "ice age cometh" predictions?

I expect there are equivalents to the climate disinformation websites in other aspects of science.  I'm not up with blogs that specialise in promoting HAARP and chemtrails conspiracy theories, which fall into the same bag as the climate science cranks as far as I'm concerned.

There are also the cranks who peddle health pseudo-science.  One Mike Adams, who blogs at various places but who I'd not come across before.  I have come across people who are fans of another health pseudo-science crank called Joe Mercola.  Unlike the climate science disinformers, these blokes seem to be able to earn a good living from their quackery and they attract a lot more traffic than WUWT does.

So the climate cranks might pat themselves on the back for getting lots of readers.  The rest of the world scratches its collective head and wonders.  Why would anyone be pleased to be viewed as a crank, even a popular nutcase?  Is it really something to boast about?  What motivates someone to have the "most widely read crank pseudo-scientific blog"?  Why would anyone be proud of being anti-science?

To finish up, I'll list what I see as the main ingredients for attracting the most nutters to your pseudo-science blog:

1. Be a crank yourself.  The most popular pseudo-science blogs are run by cranks. Be a caricature of a human being. Make believe you are a hero for fighting all those nasty scientists and the guvmint, or even portray yourself as a god (worshipped by Janice Moore).

2. Be a conspiracy theorist. If you allege that all climate science is a hoax you'll draw a lot of other conspiracy theoriest out of the woodwork.  Add in conspiracy theories about money and government, like JoNova does, and you'll draw a bigger crowd.

3. Publish outlandish articles.  The more outlandish the better.  Catching UHI disease from Russian steampipes isn't bad.  OMG it's insects isn't bad.  An Ice-Age Cometh is better still.

4. Make fun of well-respected scientists.  Libel them ferociously.  Support your mockery with cartoons. Your readers might not understand science (or pseudo-science) but they just love being part of a lynch mob. They take special delight in "shooting the messenger".

5. Keep text to a minimum. Short sentences and short paragraphs are best. Words of no more than two syllables and not too many of them. Your audience finds text tedious but can (sometimes) follow pictures, especially coloured pictures in cartoon-style.

6. Blow the dog-whistle loudly.  Make sure even the dimmest person in your audience understands that you are mocking science.  Otherwise they will leave you for another crank blog.

7. Reward readers who flame sensible comments.  Make sure your readers pile on so heavily that normal people will disappear never to return. Otherwise you'll lose most of your ratbag audience and your blog will fail dismally.

8. Regularly post silly drawings that look "sciency" - the uglier the better, supported by "equations" that look sciency to the uninformed.  That way you can proudly claim to be a 100% genuine pseudo-science blog.

9. Make up lies about what scientists actually have found so that you can say "it's wrong" and "aren't we clever for showing all the science is wrong".

10. Wear your politics on your sleeve.  You really don't want any bleeding heart liberals polluting your blog with comments.

Finally. Flatter your audience.  Make them feel they are clever for rejecting science. Tell them how smart they are for not accepting anything from the evil guvmint or gravy-train scientists. Everyone loves a bit of flattery.