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".

Anthony Watts arrives late at the APS climate party ... and gets it wrong

I see that Anthony Watts has only just discovered that the American Physical Society is reviewing its climate policy statement.  He wrote excitedly (archived here):

That noise you can hear in the distance is the sound of John Cook’s, Dana Nuccitelli’s, and Joe Romm’s heads exploding

Lindzen, Christy and Curry appointed to APS climate statement review panel

He earlier wrote, quoting Simon of Australian Climate Madness, that:

The American Physical Society, which previously issued a highly alarmist statement regarding climate change, is to review it, and has appointed three climate realists to the panel of six. 

...before slightly amending it to insert the word "[address]" after "climate realists".


Anyway, Lindzen, Christy and Curry did attend a workshop of the APS sub-committee back in early January.  As well as the contrarians, the sub-committee invited three more highly regarded and serious climate scientists (Ben Santer, Isaac Held and William Collins).  Goodness knows why they had Richard, John and Judith along.

Lindzen, Christy and Curry aren't on the sub-committee and I don't hold great hopes that the sub-committee will end up with a sensible climate policy. If you read the transcript of the January workshop it's clear that the Sub-Committee members themselves know zilch about climate science.  You'd think that out of all the members of the APS they could find some climate experts to prepare a draft statement.

By the way, this is another example of Anthony either forgetting or not reading stuff he's already posted on his blog before, too. And he doesn't read Judith Curry's blog or Rabett Run either, both of whom wrote about this a month ago.

Eli's post is a must read.  He starts off scathingly:

The American Physical Society had done it again.  In a surprisingly repetitive fit of Dunning Kruger they have assembled a subcommittee to guide the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) in a review of the APS statement on Climate Change which is composed of nuclear physicists and others who know nothing about climate relevant physics.

From the WUWT comments

Even though the sub-committee has a lot of learning ahead of it when it comes to climate science, I wonder if WUWT is going to be a repeat of Richard Muller's temperature reconstruction - where they all cried "hurrah" anticipating a finding that earth had cooled or something - only to turn on him when his analysis was completed.  I mean how likely is it that the APS would reverse its current policy position?

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Terry Comeau says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:53 am
What I would give to sit in on the meetings of the panel. The alarmists on that panel must be panic stricken. Three people with such impressive scientific credentials to actually put real questions of science and integrity to their blatant and exceedingly flimsy eco-activistic pseudo-scientific constructs. How on earth can they try to maintain their house of cards under those circumstances? The gig is up and they must see it coming like a light in a train tunnel, and there isn’t a damned thing they can do to avoid it. Wow. Break out the popcorn.

Ken Hall says:

March 20, 2014 at 8:01 am
AT LAST!!! An authorititive and august scientific institution actually using a scientific approach to investigating the merits, or lack thereof, of the CAGW hypothesis. fully balanced and fully in public, without hiding anything. About effin time!

To overtly mangle metaphors, once this domino falls it should creat a crack in the dam of CAGW alarmism which should spread through all the other authorititive and august scientific institutions, including the Royal Society. Once this happens, real science may prevail and we may see a return to sanity in science and politics. It is early days yet, but fingers crossed.

John Whitman says:

March 20, 2014 at 10:29 am
It does not get any better than this for it finally shows a reasonable good level of openness and transparency in climate science assessment. The review panel has high level personnel who are very critical of the processes that supported the controversial aspects of climate science used for the IPCC reports.

This APS process is a prototype that the The Royal Society, the IPCC, the NAS, AAAS, AGU and the US Congress should emulate.
John 

Let's wait to see how this plays out.  The American Physical Society has a reputation to uphold after all.  It could well be that WUWT will suffer a series of head explosions, not John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli or Joe Romm.

Luverly! Judith Curry supports "the GWPF objectives"

Oh, this is just luverly!  Judith Curry today:

In the midst of all this noise I wasn’t sure what GWPF was all about.  Now I have a better idea, and I certainly support their objectives.

Weirdly, Judith implies that she did no investigation before effectively endorsing the GWPF by writing a foreword to a report of theirs.

Nigel Lawson offers a sample of "what the GWPF" is all about, which I expect would delight Judith Curry, knowing her views on the IPCC.  And I wonder would Judith agree with GWPF Director Benny Peiser who seemed to be suggesting that we might be heading for an ice age?

Do you reckon she's angling for a job on the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council with science deniers: Bob Carter and William Happer and Richard Lindzen and Ross McKitrick and Ian Plimer and Matt Ridley and Nir Shaviv and Henrik Svensmark and David Whitehouse and others?

What's next? An endorsement of James Delingpole, interpreter of interpretations?

(It's more likely she's angling for a job with the GWPF's US cousin, the Heartland Institute.)

Taxpayer-funded fake sceptics - public confession time

Seems that not only will Australian taxpayers be forking out for adaptation and recuperation instead of mitigation, now we're paying science deniers.  The Institute for Public Affairs - arguably Australia's number one climate science denial machine, gets subsidised by taxpayers in all sorts of ways.

It's used the taxpayer-funded ABC as its own personal free publisher and public relations organisation.  It gets a free pass on paying taxes.  And anyone who sends it money gets a tax deduction for doing so.

This, mind you, is a right wing lobby group that rants and raves about government overspending, government subsidies and urges small government.  You'd think the last thing it would be doing is wasting our hard earned tax dollars.  But no.  Apparently it's a matter of "do what we say not what we do".  They survive with the help of taxpayer's contributions and tax breaks.

Now it's got a new scam going.  On the back of a who's who of science denying shysters, the IPC is threatening offering to publish for all the world to see, the names of anyone dumb enough to send them $400 or more to chop down trees to make door stops - or loo paper if you're extra tough.

It looks as if they can't get a publisher to pay for their trashy book so they have to resort to panhandling. You can read all about it here at Renew Economy.

I can't wait to see who are the most disreputable among the Establishment, who are willing to tattoo their names on the backside of such disreputable ratbags as Andrew Bolt, James Delingpole, Donna Laframboise, Mark Steyn,  Nigel Lawson. "Jo Nova", Jennifer Marohasy, Richard Lindzen, Anthony Watts, Ian Plimer, Bob Carter and other climate science deniers from Australia and around the world.

Hoity Toity Christopher Monckton sez the Earth is losing energy and other silliness at WUWT

The potty peer has done it again.  He's trying to argue that Dana Nuccitelli is wrong in his recent article in the Guardian: The Weekly Standard's Lindzen puff piece exemplifies the conservative media's climate failures.

Christopher Monckton has to play fudgery with numbers and I'm not sure if he's fooling anyone except the hard core deniers.  And they'll be fooled by anything as long as it rejects climate science.  Here is the archived WUWT article.

(I see that Christopher, like Bob Tisdale a couple of days ago, has taken a leaf out of HotWhopper's book and has webcited the Guardian article, but I can't access it.  No-one else has complained so I don't know if it's just me or if no-one at WUWT clicked on the link.  Neither would surprise me. Update: the webcite version is accessible now, but it doesn't look too good in Chrome.)

I won't go over all Christopher's silliness.  He's done it all before, including wanting to running off to his dreaded government  crying crocodile tears when he doesn't like something.  (Deniers typically hold government in contempt unless they are claiming to be members of the House of Lords or wanting the government to intervene in some fabricated slight.)  Here's a short sample.

Yes, Christopher - fewer than two out of every hundred climate science papers in the last twenty years dispute the notion that humans are to blame for global warming. No reputable scientist disputes this fact.

And yes, Christopher, Lindzen's Iris Hypothesis was found wanting.

And yes, Christopher, we are in a period of warming that is unprecedented in a very long time, and are heading for 10 times the pace of warming in 65 million years.

You get the picture.

At one stage Christopher shows he himself doesn't agree with Richard Lindzen.  Christopher writes:

it is possible – indeed, quite likely – that a net loss of energy from the Earth-atmosphere system is now underway. If so, global temperature may even fall,

First of all, if there was a net loss of energy then global temperatures would definitely fall.  No maybes, ifs or buts about it.  But that's physically impossible as long as we keep adding greenhouse gases at the rate we are, and as long as there are no supervolcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes or similar to stop the sunlight penetrating the atmosphere.  Christopher doesn't provide any evidence to support his nutty claim, understandably, because there is none.


Here's another blooper - Christopher writes:

Since natural variability has yielded warming at 4.33 Cº/century within the past 350 years

What natural variability?  What 15ºC of warming over the past 350 years?  Let's look at the longer term record - of the past 2000 years. (Click to enlarge.)

Figure 5.7 IPCC AR5 WG1 Reconstructed (a) Northern Hemisphere and (b) Southern Hemisphere, and (c) global annual temperatures during the last 2000 years. Individual reconstructions (see Appendix 5.A.1 for further information about each one) are shown as indicated in the legends, grouped by colour according to their spatial representation (red: land-only all latitudes; orange: land-only extra-tropical latitudes; light blue: land and sea extra-tropical latitudes; dark blue: land and sea all latitudes) and instrumental temperatures shown in black (HadCRUT4 land and sea, and CRUTEM4 land-only; Morice et al., 2012). All series represent anomalies (°C) from the 1881–1980 mean (horizontal dashed line) and have been smoothed with a filter that reduces variations on timescales less than ~50 years.

No.  There's not been anything like a warming of 4.33 degrees a century (or 15ºC) in the past 350 years.  Even taking it to the present day with the "unnatural" forcing, there's not a 4.33 degree rise from the coldest temperature in the last 1500 years to the temperature today.  Imagine what it will be like if we let global surface temperatures rise by four degrees!

At one point Christopher goes for another bit of disinformation.  He wrote:

A: Before the U.S. Senate on 23 June 1988, Hansen said that his Scenario A, which predicted 0.5 Cº/decade warming to 2060, was the “business-as-usual” case; yet Nuccitelli has only shown Hansen’s less exaggerated Scenario B.

But that's wrong.  In Dr Hansen's testimony, he describes Scenario A as assuming 1.5% a year emissions growth.  But emissions haven't grown at that rate.  The growth averaged over the period since 1988 would be roughly 0.5% a year, going by the rise in atmospheric CO2 over that period.

Christopher cries "libel" a lot.  But it's he, Christopher Monckton, who is one of the biggest frauds in the deniosphere.

The deniers who think they are modern-day Galileos won't be happy with Christopher for writing this bit of nonsense:

The Church, as well as informed scientific opinion, had long agreed that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way about. However, Galileo had drawn inappropriate theological conclusions from heliocentricity, perpetrating the notorious non sequitur that since the Earth was not the centre of the Universe the Incarnation and Crucifixion were of less importance than the Church maintained. It was Galileo’s theological conclusion the Church objected to, not the scientific conclusion that the Sun is at the center of the solar system. 

And Christopher proves to be a passive smoking denier, too, writing:

And, as far as I know, Professor Lindzen does not dispute the well-established link between smoking and lung cancer, though he would be within his rights to dispute the imagined link between passive smoking and lung cancer. 

Since Anthony Watts is so anti-smoking I'm surprised he let that one through. For Richard Lindzen's position on passive smoking - check out pages 25 and 26 of this transcript.

From the WUWT comments

Here is how Christopher finishes up:

What is your verdict? From my own knowledge of the Professor and his distinguished work, I find Nuccitelli’s piece misleading, offensive, and cruel. Damages will be huge.

It's now offensive and cruel to point out errors and listing errors is misleading?  Let's see if the WUWT-ers agree.

Lew Skannen says:

January 13, 2014 at 8:48 pm
Sueing is an expensive, difficult and risky process. Better to get a peice in the Graun refuting the garbage so all the Nuttycherry sycophants can have their noses rubbed in it.

Dr C objects to Christopher rewriting history and says (excerpt):

January 13, 2014 at 9:01 pm
Sorry to quibble, Mr Monckton, but this part is incorrect: “The Church, as well as informed scientific opinion, had long agreed that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way about.” First, no one used the word ‘orbit’ at the time. Kepler invented that word (as we understand it), and few in Rome were reading Kepler at the time. More important, however, is that Rome at the time remained firmly geocentric in its cosmological outlook: the official line in Rome was that the Sun revolved around the earth. This is an indisputable fact. 

jorgekafkazar says, without a hint that he sees the double standards at WUWT:

January 13, 2014 at 9:01 pm
Ad hominem slurs, the first refuge of scoundrels…

tallbloke has got as far as realising you can only claim "Little Ice Age bouncing" for so long and hope to get away with it, even for hard core deniers.  He's yet to wake up to the reality that there is no such thing as a Little Ice Age bounce.  It takes a forcing to change the climate. He says:

January 13, 2014 at 11:32 pm
“on the evidence there could be as little as 1 Cº global warming between now and 2100″
Or minus 0.5C. The recovery from the LIA won’t go on forever.

Bugs Man is probably one of the 8% who really and truly "believes" people like the potty peer, even though he can't understand a thing about science.  He says (excerpt):

January 13, 2014 at 11:22 pm
Lord Monckton’s article is a tour de force example of a complete* de-bunk of Nuccitelli and Abraham’s piece in The Guardian (6 Jan 2014). That it is libellous is, for me, well proven.
At least one preceding comment questions the economic sense of persuing a libel case which can be cost-prohibitive for individuals. I suggest that a formal complaint to the (UK) Independent Press Complaints Commission (regrettably also abbreviated to IPCC), using Lord Monckton’s article as evidence*, would be a far less expensive exercise and, if upheld, arguably more effective in getting The Guardian to be more circumspect before regurgitating Nuccitelli’s venomous opinions in future. A privately funded libel case on the back of such a judgement by the IPCC should then be considered.

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!

Sad Lindzen, Surprised Tisdale and another Mann-Bash on a dull day at WUWT

I don't know if it's just the mood I'm in but Anthony Watts' blog WUWT seems rather dull today.  Here's a quick rundown.

How the mighty have fallen

Richard Lindzen has had to resort to publishing his non-science at WUWT (archived here).  How long is it since he published anything himself?  It must be quite a while.  His article is not original. It's just a repeat of denier talking points, with stuff like:

arctic sea ice is suddenly showing surprising growth

Lindzen's wrong!

Sea ice this year isn't growing as fast as it did last year!  It was almost a year ago when deniers were enthralled at the growth of sea ice in the Arctic, observing "2012 is the fastest refreeze ever!".   This year they'll have to admit that 2013 won't be breaking that record.  This day last year ice added 36% to the minimum whereas today it's only added 31% to the minimum, and it had longer to do so (via JAXA)! /sarc

Tisdale on oceans

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale is surprised that he found a chart he likes in the IPCC report (archived here).  I'm surprised at how short Bob's article is, compared to his usual fare.  He still manages to say really dumb stuff like this:

I’ve noted this a number of times before: the NODC should be commended for the amount of work that went into assembling all of the data required for their ocean heat content datasets.

But the NODC cannot be praised for their portrayal of their ocean heat content data as a globally complete dataset with little uncertainty.

"Little uncertainty"?  Bob must only look at the pictures without reading the text, where there is a strong emphasis on uncertainty and its measurement.  Even if he only looked at the pictures, he can't have understood them.  For example, from page 3-93 of Chapter 3 of the full report - note the gray bars:

Fig 3.21 Time series of changes in large-scale ocean climate properties. From top to bottom: global ocean inventory of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, updated from Khatiwala et al. (2009); global mean sea level (GMSL), from Church and White (2011); global upper ocean heat content anomaly, updated from Domingues et al. (2008); the difference between salinity averaged over regions where the sea surface salinity is greater than the global mean sea surface salinity (“High Salinity”) and salinity averaged over regions values below the global mean (“Low Salinity”), from Boyer et al. (2009).

Another Mann-bash

Anthony Watts hasn't done too much scientist-bashing lately, or not on a personal level.  He was probably getting twitchy, because he came up with an excuse that he figured probably wouldn't land him in court.

Anthony decided to fake some outrage at an image used as part of an election campaign (archived here).  He writes:

The imagery is dishonest.

Anthony Watts accusing someone of being dishonest.  Now there's irony in action.

Norfolk Virginia is a flood-prone city and there was an image highlighting the risks of rising sea level, over which Anthony decided to take personal offense.  It probably took him a while to figure out it wasn't "real" and he when he did he felt very foolish.  Enough to get real mad.  I can see him now, googling away looking for a picture of the house under beautifully clear water.  I doubt anyone else thought the picture was anything but illustrating a point.  But then, Anthony isn't all that bright.

Here's the picture, it's got a caption saying seas have risen by 14.5 inches since 1930.  I wonder if Anthony thought at first it was a very very tiny house, before he realised it was an illustration?

From the WUWT comments

Nope, sorry.  The Mann-bashers let forth their pent up fury in the usual fashion.  It's not repeatable. I barely scanned them myself because the ones I did read are so distasteful.  Ignorance at its worst, fuelled by the lack of opportunity Anthony's provided lately to come together as a lynch mob or vent their various spleens.  It's archived here for the ghouls.

WUWT tabloid science

Anthony Watts' followers at WUWT reject climate science in favour of tabloid "science".  Perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale writes (archived here):

I figured today would be a good day to post this, with David Rose’s article in the “Sunday Mail” 

Instead of looking to the IPCC for a compilation of climate science, fake skeptics go to the erudite scientific journal the Mail Online to fossick among headlines about someone's ponytail, someone else's camel toe and someone (I think it's a person) called Honey Boo Boo (click image to enlarge):

Source: MailOnline

So today, in honour of tabloid science at WUWT, HotWhopper will report in tabloid style!

Now where is that sciency article by Judith Curry's latest pin-up boy, David Rose, I wonder?  Found it! It's archived here.  Let's see what David Rose has dreamt up this time.

Jilted celebrity Arctic Ice now on the Rebound!

Here's something.  Daily Fail reports that jilted celebrity Arctic Ice, whose ratings in the last few years had gone into a nosedive, is on the rebound. David Rose reports to his devoted illiterati audience:

While 2013 remains the sixth lowest Arctic sea ice year since 1979, forthcoming research suggests the long-term melting trend is partly cyclical, and may have begun a reversal.

"This is beyond me" admits star-struck Judith Curry to her new-found idol

In other breaking news, David Rose quotes his latest tabloid darling, star-struck Judith Curry, writing:

However, not only does the report deny the importance of the pause, it makes a firm, short-term forecast that it is about to end – claiming that the period 2016-2035 will, on average, be 0.3-0.7C hotter than 1986-2005.

That, said Prof Judith Curry, head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is a high-risk strategy: ‘The IPCC has thrown down the gauntlet.’

Should the pause continue, she said, ‘they are toast’.  

She was critical about the report’s statement that confidence humans had caused most of the warming of the 20th Century had increased from 90 per cent in the last IPCC report in 2007 to 95 per cent.

‘How they can justify this is beyond me.’

Pop star and illiterati heart-throb Judith Curry admitted to reporter David Rose "...this is beyond me". 

After some digging this reporter has discovered the "toast" Judith talks about are the world's leading climate scientists, who have been hilariously talking as if the world is going to get toasted.  However, anyone who reads the world's most viewed climate website will know that by 2020 the world will be in the depths of an ice age.  What "the toast" don't realise, which readers of Daily Fail have known for some time, is that the warming since the Little Ice Age was caused by a magical bounce, aka off with the pixies.

Daily Fail reports: Scientific experts are implausible and hilariously incoherent

There is more skulduggery as Professor Richard (deep throat) Lindzen solemnly declares "hilarious incoherence".  While business analyst Bjorn Lomborg, who has the best interest of the Daily Fail's illiterati at heart, pronounces the world's top scientific experts as being "implausible".  The Daily Fail's resident climate scientist and heart-throb David Rose agrees, pointing out that "1997 was not a hot year".  

To demonstrate just how cold it was in 1997, HotWhopper has dug up this animated chart of global surface temperatures showing just how freezing cold it was in 1997 compared to now and all the boiling hot years before 1997:

Data Source: NASA

If the freezing cold of 1997 doesn't prove to you that global warming is a giant hoax then I don't know what will convince you.  

Footnote and warning: This reporter has been informed by reliably unreliable sources that anyone who still isn't convinced of the giant hoax is at serious risk of having their membership of the illustrious organisation, the Scientific Illiterati, cancelled.

Click here for more sciency-sounding (sort of) confabulations from Daily Fail's pet Professor, Judith Curry.

Anthony Watts is disconnected from climate reality

Anthony Watts, blogger at WUWT, writes with sublime confidence in true denier fashion (archived here):

There’s simply no connection between droughts, hurricanes, thunderstorms, flash floods, tornadoes and “climate change”. Note to Brad Johnson of “Forecast the Facts”, and Bill McKibben of 350.org, both of whom daily try to link weather events to climate change: IPCC says STFU.

Connecting weather and climate change

Anthony Watts is wrong.  There is a most definite connection between global warming and all weather events.  How can there not be.  More energy in the troposphere on the land and in the oceans has to affect the weather. The connections have been identified in Table SPM.1 of the AR5 SPM as follows:

• Drought - Increases in intensity and/or duration of drought are likely (medium confidence) on a regional to global scale. Regional to global-scale projected decreases in soil moisture and increased agricultural drought are likely (medium confidence) in presently dry regions by the end of this century under the RCP8.5 scenario. Soil moisture drying in the Mediterranean, Southwest US and southern African regions is consistent with projected changes in Hadley circulation and increased surface temperatures, so there is high confidence in likely surface drying in these regions by the end of this century under the RCP8.5 scenario.
• Hurricanes - Increases in intense tropical cyclone activity. More likely than not in the Western North Pacific and North Atlantic - based on expert judgment and assessment of projections which use an SRES A1B (or similar) scenario.  
• Flash floods - Heavy precipitation events. Increase in the frequency, intensity, and/or amount of heavy precipitation. Likely over many land areas early this century. Very likely over most of the mid-latitude land masses and over wet tropical regions later this century. 

The following two aren't in Table SPM.1 and I'm not sure why Anthony included them.

• Thunderstorms - why Anthony mentioned thunderstorms is anyone's guess.  Thunder is the noise made when there are massive electrical discharges.  I don't know if there will be more electrical discharges in the atmosphere or not.  Anyone know?
• Tornadoes - AFAIK the jury is still out.

One item Anthony missed is rising seas, which will exacerbate the impact of storms and cyclones that hit coastal areas.  The IPCC report says of sea levels:

Increased incidence and/or magnitude of extreme high sea level is likely early this century and very likely later this century. There is high confidence that this increase in extreme high sea level will primarily be the result of an increase in mean sea level. There is low confidence in region-specific projections of storminess and associated storm surges.

What does Anthony think climate change means?  It means changing climates - duh!

Richard Lindzen - denier weirdness

People have wondered how Richard Lindzen, who is still AFAIK associated with one of the world's most prestigious institutions, MIT, could turn into such a raving ratbag.  He gave a quote to Marc Morano at ClimateDepot, which Anthony Watts reposted at WUWT (archived here in the same article).  I don't think it was picked up by the mainstream media, which is hardly surprising.  Here's an excerpt:

Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about.  It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going

Of course they "fail to point out" that warming has been small.  It hasn't been small.  It's been extremely fast. Most probably faster than any human has ever seen since humans first evolved.  And it's going to get worse.  It's definitely something to be alarmed about.  From Stanford University (excerpt):

The planet is undergoing one of the largest changes in climate since the dinosaurs went extinct. But what might be even more troubling for humans, plants and animals is the speed of the change. Stanford climate scientists warn that the likely rate of change over the next century will be at least 10 times quicker than any climate shift in the past 65 million years.

If the trend continues at its current rapid pace, it will place significant stress on terrestrial ecosystems around the world, and many species will need to make behavioral, evolutionary or geographic adaptations to survive.

From the WUWT comments

Leon0112 doesn't know that surface temperatures have already risen a lot, or that a hotter surface and warmer oceans are not incompatible. On the contrary, they are expected.  He says:

September 28, 2013 at 7:08 am
In previous reports, the IPCC asserted that it was settled science that increasing CO2 levels caused increasing surface temperatures. Now, the IPCC asserts that the heat is hiding in the ocean. This is an implicit admission that previous settled science was wrong.

gopal panicker is a simple, straightforward denier and says:

September 28, 2013 at 6:50 am
the whole ‘report’ is bullshit

Peter Miller uses fancier words to express his denial and says:

September 28, 2013 at 8:14 am
We must never forget the grim truth that the IPCC, like all quasi-government bureaucracies, is primarily interested in its own perpetuation. Everything else is a secondary consideration.
George Orwell would be proud of the IPCC and the way it portrays the ‘facts’ about climate.

A divide is emerging among the contrarians - utter nutters vs tarnished lukewarmers

Going by WUWT, Anthony Watts has been trying to make up his mind whether to join the utter nuttery or yield to his craving for respect from serious people and mainstream America.  It's looking as if the "utter nuttery" is winning.  He used to care what normal people think about him, but I'd say he's now given up on any dream he might have had in that regard.

A few weeks ago Anthony made what might have been his last feeble attempt at respectability by putting up some "experiments" to show that the greenhouse effect is real.  Mind you, this was in the middle of some really crazy articles - see some of them here - and don't forget "OMG it's insects".  Since then he's proclaimed that global warming "is a natural cycle".

I'm wondering if a turning point was his foray into giving a talk to a group of deluded doctors and nurses.  Citizenschallenge wrote a good rebuttal to Anthony's horrendous video. Anthony only made $250 from it, but maybe he thinks that's where his future lies.  Catmando did a bit of research on the doctors. (If you are in the USA, I'd recommend you make sure your doctor isn't a member of this group - they have what could politely be described as fringe views).

Right wing extremist medicos

Today Anthony put up another article relating to those same doctors (archived here).  It was about an article Richard Lindzen wrote for The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.  The journal isn't a real journal.  It's not recognised in medical circles.  It's more of a magazine put out by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.  That group sounds very professional doesn't it.  It's not at all.  It's a fringe group described in Wikipedia as:

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a politically conservative non-profit association founded in 1943 to "fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine."[1][2] The group was reported to have approximately 4,000 members in 2005, and 3,000 in 2011.[1][3] Notable members include Ron Paul and John Cooksey;[4] the executive director is Jane Orient, a member of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

The AAPS motto, "omnia pro aegroto" is Latin for "all for the patient."[5] AAPS also publishes the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (formerly known as the Medical Sentinel). The Journal is not indexed by mainstream scientific databases such as the Web of Science or MEDLINE.[6] The quality and scientific validity of articles published in the Journal has been criticized by others. Many of the political and scientific viewpoints advocated by AAPS are considered extreme or dubious by other medical groups.[1]

Going by the articles in their journal, they are an odd bunch and have some pretty weird ideas for health professionals.  (There are only 3,000 or so members according to Wiki, which is a tiny proportion of health professionals in the USA.)

Richard Lindzen espouses "Lysenko/eugenics" conspiracies

Richard Lindzen has thrown in the towel with them and has become a wacko conspiracy theorist.  If you want to find out just how far from reality he's plunged, read the article.  He's joined the "climate science is a Lysenko plot" and "climate scientists are eugenicists" mob.  Enough said!  Well, almost.  He even put up those two silly charts that Anthony Watts showed the other day as it to say "if two bits of charts look vaguely similar then climate science is a hoax".

Utter Nutters vs Tarnished Lukewarmers

Contrarians are splitting into different camps.  Some of the so-called sceptics have gone down the gurgler.  They have departed reality for good and become utter nutters - Richard Tol, Richard Lindzen joining up with cranks like Jo Nova, Christopher Monckton and dubious characters and non-entities like Tim Ball and Marc Morano.  While others have become or remained lukewarmers, like Stephen Mosher and Richard Muller who strive to be recognised as 'respectable' by the mainstream, even though they've tarnished their reputation in one way or another.  Anthony Watts I think hoped to straddle these two camps, but it looks as if he's given up on angling for respect and has cast his lot with the wacky mob.  You can't be aligned with Christopher Monckton and Tim Ball and expect to be regarded as "respectable".  You can't promote wacky "Lysenko" conspiracy theories and be viewed as anywhere remotely close to the mainstream. Then there are the ordinary fake sceptics.  Those driven by ideology but who don't seem to promote wacky conspiracy theories.  That includes people like Bob Carter and Ian Plimer, whose allegiances are transparent.  They offer nothing (eg "I am agnostic" Bob Carter), foolish ideas (eg Plimer's iron sun) or pseudo-science - like the ones who go for mathturbation. People like Judith Curry and maybe Bjørn Lomborg are wavering.  I don't know if they've decided yet whether they want a legacy of "wacky" or "tarnished but still vaguely respectable" or whether they'll just end up with Plimer and Carter and live off the right wing speaker circuit.

The extremists, which now include Lindzen, may not even be aware just how far they've strayed particularly if they only associate with each other.

Leo Hickman writes that the era of climate change 'denial' is over.  Lindzen's descent into quackery to my mind proves his point.

From the WUWT comments

Most of the comments are as far out as Lindzen's article.  This one probably sums them all up well. It's got the lot.  If this is the audience that Anthony Watts is looking for, then he is doing the right thing sticking close to curer's of AIDS, birthers, Lysenko conspiracy theorists and other odd bods.

Mary says:

August 29, 2013 at 8:12 am
Thanks for the good news, as truth emerges. The environmental movement appears to be a religion, as Michael Burleigh’s books on history make clear that often political movements have replaced Christianity during the 20th Century. Nazism, Fascism and Communism all are examples. It appears there is something inside most humans that requires a belief in something higher than self. Maybe it’s evidence of a soul?

Here's the link to the archived thread again.

WUWT recycling trivially false trivia

Looks as if Anthony Watts has run out of Quotes, recycling one from his May 20 Quote of the Week.

Let's look at it:

Quote of the Week: : “The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.” Richard Lindzen [H/t Tom Sheehan]

Well, that's about the most wrong-headed thing you could come across from someone who calls himself a scientist.  Everyone knows the influence of "mankind" is having a huge impact on climate.  I don't know who Tom Sheehan is** but I do know who Richard Lindzen is.  He's the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Professor Lindzen describes himself as a "dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability". ("Dynamical" is a term used in science and mathematics.  I'd never come across the word till now.)

Professor Lindzen when he was a more active researcher published a lot of papers and made a solid contribution to the field.  In his later career he appears to have got somewhat fixated on trying to prove that climate sensitivity is low, without success.  That hasn't stopped him from talking to various collections of people who also want to have proven that climate sensitivity is low, and reassuring them that it is.

In trying to track down the source of the quote from Lindzen, I came across this 2010 presentation to a Hearing of the House Sub-Committee on Science and Technology (USA), but the quote was slightly different:

The claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a greenhouse effect, and that man’s activities have contributed to warming, are trivially true and essentially meaningless in terms of alarm.

Lindzen ignores the crushing weight of scientific research

Ah, I remember that, I thought to myself.  That was when the Republican-minority committee got a list of science delayers, deniers and not-even-scientists to tell them "not to worry", "God will protect us" and all that sort of nonsense.  Joe Romm was on top of it of course.  Here is a link to his first article about it, and here is a link to his second.  To give you a taste, Joe Romm writes:

...Of course, Lindzen’s testimony somehow manages to ignore the crushing weight of scientific research finding dramatic, unprecedented changes in the natural world in all realms, including (for just one example) the freak Russian heat wave and associated Asian monsoon which killed over 60,000 people this summer during the hottest year on record.

Then there was Lindzen's 2012 presentation to a meeting held in the UK (wrongly promoted on some fake skeptic blogs as being to the House of Lords or to the House of Commons, but it was just a public meeting for deniers).  His presentation was of the same style and had the same quote as his presentation to the US House Sub-Committee of eighteen months or so earlier:

The claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a greenhouse effect, and that man’s activities have contributed to warming, are trivially true and essentially meaningless in terms of alarm.

I remember there was a bit of a fuss about that too.  Here is an article on realclimate.org, figuring out how Lindzen's charts got so screwed up.  Lindzen sort of apologised for the mess up, but probably a bit late for the denier blogosphere to notice.

So I've been unsuccessful in tracking down Anthony Watts'/Tom Sheahan/Sheehan's Quote of the Day.  Maybe the quote suffers from the Chinese Whispers syndrome.


**I believe I've discovered where on the internet the Tom Sheehan article is.  His name could be Tom Sheahan and maybe he is Thomas P. Sheahan, Ph.D, Western Technologies, Inc., whose name is on a list of 100 science deniers circulated back a couple of years ago by the Cato Institute.  A Tom Sheahan (with two "a"s) wrote an article last week for the conservative blog, the somewhat inappropriately named American Thinker, using Anthony's Quote of the Day.  Sheahan doesn't give the source of his quote except that he attributes it to Richard Lindzen.

Update: American Thinker has now changed Thomas Sheahan to Thomas Sheahen.

DuKE-ing it out...

The Battle of the DuKEs*

Anthony Watts of  WUWT is DuKE-ing it out with the Dragon Slayers** from Principia Scientific International.  A quote from the Slayers on WUWT:

“All of us on our side have researched and deeply pondered the actual principles of radiative heat transfer. On the other side, however, the “experts” we argue with, like Spencer, Lindzen, Monckton, Watts, just insist that a body’s radiant energy can be doubled by directing that energy back to it — even though the simplest of experiments will shows that this is false.

Anthony Watts is arguing with the Slayers that the greenhouse effect is real.  Meanwhile Anthony's top sticky post is that global warming isn't real.

---

*DuKE - a collective noun eg A DuKE of deniers TM Lotharsson.
** Dragon Slayers - refer: The Uncertainty Monster Swallows the Sky Dragon

Duke it out:

1. To fight, especially with the fists. A large crowd came to watch the boxers duke it out. 
2. (idiomatic) To argue heavily or at length. The candidates duked it out on the proposal for hours.