Another exceptional doozy from WUWT - physically impossible global temperatures!

This is kind of funny if you're into denier humour. Anthony Watts likes people to think that he knows something about the Earth's surface temperature when he doesn't even understand the concept of anomalies. Today he is telling everyone that it's not just okay, it's correct to splice the record of ice cold temperatures in Greenland with those of the entire world, and claim it is global surface temperature. Wow!

Anthony posted a cartoon from Josh (archived here, latest here). It's sort of a copy cat of the new xkcd cartoon that is meant to put what's happening now into perspective. Instead what he's done would be a terrific parody of denier weirdness, if not for the fact that Anthony and his band of deniers believe it to be so. (Sometimes I wonder if Josh is poking fun at deniers, going overboard with silliness to see what he can get away with. Thing is, I don't think he knows the first thing about climate, or science. So, no.)

By the way, what I mean by physically impossible is that the temperature changes that Anthony Watts and Josh are claiming just could not have happened. If they had, there would have been evidence of an ice age 13,000 years ago that was at least as cold as the last glacial maximum (24,500 years ago) and evidence of major, major forcings both hot and cold. (Meaning very substantial, impossible to miss.) There isn't.

A strong, alarming warning from scientific luminaries: We have to decide...

This is an alert for denier watchers. Get ready for the possibility of another "whopping mad (crazy)" onslaught from the climate conspiracy theorists. Peter U. Clark and a team of leading scientists have published a paper in Nature Climate Change, this time looking ahead 10,000 years to changes in climate and sea level. The team is laden with some of the heaviest of heavyweights from the world of climate science:

Peter U. Clark, Jeremy D. Shakun, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix, Michael Eby, Scott Kulp, Anders Levermann, Glenn A. Milne, Patrik L. Pfister, Benjamin D. Santer, Daniel P. Schrag, Susan Solomon, Thomas F. Stocker, Benjamin H. Strauss, Andrew J. Weaver, Ricarda Winkelmann, David Archer, Edouard Bard, Aaron Goldner, Kurt Lambeck, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Gian-Kasper Plattner.

Searching for the dragons - with Richard Alley at AGU14

Professor Richard Alley gave one of the first lectures at AGU14. (Click here for how to view AGU14 videos.)

Richard talks in his usual lively manner, with an early reference to the possibility that some things may happen very quickly, much faster than economic discounting allows. He talks about how faster, less-expected changes would be very damaging to economies and ecosystems. He says that "in some sense, we are searching for the dragons that are out there" - in a reference to a fifteenth century map showing where "here be dragons".


He points out that when we discover a possible dragon part we examine it further - and often find that it's "not likely to eat us" - or we may find that it is indeed really dangerous.