Climate things to do - a short round up

This is just to let you know of a few things that you might have missed.

First, Skeptical Science is doing a reader survey. So pop over and let them know what you like best about SkS - here's the link.

Then there's an in-depth article about Exxon at Inside Climate News. It's about how Exxon invested quite heavily in climate research at a time when few people were talking about CO2 and global warming. Before the IPCC was set up. It's a real eye-opener. The authors: Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer, are to be congratulated for their excellent research, as well as a highly readable article.

There's another new paper out disputing the so-called "pause" in global warming. It's about how the so-called "pause" fails a blind test. It has just been published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The authors are Stephan Lewandowsky, James S. Risbey and Naomi Oreskes. The paper can be downloaded here.

Peter Sinclair of ClimateCrocks fame has a wonderful video featuring Stefan Rahmstorf - it's only just over six minutes. It features Stefan's beautiful photography, as well as his passion for climate science. Do go and read the article and watch the video. For the lazy ones, here's the video - but go and compliment Peter, too:

References

SkepticalScience reader survey

Exxon: the road not taken - article by Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer at Inside Climate News

Stephan Lewandowsky, James S. Risbey and Naomi Oreskes. "The “Pause” in Global Warming: Turning a Routine Fluctuation into a Problem for Science" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2015 ; e-View doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00106.1 (open access)

Stefan Rahmstorf – A Scientist’s Mind, and an Artist’s Eye - article and video from Peter Sinclair of ClimateCrocks.com

Warmer oceans matter

Some people might argue that oceans aren't warming much and so we've lots of time to mitigate global warming. (See recent article.)

Thing is oceans are warming quickly, and it does matter. It matters to the creatures that live in the oceans for a start. Anyone who has had an aquarium knows that some fish are very sensitive to temperature. Sure, they can swim to where it's cooler if it gets too hot for comfort but there's no guarantee they'll find a source of food there that they like. Many fish have been moving to cooler waters as fishers have known for a while. The fish in the coolest waters don't have any such luck. They've run out of options. Add warming oceans to increasing acidification and marine life is getting a double whammy. (Which reminds me, I must finish that promised article soon.)

It also matters to species like us who live on the surface. That's not just because it affects a major source of food (fish) but because of the ocean-atmosphere connections. Warmer oceans means a warmer ocean surface, which has an impact on surface temperatures on the land as well. Plus there are impacts on ocean currents (with consequences for the atmosphere) and melting ice, which are not insignificant.

WUWT trips over p's and H's in the ocean

Here's another teaser on oceans and acidification. I've got another article in train but have been busy, so it won't be up for a while longer. Meanwhile, WUWT has another "claim" article (archived here) about a not so new paper on ocean acidification,  total CO₂ concentration and the degree of CaCO₃ saturation (from June this year).

The paper itself is by a team led by Professor Taro Takahashi and has been published in Marine Chemistry. Anthony copied and pasted the press release but didn't have time to link to the source :) Never mind. It wasn't hard to find. The press release is on the website of the Earth Institute of Columbia University. I don't know why it has just been released. The paper itself has been out for a while. It looks to be a continuation of the work discussed in this paper from 2010, which itself built on work done prior. In fact, as stated in the press release, Taro Takahashi has been doing this research for four decades.

Taro Takahashi has spent more than four decades measuring the changing chemistry of the world’s oceans. Here, aboard the R/V Melville, he celebrates after sampling waters near the bottom of the Japan Trench in 1973. (Lamont-Doherty archives)

In a nutshell, the scientists have published maps of the world's oceans, showing:

... a monthly look at how ocean acidity rises and falls by season and geographic location, along with saturation levels of calcium carbonate minerals used by shell-building organisms. The maps use 2005 as a reference year and draw on four decades of measurements by Lamont-Doherty scientists and others. 

Anthony Watts fails to save face, pretending not to be excited

Remember a couple of days ago how Anthony Watts was itching to "sue the pants off" skeptical science? How he just knew that they were up to something nefarious. How he figured that John Cook and his team were going to defame deniers? (Would that even be possible?)

He was wrong.

To hedge his bets Anthony later added that perhaps they were going to say something about science itself but if they were, they'd do it in Monty Python style like the 10 out of 10 video that some group came up with (not SkepticalScience), which deniers pretend "shock horror" about. He was wrong about that, too.

A failure to predict - and more

In a pathetic attempt to save face, today he wrote:

The latest propaganda stunt from the Skeptical Science Kidz is underway and it is about as exciting as it is predictable. 

If it was as exciting as it was predictable by Anthony, then he's saying he failed to find it exciting just as he failed dismally in his attempt to predict it.

At least he's owning up to his failure to predict. Or did he make another gaffe and was wanting to make out that he did predict it, when he didn't, but messed up and said it was very exciting.

The SkepticalScience initiative was exciting enough for Anthony to write two articles about it, wasn't it.

What other dismal failures does he achieve in his delayed reaction to 97 hours?

Anthony Watts mistakes Greenland for the entire world - and gets even Greenland wrong

Anthony probably likes to think he deceives his readers well. Perhaps he does, but that's because his readers are only too willing to be deceived not because Anthony is any good at deception.

His deception today is that he presents the ice sheet way up on a freezing cold summit in central Greenland as a good proxy for the entire world.  That's as ridiculous as presenting the Simpson Desert as a proxy for the entire world.

Anthony put up a chart of GISP2 temperatures and couldn't even get that right, labeling it as stopping in 2000, when in fact it stopped in 1950 and shows the temperature up to 95 years before 1950. In other words, it doesn't show any temperatures past 1855.

Flawed chart from WUWT, annoted by HotWhopper

See if you can spot other things wrong with the chart. I mean the chart itself, not just the fact that the average global temperature on earth is quite a bit higher than minus 30 degrees Celsius. Or the fact that temperatures in any one spot on land will fluctuate more than the average temperature over the entire earth.

Anthony Watts thinks weather happens by magic

Then Anthony disputes the fact that all weather now is affected by the amount of energy in the system. He seems to think that physics doesn't apply with some weather. Quoting climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, Anthony wrote:

“all weather is now connected to climate change” – Yikes, every cloud is hiding a climate change boogie man now?

Yes, Anthony. If there was less energy in the system then weather would be different. What do you think. Is some weather governed by magic?

Anthony knows he's a loser, so invokes Godwin's Law

Then he sees a Nazi salute in a friendly wave. He wrote:

I had to chuckle though, because the SkS kids went to all this trouble to make this page where when you mouse over one of the cartoon character climate scientists, their arm goes up in the air to say “hey, I’m part of the consensus!”. That sort of high salute reminds me of the Nazi dress up photos we found last year on the Skeptical Science website. 

Can you believe that Anthony sees a Nazi salute in this sort of pose? What a warped mind he must have.

Professor J Marshall Shepherd. Credit: SkepticalScience

The dress up photos he refers to are about how some people at SkepticalScience coped with Anthony Watts and other lowlifes calling them Nazis in the past. Instead of letting it get to them they made light of the disgusting name-calling. In private. On a private website. Then the images were stolen.


Oh, and it looks as if HotWhopper is getting to Anthony too. Excellent!


PS While I was writing this article, readers were commenting about Anthony's recent effort and picked out other points of interest.

From the WUWT comments

biff33 thinks it was predictable. Maybe, but Anthony failed to predict it.

September 8, 2014 at 3:21 am
Don’t you mean as boring as it is predictable?

Kit Carruthers wonders what goes on in Anthony's twisted mind when he sees children waving.

September 8, 2014 at 3:44 am
Anthony, so do school kids remind you of Nazis? They put their hands up too!

knr decides to act the fool and writes:

September 8, 2014 at 3:56 am
Trenberth ‘missing heat ‘ is a result of poor science not of good theory.
For if temperatures had increased in the way they said they would, STELLED SCIENCE, with increases in CO2 , then there would be no need for any ‘missing heat ‘ in the first place . The fact he cannot justify or even remotely prove his ‘missing heat’ idea is the reason why he tried to reverse the null hypothesise in the first place. And approach which results in a total fail for any undergraduate handing in an essay, would seem to be an acceptable standard with climate ‘science’ professionals . And they wonder why they consider a joke. 

Oatley finds it rather odd that Anthony Watts claims the average global temperature of earth is around minus 30 degrees Celsius, and asks:

September 8, 2014 at 4:05 am
Help me understand the RH scale on the graph…

jmrSudbury doesn't comment on Anthony's major mistake, but answers Oatley's question:

September 8, 2014 at 4:50 am
The air temperature of Greenland averages near -30 C. — John M Reynolds

richard verney looks again at Anthony's chart and wonders how the settlers survived in ancient Greenland:

September 8, 2014 at 6:03 am
I do not disagree with your summary of the charts, but is the reconstruction of the past temperatures accurate?

How could the Vikings with their primitive technology (and no mechanical aids such as mini diggers and tractors) have farmed Greenland for a couple of hundred years if the temperatures were only about 1 or so degrees warmer than today? That is the question that should be asked when tuning the proxies.

Where they were located (and I accept that their settlements were not spread right accross Greenland), it must have been about 4 degrees (and possibly more) warmer than it is today, if not just 1 or 2 harsh winter would have wiped them out.

Greg is a bit worried that Anthony Watts is giving publicity to proper science communicators (instead of the usual WUWT fare of paranoid conspiracy theories):

September 8, 2014 at 4:54 am
This is too feeble to even bother trying to counter it.
Don’t flatter thier sorry efforts by reading and commenting on them. 

JLC is baffled that anyone would be interested in what climate scientists have to say about climate. It just goes to show how out of touch with reality are deniers. JLC - most people aren't very interested in the pseudo-science quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, which is the normal fare at WUWT.

September 8, 2014 at 5:30 am
This baffles me. It might increase the number of hits on their website and entertain the true believers but I can’t see that it would achieve anything else. 

Prof Michael Mann heralds 97 hours of climate scientists

The mystery of the silhouettes has been revealed. SkepticalScience.com has come up with a fun way to tell people about climate science via the scientists themselves.

The first scientist to appear is Michael Mann:

From skepticalscience.com:

Climate scientists from across the globe feature in our 97 Hours of Consensus campaign addressing one of the most significant and harmful myths about climate change. Each hour, beginning at 9am Sunday EST, September 7th, we'll publish a statement and playful, hand-drawn caricature of a leading climate scientist. Each caricature lists the scientists’ name, title, expertise and academic institution.

To translate the time, it's probably referring to eastern time in the USA, which was 11:00 pm in Australia and 1:00 pm Greenwich Mean Time or Universal Coordinated Time for all you modern young things :)

You can check out the unveiling of a new scientist on the hour every hour for the next 96 hours at the cute website created by a computer wizz at SkS. Or read about it at SkepticalScience.com and in an article by Dana Nuccitelli at the UK Guardian.


Anthony Watts will be mortified. Not only was he woefully wrong. Not only will he not have any grounds for "suing the pants off" SkepticalScience.com.  Dumb denier blogs like his won't rate a mention. This is about climate science and real live scientists, not wacky conspiracy bloggers who dwell in the dark fringes of cyberspace.

The Heartland Institute can't get anyone to promote their NIPCC report

The poor chaps at the Heartland Institute are doing it tough. Craig Idso (respected scientist?) can't find anyone to do some free PR and advertising for the Not the IPCC Report version umpteen. So he is falling back on an old standby, Anthony Watts and his pseudo-science blog, wattsupwiththat.com (archived here).  Which means, of course, that he is preaching to the converted.

I'm not sure that WUWT is an old standby. It might just be a fallback position. While Anthony occasionally posts an article by one or other of the Idso family of disinformers, it doesn't happen very often.  Still, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Their "big launch" of the latest version of the Not the IPCC report attracted the following people, according to skepticalscience.com:

• 5 Heartland participants
• 5 grumpy-looking old white guys 
• 1 supporter from the American Enterprise Institute
• 2 bored looking middle-aged guys playing with electronic devices
• 1 journalist from CNS news ("The right news. Right now")
• 1 guy running the Fox TV camera 
• 2 women who came in late
• An SkS author and co-conspirator.

They knew they were in trouble. Maybe they put in a call to their mate, Tom Harris, because yesterday it was Tom Harris from Canada and the grandly if inappropriately named International Climate Science Coalition, who explained that bible science trumps climate science, and then denied having written it.  He also denied writing that "In the long run, the climate scare will be revealed as the most expensive hoax in the history of science", which is pretty odd, because it turns out he's claimed climate science is a hoax on other occasions too (h/t Anonymous).

It could be they weren't satisfied with Tom's promo, or maybe it was part of the PR effort but today it's Craig Idso's turn.  To his credit, he admitted right up front that he couldn't get reputable media organisations to publish his nonsense, so he's making a plea for any science denying bloggers to put his article up on denier blogs.

Too hot dull wrong to handle!

Craig Idso started off somewhat hopefully: "NOTE: This op-ed is apparently too hot for some editors to handle."

Ha ha - when was an op-ed about climate "too hot to handle"? More commonly they would be considered too dull to handle.  In this case it wasn't that it was too hot or too dull, it turns out it was too wrong to handle.  As Craig admitted (my bold italics):

"Late last week it was accepted and posted on politix.topix.com only to be abruptly removed some two hours later. After several hours of attempting to determine why it was removed, I was informed the topix.com editor had permanently taken it down because of a strong negative reaction to it and because of “conflicting views from the scientific community” over factual assertions in the piece."

Yep, Craig didn't portray the science properly.  So let's see how much he got wrong. His first paragraph was okay but then he quickly strayed from the facts, writing:

Really? Is Earth’s climate so fragile that both it and our way of life are in jeopardy because of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions?

In a word, no! 

Craig is wrong! And he doesn't accept paleoclimatology.  A sudden rapid change in CO2 can precipitate a major extinction event.  Earth's climate is fairly robust as long as nothing changes too rapidly.  The earth system has fast and slow feedbacks and prefers slow changes so that everything in the system has time to adjust.  Give it a big shock and the results are difficult to predict.  But looking at big shocks to the system in the past provides some clues.  For example, the Permian-Triassic extinctions.

Then Craig makes a couple of other "wrong" statements in quick succession:

• The human impact on global climate is small; Wrong! Human activity is probably responsible for more than 100% of the warming since the 1950s, and some of the warming before that time).
• any warming that may occur as a result of anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is likely to have little effect on either Earth’s climate or biosphere - Wrong again!  It is already and will continue to raise temperatures, melt ice, raise sea levels, drop ocean pH etc etc, all having massive flow-on effects to life on land and in the oceans.

Craig gives up at this point. The rest of his article is mostly empty rhetoric with lots of mentions of his silly Not the IPCC report, which he can't seem to be able to give away to too many people.  I noticed that Craig provided no evidence for his bald statements of untruth, other than his Not the IPCC report.  Readers are meant to take on faith that all the world's scientists are wrong and the Heartland Institute is right.  Which if you stop to think about it is ridiculous.  (If you have to stop to think about it you are probably not familiar with the Heartland Institute.)

From the WUWT comments

There wasn't all that much discussion of the scientific content errors in Craig's article. The majority of comments didn't seem to relate directly to the article at all. The commenters got distracted by other commenters' comments :)

Ian W says rather hopefully:

April 20, 2014 at 8:24 am
Panic must really be breaking out if the politicians and grant seeking catastrophists have to pull strings to remove such a mild ‘op-ed’. They obviously have not heard of the Streisand effect.

Greg cries "censorship" and says:

April 20, 2014 at 8:25 am
Hardly radical. This well demonstrates the fact the alarmists now realise the game is over and all they have is an attempt at total censorship of opposing views and information.

RMB says something about not being able to heat water through its surface. He's wrong. How does he think that water evaporates - from underneath? (This is something you'll read in the WUWT comments from time to time, usually refuted by other WUWT commenters):

April 20, 2014 at 8:30 am
The good Dr doesn’t appreciate just how right he actually is. The fact is that you cannot heat water through its surface. If you doubt me try heating water through the surface using a heat gun. The heat is completely rejected. Energy only enters the ocean via the sun’s rays not via the heat of the atmosphere. The reason is surface tension. Surface tension is not a powerful force but it is powerful enough to block heat passing from the atmosphere into the ocean. No matter how much co2 is put into the atmosphere the heat from it cannot pass through the the surface of water. In short there is no way of storing or building heat on the planet, no matter how long you leave your suv idling. Therefore there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming and the oceans cannot be boiled away.

Leonard Weinstein comes to the rescue of WUWT and does refute RMB and says:

April 20, 2014 at 8:43 am
RMB,
Your reply manages to contaminate a good blog, and give ammunition to pro CAGW viewers, that will quote your error as typical skeptic ignorance. Surface tension is not the cause of blocking heat entering the oceans. 

Col Mosby points out that the article has no evidence and says (excerpt):

April 20, 2014 at 8:37 am
What’s lacking in the op-ed is some nice concise facts to illustrate the main failings of the AGW position ...

 Steven Mosher puts his head on the WUWT chopping block and says:

April 20, 2014 at 8:48 am
“The human impact on global climate is small; and any warming that may occur as a result of anthropogenic CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions is likely to have little effect on either Earth’s climate or biosphere, according to the recently-released contrasting report Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts, which was produced by the independent Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).”

so the science is settled. little effect?

I wonder how the clowns who wrote the NIPCC scientifically determined that there will be little effect in the future? how’d they do that? I read the NIPCC. I saw no experiments that proved there would be little effect. I saw no statistical analysis in that report that proved there would be little effect. And they explained why you could not use models to project the effects.

How did those clowns deduce from no evidence that there would be little effect

From here on in, as expected, much of the discussion turns to Steve Mosher, not Craig Idso and the Not the IPCC report.

BioBob is partly correct when he responds to Steve Mosher and says:

April 20, 2014 at 9:20 am
Steven Mosher says: April 20, 2014 at 8:48 am How did those clowns deduce from no evidence that there would be little effect

Is this a trick question ? Here is my response….
The same way warmists concluded the opposite: they made it up ? /sarc

Otter (ClimateOtter on Twitter) dumps on Steve Mosher and says:

April 20, 2014 at 9:25 am
Clowns, mosh? My apologies to Anthony and the rest, but you just took a HUGE step down in whatever estimation I had of you. 

Brad says how sad it is that deniers get criticised for their nonsense:

April 20, 2014 at 9:28 am
Mosher,
Once again you exhibit the fear your side has for an alternate stance. You are reduced to calling people you disagree with “clowns”, and generalize the NIPCC findings to suit your position.
Very immature, and very sad.

kim says:

April 20, 2014 at 9:28 amUh, moshe, it’s paleontology. CO2 warms and greens the globe. Be thankful the level has risen.
The Early Bird shares the worm. Bon Appetit.
==========

Anthony Watts belatedly joins in with the lynch mob. He wanted to wield the axe to chop off Steve Mosher's head and rescue Craig Idso and says:

April 20, 2014 at 9:38 am
Mr. Mosher needs to learn the value of debate and alternate ideas. Don’t be a Mannic oppresive. 

Chad Wozniak says to hell with airing differences of opinion:

April 20, 2014 at 10:38 am
The only “clown” here is Steven Mosher, with his disingenuous attack on the real science offered by Dr. Idso. Steven, why don’t you just shut up and go away somewhere? Go find a place that provides you with no energy nor any of the other benefits of carbon-based civilization, and stay there. 

Mark Bofill comes to the rescue of Steve Mosher and says (excerpt):

April 20, 2014 at 10:59 am
Steven’s only saying what he often says one way or another, which is that skeptics should apply (where applicable) the same standards and criticisms to reports with conclusions we like as we do to reports with conclusions we do not like. As usual, it’s hard to argue with his point. 

Matthew W bemoans the fact that dissension diverts discussion away from unanimous applause and says:

April 20, 2014 at 11:34 am
It’s a real shame that some of the best topics here get little to no real disscission in the replies because most of the replies have to deal with Mosher saying something stupid. 

James Ard makes the point that Steve Mosher asks the impossible of fake sceptics and says:

April 20, 2014 at 1:24 pm
Did Mosher just imply that the onus is on us to prove their doomsday scenario is wrong? I thought he was smarter than that. 

thegriss reckons Steve Mosher ought to hang out with the science deniers not sceptics and says:

April 20, 2014 at 6:39 pm
Moshpit, you really should stick to low level journalism. ! The one thing you might be good at.
And ‘hangin’ with the crew from BEST isn’t helping your scientific credibility 

There were quite a few other comments diverted to Steve Mosher rather than Craig Idso's article. Some telling him in no uncertain terms to shut up and go away, others implying that he's wrong or a traitor to the cause or something. I won't bother with them.

Santa Baby doesn't understand science, but knows what he/she likes (or in this case, doesn't like) and says:

April 20, 2014 at 9:16 am
The whole climate theme is so political created by the democrats and Al gore, Obama etc.. in the USA that it’s vomiting to watch it.

Policy based science is what it really is. And policy based on policy based science is no longer a sign of a functional democracy?

USA better wake up and rid themself of this ideological corruption before it’s to late?

cnxtim copies and pastes her/his regular comment and once again builds a strawman. Does s/he know the difference between the troposphere and the upper layers of the atmosphere? Does s/he know that the greenhouse effect is in the troposphere not the upper atmosphere?  Has s/he ever heard of convection? S/he and says:

April 20, 2014 at 10:36 am
And can anyone here on either side of the CAGW debate please explain to me, by what physical process(es) CO2 generated at ground level by the burning of fossil fuels makes its way to the upper atmosphere to become a greenhouse gas? 

Chad Wozniak can't contain himself as a rare event has just taken place, he bursts out and says:

April 20, 2014 at 10:41 am
I just gave myself an idea – we skeptics are defenders of carbon-based civilization!

Terry Oldberg seems to think that science is divided according to party politics in the USA and says:

April 20, 2014 at 11:17 am
Among the news outlets that do not tolerate deviation from the party line are the San Francisco Chronicle and PBS News Hour. The other night, in reporting on global warming politics the latter organization presented its audience with two experts, each of whom presented the Democratic party line. Cancellation of one’s subscription to the Chronicle and contributions to public broadcasting stations would be appropriate responses.

Steve from Rockwood says:

April 20, 2014 at 4:14 pm
50 years from now Michael Mann and James Hansen will either be regarded as ahead of their time brilliant leaders of science who fought so bravely against the hoard of denying heathens … or … complete buffoons who duped so many with their faulty science and set the world’s great economies on a wild goose chase while so many were forced to remain in poverty. I’m leaning heavily toward the latter.

Paul Woland says:

April 20, 2014 at 4:29 pm
RACookPE1978:
Incidentally, the Pentagon thought that climate change was a serious threat even under bush. Do you think that was political manipulation as well? Then how do you explain it considering the fact that Bush never accepted the reality of climate change?
http://www.rense.com/general70/pepen.htm 

Which doesn't go down too well with the denialati, hunter says:

April 20, 2014 at 4:51 pm
Paul Woland, Argument from authority just makes you look rather ignorant. You seem to thrive on argument from authority, when you are not relying on condemnation by association (even when you have to fib about the association). 

To which Paul Woland responds and says:

April 20, 2014 at 4:59 pm
Hunter: My authority in this matter is science. When I mentioned the fact that Pentagon has accepted climate change as a reality for a long time, it was only to falsify the argument of RACookPE1978. I suspect the Pentagon make their choice in part through some institutional process that evaluates science as well. 

lordjim74, citing no evidence or authority at all other than himself, pipes up and says:

April 20, 2014 at 5:12 pm
Argument from authority needs a bit more than ‘my authority in this matter is science’. It requires (inter alia) a genuine consensus amongst qualified experts. There is no genuine consensus amongst qualified experts that co2 emissions will lead to CAGW, so the argument from authority fails. 

I kept looking for discussion of specific points raised by Craig Idso, but they were few and far between. Most comments related to politics, not science.  Or Steve Mosher. Or whether or not the oceans can warm from the top.

Denier weirdness: This is Denialism at WUWT

Deniers are in hysterics and over the moon, tickled pink with a "funny" video Anthony Watts dug up from somewhere or other (archived here).  It's supposed to be a skit on the SkepticalScience escalator.  The video shows the escalator with global surface temperature, then zooms out to to show temperatures going back about 12,000 years.  Only thing is...

Well, I'll let you see for yourself.  This isn't the whole video, just a short segment plus a bit I added.  In fact it's my very first ever YouTube video.  In fact I think it's the very first video I have ever produced or the first published at least.  (I might have played around with one a couple of decades ago.) It's just a slight edit of the one at WUWT, but I don't think anyone will mind too much seeing it's mainly charts of SkepticalScience and elsewhere.

From the WUWT comments

If you want to read the reaction to the original at WUWT, it might as well be a reaction to the edited version above :)

Seriously, though.  "Wonderful"? "Fantastic"? "Brilliant"? The "most hilarious video ever"? Sheesh, those sad sacks must be hard up for entertainment. (Archived here.)


Mike Maguire says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:16 am
That’s the most hilarious video ever!!!

philjourdan says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:21 am
The art of humor! Josh is a prize! LOL

Brian Cooper says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:21 am
Fantastic…

Larry Ledwick says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:24 am
I think I hurt myself!
That is the best laugh I have had in a long time.

PaulH says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:24 am
Ha ha! Cute. :-)

Mac the Knife says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:27 am
….No! Don’t Go There!…Think Of The Children!….. (in that funky, whiny voice….)
Gads! Just about coughed clam chowder across the display monitor!
Too funny!

ldd says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:28 am
Succinct & funny!

dbstealey is always a bit slow on the uptake.  In fact he's usually so slow that he never gets up.  This time he eventually does and says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:31 am
Funny!
At first they had me going — I ran to my bookmarks and found this.
But then I saw the article was a Cook parody.

Nevermind.

Jonathan Abbott says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:41 am
Wonderful, people!

Tom G(ologist) actually "lectures" this way?  Poor students.  Tom says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:42 am
Very effective. When I lecture on this topic I show similar graphs for the past 250 years, 25,000 years, 250,000 yrs, 60,000,000 yrs and 600,000,000 yrs. I then hold out my pointer and invite (I actually DARE) anyone to come to the stage and draw the horizontal line across the graph which would represent the temperature the Earth SHOUD be. It is the first thing I do in every presentation and I have yet to get a taker. It is a really effective way to preclude any heckling about unprecedented temperatures or rates of warming as I go through the rest of the graphs..

john robertson says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:47 am
The proper and civilized method of dealing with delusional zealots.

Right on, John!


crabalocker says:

December 6, 2013 at 11:57 am
That’s pretty funny!

Bloke down the pub says:

December 6, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Unfortunately it sounded all too realistic.

TimiBoy says:

December 6, 2013 at 12:03 pm
Best ever. Easiest Nobel Prize win. Well, it should be…

David, UK says:

December 6, 2013 at 12:25 pm
I genuinely laughed out loud! Thanks for sharing!

phillipbratby says:

December 6, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Brilliant, just brilliant.

David, UK says:

December 6, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Duly shared on Facebook!

Stephen Brown says:

December 6, 2013 at 3:08 pm
I started watching this and went into “Gobsmacked” mode, then I started laughing, and laughing some more. Each switch to the longer time-frame graph brought on more hilarity! The “Think of the children” comment floored me!!
Abso-bloody-lutely BRILLIANT

And a zillion more in that vein.  There were a few party poopers though.  For example,  Felix says:

December 6, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Comparing global mean temperature to data from just one location is not valid. If you want to refute SkS refute this:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?n=1928

And Neven's comment got censored with a rude remark.  Anthony must have gone over his "no more than two science types at a time" limit. NevenA says:

December 6, 2013 at 1:10 pm
[it is humor, get over yourself - mod]

I think my version is worth at least the same level of rapturous adulation, don't you? :D

Bombing out: Christopher Monckton goes in to bat for two professors at WUWT

Update - click here for a follow up article demolishing disinformation from Murry Salby.

This is still "utter nutter" week at WUWT.  Today Anthony Watts has posted an article by the potty peer from the UK, Christopher Monckton.  Christopher writes in his usual "schoolboy" fashion, using words such as "schoolboys at the University of Queensland", probably referring to John Cook, who runs the award-winning climate website, SkepticalScience.com.

Christopher is resurrecting a couple of old and utterly silly denier memes arguing that the CO₂ we emit somehow disappears by magic and goes goodness knows where.  It's a very mixed up article altogether.

One of the main difficulties I had with the WUWT article is that Christopher keeps referring to other articles and comments but doesn't provide any links to what he is talking about.  I guess he has the WUWT target audience summed up well.  He'd have assumed that no fake sceptic would ever follow a link - that would be heresy to the fake sceptic creed.  They might be mistaken for a real sceptic.  However - in this case Christopher would have assumed wrongly.  His article generated much discussion and got lots of people doing lots of sums.  (Archived here)

Two wrongs don't make a right

As far as I can tell, Christopher Monckton is trying to make a whole out of two disparate denier memes.  One is propagated by an older retired professor Gösta Pettersson.  The other is some convoluted hypothesis or two or three of a younger retired ex-professor Murry Salby.  The two hypotheses don't make any sense on their own.  Try to put them together and you end up with a helluva mess.  But that's what Christopher Monckton is proposing.

The short version is as follows:

Gösta Pettersson

AFAIK, Gösta tries to claim that all the extra CO₂ will only stay in the air for a very short time.  He bases this on flawed deductions from analysis of  ¹⁴CO₂. (Note: In the comments, Lars Karlsson says that Gösta Pettersson has acknowledged he made an error in his analysis.)

Following the bomb testing of the 1950s and 60s, analysis has been done to work out how quickly CO₂ circulates between the atmosphere and the surface.  You can think of it as how long it takes for individual molecules of atmospheric carbon dioxide to disperse through the atmosphere and surface.  This time is quite short.  A matter of a few years.  By contrast, if we stopped adding any CO₂ to the air altogether, it would take around 300 years to remove something like 65% to 80% of the extra we've added in the last 150 years or so, and hundreds of thousands of years to completely remove all the carbon we've added to the air.

Murry Salby

I think, based on what Christopher Monckton has written, that Murry has things completely back to front.  I believe he tries to claim that rising temperature has caused CO₂ to outgas from the ocean and that's why atmospheric CO₂ is rising.  He reckons it's not from burning fossil fuels.

I gather that Murry doesn't have any answer to what happens to all the waste CO₂ we've been tossing into the air.  Nor does he seem to understand that the oceans are getting more acidic - because they are absorbing more CO2 than they are outgassing.

If carbon dioxide is not going into the ocean (it is), in fact if as Murry apparently maintains, CO₂ was coming out of the ocean (it's not), and since biomass on earth hasn't increased that much, then where is all that fossil fuel CO₂  ending up?

That's it in a nutshell.  Murry Salby and Gösta Pettersson both have it wrong.  Christopher Monckton is trying to argue that "two wrongs make a right".

There's more - if you're game :)

Researching this article I found myself delving into all sorts of interesting areas and learnt a heap of new stuff.  This article evolved into a longer post reflecting my meandering travels.  It's probably the longest article I've written and I won't blame anyone for not reading it.  If you've landed on the home page and you're not deterred by my sloppiness in not cutting back to bare bones, you can click here to read more.

Anthony Watts goes to SkepticalScience

This past day or two Anthony Watts has been looking to SkepticalScience's "Most used climate change myths" for ideas on what to post.  He seems to have been using it as a crib sheet.  The following WUWT articles are all from the current page of WUWT - dated from the 24 September to 26 September:

3 "It's not bad" Anthony Watts put up an article by Matt Ridley who was arguing that the benefits of global warming will outweigh the costs until the end of this century.  I wrote about this here.

6 "Models are unreliable" Bob Tisdale uses Anthony Watts' blog to try to sell his books.  His latest attempt is to write a whole book around this denier myth! (WUWT article archived here.) I've covered this argument of his in the past here, for example.

7 "Temp record is unreliable" A guest article today by Jim Steele trying to argue that raw temperatures shouldn't be adjusted.  He even managed an "algore is fat" jibe! (or close!)  Zeke Hausfather popped in with some words of wisdom to help set him straight.  I don't know if he succeeded. It would be quite a challenge. (Archived here.)

15 "Ocean acidification isn't serious" Anthony Watts tried to tell people it's not a problem because the oceans won't turn into acid by the end of the century! I've covered that one here.

25 "Sea level rise is exaggerated"  Don Easterbrook tried that on today as I've already discussed.

It's undersea volcanoes!

Anthony did manage to come up with one original idea.  (Not really original, I used to come across it in my days among the science deniers at HotCopper, too.)

It's underwater volcanoes - that one is so weird it doesn't even rate a mention in skepticalscience.com. Anthony Watts pastes a quote (archived here):

If the oceans are warming up, this implies that the Earth must absorb more solar energy than it emits longwave radiation into space. This is the only possible heat source.

And then speculates that the oceans are heating from underneath:

The only heat source? There’s also undersea volcanic activity, which we can barely track, and we are just now discovering the largest undersea volcano on Earth. Has there been an increase in global undersea volcanic activity? We simply don’t know. However, thanks to satellites, we are just beginning to see:

How the oceans are managing to hide all the new hot water from all the new volcanoes underneath all the cold water and then sneak it up to the surface is anyone's guess.  And why all this extra heat isn't showing up unexplained somewhere in the system - as Anthony would say "we simply don't know"!

Heartland Institute's NIPCC science deniers make startling finds: "CO2 is plant food" and "it's the sun"

The "Not the IPCC" crowd of science deniers from the Heartland Institute have released their latest report (NIPCC page archived here).  The main authors are listed as Craig D. Idso (USA), Robert M. Carter (Australia), S. Fred Singer (USA).  The full list includes people like Tim Ball, and denier Don Easterbrook and Cliff Ollier - so you can imagine the lack of quality and silliness their report contains.

It doesn't look as if they've come up with anything new from their last equally silly report.  I've listed their "summary of findings" from their "Summary for Policy Makers" (ie the tea party in the USA).  I've put their summary document up on Google docs to save you going to the NIPCC website.

They've covered a lot of SkepticalScience's climate myths.  Like many science deniers, they seem to use Skeptical Science's most common denier memes as a cheat sheet. This so-called "report" is a load of crock.  It's nothing more than a repeat and mishmash of some of the silliest denier memes that they used in their previous "reports" from "CO2 is plant food" to "it's the sun" to "it's not warming" to "it's warming but it's a recovery from the Little Ice Age".

Here is their Summary of NIPCC’s Findings, which they list as: Source: “Executive Summary,” Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science (Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2013).  I've made a brief comment for each of their claims, explaining why each is wrong.

"CO2 is only a weak greenhouse gas" - no, it's not!

False claim: Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases. 

Why it is false: CO2 is not mild.  It is the main greenhouse gas that controls earth's climate.  Although it has a smaller effect than water vapour in absolute terms, it is long-lived in the atmosphere.  A change in CO2 acts as a force on climate.  In response to the forcing, water vapour changes, known as a feedback.

"We don't understand the carbon cycle" - that's obvious!

False claim: Doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial level, in the absence of other forcings and feedbacks, would likely cause a warming of ~0.3 to 1.1°C, almost 50% of which must already have occurred. 

Why it is false: In the absence of any other feedbacks or forcings,a doubling of CO2 would cause a warming of around the same magnitude as a 2% increase in solar radiation.  This effect takes a long time - ultimately the time it takes to complete a carbon cycle - many millenia.  Therefore it is also wrong to claim that almost 50% of which "must already have occurred".

Source: Realclimate.org

"We're building a straw man" - question is why?

False claim: A few tenths of a degree of additional warming, should it occur, would not represent a climate crisis. 

Why it is false: This is a strawman argument.  There has been and will continue to be much more warming than a "few tenths of a degree".  This is already causing problems for the world and it will get much worse if we do not cut emissions.

"We don't know what we're trying to argue" - well, that's obvious!

False claim: Model outputs published in successive IPCC reports since 1990 project a doubling of CO2 could cause warming of up to 6°C by 2100. Instead, global warming ceased around the end of the twentieth century and was followed (since 1997) by 16 years of stable temperature.

Why it is false: Firstly the argument is very mixed up.  The doubling of CO2 is not the same as any projected surface warming by 2100.  We are on track to double atmospheric CO2 well before the end of this century, maybe triple it. Secondly, global warming has not stopped.  The first decade this century was the hottest on record, hotter than any decade in the twentieth century. In addition to surface and tropospheric temperatures, now even the deep ocean is warming up.

"It's natural" - and we're causing it!

False claim: Over recent geological time, Earth’s temperature has fluctuated naturally between about +4°C and -6°C with respect to twentieth century temperature. A warming of 2°C above today, should it occur, falls within the bounds of natural variability.

Why it is false: The causes of temperature variations in "recent geological time" are known.  The ice ages and deglaciations referred to are caused by changes in solar irradiance combined with changes in CO2 as a feedback (Milankovitch cycles).  The current changes are not a result of natural variability.  They are the result of a very rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 because of human activities - predominately the burning of fossil fuels.  The variation in temperature over the entire Holocene, since the beginning of civilisation is not likely to have exceeded +/- one degree at a maximum.  A rapid warming of 2°C above today would vastly exceed anything that could be caused by "natural variation" of anything other than our huge emissions of CO2.

"We don't believe science" - ummm - oka..a..ay

False claim: Though a future warming of 2°C would cause geographically varied ecological responses, no evidence exists that those changes would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being. 

Why it is false.  The main reason for the changes being so harmful is because they are happening so quickly.  Life on earth does not have time to adapt to the changes.  This is one reason we are now witnessing the beginning of the sixth major extinction event and why it's likely to speed up.  Global warming and the rapid rise of CO2 is affecting the oceans through warming of the seas plus acidification; it is affecting the land by melting ice, droughts, wildfires, heatwaves and intense precipitation.  And if you want know about potential direct harm to humans, read what the science says if web bulb temperatures were to exceed an achievable threshhold.

These changes are already causing harm and it will only get worse

"CO2 was higher before life on land existed" - errr ... so what?

False claim: At the current level of ~400 ppm we still live in a CO2-starved world. Atmospheric levels 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects. 

Why it is false:  This is one of the sillier of this list of silly claims.  Humans didn't even exist 550,000,000 years ago when CO2 levels were 7000 ppm and neither did any other life on land.  Life did start to flourish in the late Cambrian - just not on land.  It wasn't till CO2 dropped and oxygen increased in the atmosphere that the land was colonised with plants and animals.

"Climate changes by magic" - no it doesn't!

False claim: The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities. 

Why it is false: Contrary to what Not the IPCC implies, climate does not change by magic.  Any "recovery" from the Little Ice Age has to be explained in terms of what caused the earth to warm.  Not only that, but it would have to explain why it continues to warm.  "Cycles" and "oscillations" mean that if temperature goes up from a cycle or oscillation it also goes back down again in the same cycle or oscillation.  Otherwise it's not a cycle or oscillation.  The fact is that energy is being built up in the earth system, which is causing the temperature of the air and oceans to rise, the ice to melt etc.

"It's not warming" - yes, it is!

False claim: Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8% increase in atmospheric CO2, which represents 34% of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution. 

Why it is false: Firstly the argument is a repeat of part of the one above. The first decade this century was the hottest on record, hotter than any decade in the twentieth century. In addition to surface temperatures, now even the deep ocean is warming up.  This is very significant!

"CO2 is plant food!" - ROTFL!

False Claim: CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population. 

Why it is false: This is the silly denier meme of "CO2 is plant food".  C3 plants like wheat (but not maize) do respond to increased CO2, all other things being equal.  But rising CO2 makes other things not equal.  The downside working against "feeding the growing human population" are temperatures so hot that it kills crops; drought so long that crops, if they get planted at all, don't produce seed or fruit and die from dehydration; rain so intense that it washes away crops that have been planted or prevents farmers from getting into the paddocks to sow their crops; humidity such that plant disease flourishes and reduces productivity.

"It's not CO2" - yes, it is!

False claim: No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and humanrelated CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation. 

Why it is false: This one is just plain dumb.  Physics explains the greenhouse effect.  Paleoclimatology shows that when CO2 increases in the atmosphere the earth system heats up in response.  Modern climatology shows exactly the same thing.  I'm surprised at how these so-called scientists oscillate between accepting the greenhouse effect and denying it.  They are as bad as Tim Ball and his merry band of "sky dragon slayers".

"It's the sun" - not!

False claim: The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years. 

Why it is false: This is the "it's the sun" argument, which is dumb as.  The causes of historic global warming are explained by science.  The temperature keeps rising even though incoming solar radiation hasn't increased.  That's because atmospheric CO2 keeps rising.


"We're heading for an ice age!" - they didn't go quite that far, but came close!

False claim: Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions. 

Why it is false: Even if there were to be a grand minimum it would only reduce the warming by a very small amount.  Earth will continue to heat up very quickly as we continue to pour more and more waste CO2 into the air, polluting the atmosphere for centuries.

Wrap up

Nothing new from the anti-science crowd at the Heartland Institute.  It's not suprising it hasn't caused a ripple in the mainstream media.  One could say the denier mob from Heartland Institute are showing symptoms of brain deficiency.

WUWT is late to the party

I haven't seen this posted on WUWT yet.  Anthony Watts is too busy telling everyone about what the new Abbott government is doing and undoing in Australia.


Note: The "Not the IPCC Report" from the US-based anti-science lobby group, the Heartland Institute, is part of a wider disinformation campaign (as described by Bloomberg) ahead of the release of the real IPCC report at the end of September.  Members of the anti-science brigade are coming out of the woodwork.  Graham Lloyd of the Australian did his bit and so did Mail hack "journalist" David Rose (and again) as well as right wing economist (and failed banker) Matt Ridley and science denying scientist, Judith Curry (and again).

What's going to bite these other disinformers in the proverbial is that they are all saying that the IPCC report is correct (although misrepresenting it).  What will this pack of science deniers say when the real report comes out?  I guess they'll do an about face and say that 97% of scientists are wrong and tabloid journos know better.  Self-contradiction is one of the hallmarks of a science denier.

About PDO, lags, kettles, cycles and hysteria...

...sorry, meant to write "About PDO, Lags, Cycles and Hysteresis"

In another article here, a certain WUWT commenter, Professor JP, took me to task for quoting him.  Quite right too.  But that one line of mine resulted in something of real value.  The Professor obviously forgave me because he was kind enough to give me a lengthy lesson on climate sciency stuff.  For free.  I didn't have to pay a cent.  I was a bit nervous at first because I've heard awful stories about gravy trains and the billions of dollars climate sciency people charge everyone.  For a minute I wondered if I'd end up roast meat under a pile of brown sauce.  But no.  Not a penny did he charge.

Now I wouldn't have written this up as an article, but the Professor was so insistent that I learn and he was so gracious in imparting his years of climate sciency knowledge that I just have to share.  (Don't you just love it when people say "share".  Makes you feel all gooey and warm and fuzzy in your mouth.)

Now I'm always willing to learn new things and I read his comments over and over to make sure I didn't miss a thing.  It's not often I get offered personal tuition.  RealClimate is one place but there are always such a lot of other people in the classes there.  (I've been honoured by other renowned scientists here as well, but none who have written so much detail as Professor JP.)

From kettles and ice blocks to the PDO

After some wonderful lessons on the basics of kettles and ice blocks (I learnt some really good stuff - like ice blocks melt if you take them out of the fridge and water in a kettle won't boil unless you heat it, while seawater doesn't need heat, it expands by magic - did you know that?), the topic shifted to the PDO.  This lesson was so informative I just have to share.  (There's that word again.)  

Here is how it started.  Professor JP was explaining why it took so long for the warmer sun in the 1950s to heat up the earth in the 1970s.  It's called "waiting for homeostasis" and has something to do with boiling kettles.  But then it turns out it wasn't the sun after all that heated up the earth.  It was the PDO.  (I looked that up.  PDO stands for Pacific Decadel Oscillation.  See I'm not as dumb as I look!)  Anyway, Professor JP wrote:

As for why the Earth started heating up in 1978, that is pretty obviously due to the PDO going into its positive phase (the previous 30 year cooling period was coincidentally during the PDO's negative phase).

And this is where lags come in again:

The PDO is clearly one of the long-term lags in climate that I was speaking of.

I got curious about these 'lags' and asked:

Just how long is that "lag" supposed to be? 

To which the Professor replied:

A reasonable guess would be the length of a half-cycle or two - 30-60 years.  

That's wonderful news.  The scientists have narrowed the uncertainty right down to half a cycle or two or 30 years or sixty years. Still, not being at all knowledgeable like the Professor, I had another couple of questions:

And when is the earth going to get back to temperatures of the 1960s? Maybe the PDO only heats the earth but doesn't cool it? Is that what you are arguing?

Unfortunately Professor JP only had time to answer the second question, so there's still a big gap in my knowledge.  Not that I'm complaining, you understand.  Heavens above, it was so generous of him to tutor me at all.  Anyway he scolded me and told me to pay attention (justifiably - I was starting to race ahead a bit) and wrote: 

Not at all, it cooled during the 30 years of the last negative cycle, which I believe I already said. Are you even bothering to read my posts?

The instantaneous laggy PDO

So there you have it.  The PDO warms and cools the earth with either a 30 year lag or a 60 year lag, which I'm told is a half-cycle or two, and instantaneously too like in the previous negative phase.  If you do the sums you'll see the Professor means that the PDO has a 60 year cycle.  In other words the PDO is a 30 or 60 year laggy sciency thing that acts instantaneously. He then generously added more words of wisdom:

I wonder since you haven't mentioned hysteresis, but I assumed someone quietly told you that you were ridiculously wrong on it or you finally realized it yourself.

Oh and please, if you can't see what is wrong with the skeptical science page on it then there is no hope for you. Their graph is so blatantly stupid the way it applies linear trend lines to a cyclical phenomena that a grade school kid could see the error.

Well, I did try to read his posts and I did make a reference to hysteresis, but I can't really blame him for missing that bit.  Professors are very busy at doing PDO climate sciency stuff, and boiling kettles and so forth, I'm sure.

Given Professor JP's insistence that it's now the PDO that is causing global warming, I sat up and took notice.  The way he writes with such certainty, he's obviously a highly qualified expert in the field of hysteresis, PDOs, lags and kettles.  It was with some trepidation that I ventured forth, however.  If a renowned climate expert like JP can't figure out if this PDO lag is 30 years or 60 years, I thought to myself, then what hope does a humble blogger have.  And I couldn't figure out if the lag only applied to the warming phase, because I thought he said the cooling phase brought instant cooling but the warming phase takes 30 or sixty years.  In any case, I put aside my fears and decided to give it a go.

Here's the result.  You can click the animation to enlarge it:

Sources: JISAO and NASA

What do you think?  I reckon Professor JP is incredible.  It sure looks like the negative phase cooled the earth instantly.  Well okay, it didn't cool it exactly but at least it looks like it stopped it getting hotter for a while. Fine, whatever you say.  It didn't completely stop it from getting hotter but you've got to admit it didn't warm quite as much. And 'not warming as much' is pretty close to being the same thing as 'cooling', sort of, if you squint a bit.  Okay, if you squint a lot and shut your eyes and imagine.  Anyway the warming phase really gave such a jolt to the earth that it's still getting hot, even though the PDO has turned negative.  That's pretty powerful stuff.

I figure I'm still much dumber than the Professor though because I can't see the lags working very well. Nor can I see the PDO's 30 year half cycle or the 60 year full cycle.  It goes up and down for sure, but I must have forgotten how to do sums because I just can make them all add up to either 30 or 60, no matter what I do. It's just me I'm sure.  He probably knows as much about climate science as his fellow Professor David Archibald, or even more.  I don't know that he knows as much as Ronald A. "it's the insects" Voisin.  But that's doubtless a matter of opinion.  Whatever, I know I'll never get to the level of any of them.

On "blatant stupidity"

BTW here is the SkepticalScience chart.  As the good professor said, how "blatantly stupid" of them to compare linear trends instead of cycles.

Source: SkepticalScience

I'll send an email to Mr John Cook Esq (proprietor of SkepticalScience) and tell him to change the chart.  Of course he wouldn't listen to a humble blogger.  I'd better tell him Professor JP, the expert in half cycle or two PDO's, hysterical lags and kettles, is personally tutoring me.  That should impress him no end.

As the Professor suggested, all you have to do is show cycles.  I couldn't draw the spokes but I did manage to draw the shape of the wheels.  You can see how bigger and bigger wheels can be made to fit between the lines and are pushing up the temperature.  It's a tri-cycle.  It all makes sense now.  You just wait and see.  I'll bet in no time at all, SkepticalScience will replace their "blatantly stupid" chart with this one below.  It's prettier for one thing.  Don't you like pink?

You had the Marcott wheelchair, now here's the HotWhopper tricycle

I hope every reader has learnt as much as I did from this wonderful lesson.

Gotta go now, the kettle's boiling at last.  (I've only been waiting forty years.  It was only after the tip from the Professor that I figured out you have to apply a source of heat before the water boils.  After I did that, it took no time at all. Nary a lag to be seen.)

Anyone for a nice hot cuppa?

PS While you're sipping your tea (milk and sugar?), you might enjoy reading another version of the PDO, this time with clouds and magic fairy dust.

Denier Weirdness: Don't count climate science papers to "prove" there's no consensus!

An economist, Richard Tol, is feeling a bit left out and lonesome.  So he has started hobnobbing with science deniers like Anthony Watts of  WUWT (and even the idiot poptech), courting them for attention.  He's protesting the 97% scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.  Let's see what he has to say - we'll start with Anthony Watts version of Tol on WUWT.

The basic argument seems to be that Cook13 shouldn't have counted the papers that are about climate science - you know, scientific papers on the impacts of global warming, or applied science papers on mitigation.  If you thought Richard Tol had odd ideas, here's the proof. (We already know Anthony Watts has odd ideas.)

Arithmetic fail

Let's start with some basic arithmetic.  For an economist, Richard Tol is not very good at arithmetic.  He gets the following wrong saying he's using data from Cook13.  Either he's not using that data or he can't do arithmetic - he calculates 98% somehow, when the answer is 97.1%:

3896/(3896+78+40) = 98%  

No, Richard, it equals 97.1% just like the paper says.

Anthony is not very good at peer/pal/blog review or he would have picked that up.

Neutral vs No Position

Richard keeps talking about a "neutral" category.  There is no such category in Cook13.  Now I'm not sure if English is Richard's first language, so I'll hold back on questioning his ability to understand the difference between "neutral" and "no position".  It's an important difference.

• "Neutral" could indicate a half-way point between two extremes. Global warming being caused by humans and global warming being caused by other means.  
• "No position" means just that.  The authors will be likely to know full well that global warming is caused by humans, but the particular abstract in question does not allude to the cause.  That is a different meaning to "neutral".

Making up his own rules - toss out the bulk of climate science research, says Richard

Anthony quotes Richard Tol saying 35% of abstracts were 'misclassified'.  He didn't say why, so I went to Richard's article (yes, he went ahead and tried to justify his tweets!) and found this:

The majority of the selected papers are not on climate change itself, but rather on its impacts or on climate policy. The causes for climate change are irrelevant for its impact. Therefore, impact papers should be rated as neutral.

The causes of climate change are irrelevant to the impact of climate change so should be rated as neutral?  What? Why?

Impacts are defined in Cook13 as: Effects and impacts of climate change on the environment, ecosystems or humanity.  Impacts papers constitute the biggest single component of climate science research, comprising 48.4% of the abstracts examined in Cook13.  It would be nonsense to rate them all "neutral" (which isn't a category anyway) or "no position" - when the cause of global warming may be a fundamental aspect of the research.

I looked up one such abstract.  It was rated by Cook13 as "Explicit endorsement without quantification - Explicitly states humans are causing global warming or refers to anthropogenic global warming/climate change as a known fact"

Here is the abstract (excerpt from a longer abstract, my bold):

A complex earth system model, simulating atmosphere and ocean dynamics, marine biogeochemistry, terrestrial vegetation and ice sheets, was used to study feedbacks between the terrestrial biosphere and climate with a set of long-term climate change ensemble experiments. CO2 emissions were assigned according to historical data and the IPCC SRES scenarios B1, A1B and A2, followed by an exponential decay of the emissions for the period 2100–3000. The experiments give a reasonable reconstruction of the measured CO2 concentrations between 1750 and 2000. Maximum atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 520 ppm (B1), 860 ppm (A1B) and 1680 ppm (A2) were reached between 2200 and 2500. Additional experiments were performed with CO2 emissions and suppressed climate change, as well as an experiment with a prescribed land surface. The experiments were repeated with the vegetation model driven offline, to investigate the effects of climate and CO2 changes separately. The biogeochemical and biogeophysical interactions between terrestrial biosphere and atmosphere were quantified and compared.

Clearly the cause of global warming is critical if one is to estimate its progression.  The major forcing is CO2, therefore emissions of CO2 will determine the impact. The above paper refers to the different impacts of global warming, depending on the scenario.  Richard Tol is very wrong in his 'rule' to rate "impact" papers as "neutral".  He's not a scientist, that's quite clear.

While we're at it, toss out most of the rest of the research, says Richard

Richard then says to chop out even more papers, based on another of Richard's own made up "rules":

However, a paper discussing, say, carbon capture and storage cannot be taken as evidence for global warming. These papers should therefore also be rated as neutral.

Why? On what grounds?  Mitigation papers constitute the next largest category, or 28.3% of the abstracts in the Cook13 sample.  I found papers on carbon capture and storage that had different ratings - some were rated as endorsing AGW and others as taking no position.

This one was rated as implicitly endorsing AGW based on this abstract (excerpt only and my bold):

Coal-fired power plants account for nearly 50% of U.S. electricity supply and about a third of U.S. emissions of CO2, the major greenhouse gas (GHG) associated with global climate change. Thermal power plants also account for 39% of all freshwater withdrawals in the U.S. To reduce GHG emissions from coal-fired plants, postcombustion carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems are receiving considerable attention.

This one as taking no position on AGW:

The evaluation of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from power generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a critical factor in energy and policy analysis. The current paper examines life cycle emissions from three types of fossil-fuel-based power plants, namely supercritical pulverized coal (super-PC), natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC), with and without CCS. Results show that, for a 90% CO2 capture efficiency, life cycle GHG emissions are reduced by 75–84% depending on what technology is used. With GHG emissions less than 170 g/kWh, IGCC technology is found to be favorable to NGCC with CCS. Sensitivity analysis reveals that, for coal power plants, varying the CO2 capture efficiency and the coal transport distance has a more pronounced effect on life cycle GHG emissions than changing the length of CO2 transport pipeline. Finally, it is concluded from the current study that while the global warming potential is reduced when MEA-based CO2 capture is employed, the increase in other air pollutants such as NOx and NH3 leads to higher eutrophication and acidification potentials.

(If I were rating the above I'd probably rate it as "implicit" rather than "no position" based on the last sentence in particular.  That suggests that marginal decisions probably balance out in the long run, or that the reviewers if they erred, tended to err on the conservative side when it came to categorising the abstracts.)

Who's the denier, Richard?

Now if Richard took out all the "impacts" papers and all the "mitigation" papers, he'd be tossing out the bulk of climate research - in fact he'd toss out 77% of the literature.  He'd be left with just the following:

• Methods - Focus on measurements and modeling methods, or basic climate science not included in the other categories
• Paleoclimate - Examining climate during pre-industrial times

Richard Tol needs to rethink his "analysis".  He does sound like a typical denier, doesn't he.  Toss out all the papers on climate science and you'll surely be able to prove there's "no consensus".

Count the papers on climate science and there's a 97% consensus that humans are the cause of global warming.

Postscript

In the comments on WUWT the fake skeptics are very relieved that Anthony has told them they don't have to take any notice of yet another study.  They say they would have sat up and taken notice if 97% of science really and truly found that humans are causing global warming.  "What a relief", they say.  "Thank goodness for Anthony."  It means they can sit back and continue to deny reality.  It makes little difference that Tol himself has not disputed the 97% number.  They don't even seem aware of that fact.

One of the fake skeptics wants to give more weight to attribution studies and not count or give lesser weighting to research on impacts.  None of them seem aware that removing thousands of studies from the 'count' as Richard suggests, may not make any difference to the 97% number.

I have to wonder how many more thousands of studies deniers need before they accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and adding more of it to the air warms the planet?  How does their denial of human-induced global warming stack up against their certainty that H pylori exists?  Deniers often quote that discovery as 'proof' there will one day be a paper that the greenhouse effect doesn't happen.  How many papers did they need for "proof" of H pylori?  What about the helical structure of DNA?  Are they still waiting for the one paper that "proves" DNA doesn't exist?  Or maybe they are still waiting for the one paper that "proves" the earth is flat.

Tol says he's been told how the 97% is calculated, but no-one takes any notice.  They prefer his wrong version.  In any case, he doesn't explain it well, talking about 'reported data' and 'original data' implying there was some sort of dodgy activity instead of just admitting he got it wrong.  He is not coming out of this smelling of roses.  That doesn't matter to deniers and dismissives.  They lost their senses a long time ago, if they ever had any.


For more enlightenment on the different shades of denier weirdness plus a discussion of Cook13 by people closer to the research than I am, visit Eli's blog.