They really are a bunch of paranoid twits at WUWT!

It's Easter and I'm taking a day off. Couldn't resist writing about the latest denier conspiracy theory, though. (It will make a nice lead in to an article I'm working on.)

Let me start by asking you a question. If there are five explanations for something happening, which do you think your typical climate science denier will choose?

1. the most likely
2. the next most likely
3. the improbable but possible
4. the least likely
5. the one that nobody in their right mind would contemplate
6. 5. above -- and they'd blame it on a climate scientist.

If you picked the sixth (out of five options), you'd get it right.

How not to frame an FOI request - if you really want information

I don't normally bother too much with the denier blogger "Steve Goddard". Even among mainstream deniers he's viewed as shonky. However, something popped up at WUWT today (archived here) which is a great example of how deniers manufacture situations to suit their message, and how some disinformers (like Eric Worrall) misrepresent other deniers when it suits them.

This is what happened. "Steve Goddard" and someone I've never heard of, Kent Clizbe (a shady character), submitted an FOIA request to NOAA (the "Steve Goddard" version is archived here). They asked for a huge amount of information going back in history, minus the kitchen sink.

NOAA and temperature data - it must be a conspiracy.

Update: Nick Stokes of Moyhu has written two articles that demonstrate what would happen if Anthony Watts had his way and stations with no data were ignored completely. See here and here. Anthony Watts might change his tune if he read them.

Sou 3:22 pm 1 July 2014 AEST

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This article is about the kerfuffle that erupted between a bunch of science deniers. It all started when Steve Goddard accused NOAA and NASA of "fabricating data" (archived here).  The lie was spread all over the right wing media. Politifact and Climate Crocks among others pointed out he was wrong. Steve didn't explain how the two agencies did this. All he did was put up an animated chart that he claimed showed that the US temperature was warmer in the 1930s than at any time since. He wrote:

Prior to the year 2000, NASA showed US temperatures cooling since the 1930′s, and 1934 much warmer than 1998....Right after the year 2000, NASA and NOAA dramatically altered US climate history, making the past much colder and the present much warmer. The animation below shows how NASA cooled 1934 and warmed 1998, to make 1998 the hottest year in US history instead of 1934. This alteration turned a long term cooling trend since 1930 into a warming trend.

Steve doesn't say what data was "fabricated". Why should he? He's not a fact checker. Quite the opposite. He's in the denial business of making up stuff to stop any action to mitigate global warming.

This article is another one that's too long :( Click read more if you're on the home page.

Denier weirdness: Is Steve McIntyre calling the instrumental record an "artifact"?

Saw this comment by that poor old obsessive climate science denying crusader Steve McIntyre at WUWT today. Steve McIntyre says:

June 25, 2014 at 10:34 am
Anthony, it looks to me like Goddard’s artifact is almost exactly equivalent in methodology to Marcott’s artifact spike – this is a much more exact comparison than Mann. Marcott’s artifact also arose from data drop-out.

However, rather than conceding the criticism, Marcott et al have failed to issue a corrigendum and their result has been widely cited.

Is Steve mistaking the instrumental record for an "artifact"? Or is he talking about that little blip in the most recent bit of the Marcott data. If the latter then it just goes to show that, even after all this time, Steve has still not bothered to read Marcott et al. Or if he did he missed the bit where they wrote (my bold italics):

Without filling data gaps, our Standard 5×5 reconstruction (Fig. 1A) exhibits 0.6°C greater warming over the past ~60 yr B.P. (1890 to 1950 CE) than our equivalent infilled 5° × 5° area-weighted mean stack (Fig. 1, C and D). However, considering the temporal resolution of our data set and the small number of records that cover this interval (Fig. 1G), this difference is probably not robust. Before this interval, the gap-filled and unfilled methods of calculating the stacks are nearly identical (Fig. 1D).

I've got to say that I'm a bit surprised Steve's continues to beat this drum.  It makes him look very foolish. Normally he likes to make believe he's clever. He usually wants people to think he knows more than all the climate scientists in the world. Yet, as his comment shows, the doddery dogsbody still hasn't got the point of the research or understood it's findings. I'd have thought by now he'd at least have read the paper and if not that, he could have read the FAQ, where they explain the above passage again, writing (my blue, bold italics):

Q: What do paleotemperature reconstructions show about the temperature of the last 100 years?

A: Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record. Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval (Anderson, D.M. et al., 2013, Geophysical Research Letters, v. 40, p. 189-193; http://www.agu.org/journals/pip/gl/2012GL054271-pip.pdf).

You'll notice that as Shaun Marcott points out, there is plenty of data around for the recent past. Marcott13 is about the entire Holocene record. Steve McIntyre doesn't "get it". Still, Steve's got to deny I guess. It's all he's good for. And Marcott13 was an important paper, especially for deniers, because it really showed up the fact that humans are entering very new territory as far as climate goes.

The chart below shows where we've been and where we're heading. The green bit is from Shakun12 showing when earth was cold and humans struggled for survival. The blue bit is the surface temperature over the period since human civilisation. The red bit is where we're heading this century.

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

Incidentally, Anthony Watts in that article was doing something positive for a change. He was explaining why Steve Goddard is making a fool of himself over US surface temperatures (archived here).  Peter Sinclair talks about this in his latest "Climate Crocks" episode. So did Media Matters, because Fox News made some fuss about it all. Fox News really does know how to add to its reputation as the place to avoid if you are after facts. Dana Nuccitelli is on the ball at the Guardian, too.

It looks as if Anthony is going to spoil his good efforts in this regard in the upcoming Part 2 of his two-part take-down of Steve Goddard. Anthony Watts says, in reply to Steve McIntyre:

June 25, 2014 at 10:55 am
Steve McIntyre: good point, I’ll address that in part 2. Thank you.

From the WUWT comments

This comment is about Steve Goddard and I thought it was interesting because the person who made it usually comes across as being just as much of an "utter nutter".  NikFromNYC says:

June 25, 2014 at 10:47 am
Goddard willfully sponsors a hostile and utterly reason averse and pure tribal culture on his very high traffic skeptical blog where about a dozen political fanatics are cheerled on by a half dozen tag along crackpots who all pile on anybody who offers constructive criticism. His blog alone is responsible for the continuing and very successful negative stereotyping of mainstream skepticism by a highly funded alarmist PR machine. His overpolitization of climate model skepticism results in a great inertia by harshly alienating mostly liberal academic scientists and big city professionals who also lean left but who might otherwise be open to reason. I live two blocks from NASA GISS above Tom’s Diner, just above the extremely liberal Upper West Side and my main hassle in stating facts and showing official data plots is online extremism being pointed out by Al Gore’s activist crowd along with John Cook’s more sophisticated obfuscation crowd. Goddard’s regular conspiracy theory about CIA drug use to brainwash school kids into shooting incidents in order to disarm conservatives in preparation for concentration camps for conservatives is something skeptics should stop ignoring and start actively shunning. His blog is the crack house of skepticism.

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Marcott, Shaun A., Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, and Alan C. Mix. "A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years." science 339, no. 6124 (2013): 1198-1201. DOI: 10.1126/science.1228026

Shakun, Jeremy D., Peter U. Clark, Feng He, Shaun A. Marcott, Alan C. Mix, Zhengyu Liu, Bette Otto-Bliesner, Andreas Schmittner, and Edouard Bard. "Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation." Nature 484, no. 7392 (2012): 49-54. doi:10.1038/nature10915

Merry-go-round with shonky Steve Goddard and slayer HockeySchtick1

I've spent a bit of time last night and today on twitter.  I don't make a habit of engaging with wackos on twitter because science deniers are nuts when it comes to science (by definition).  Also, because Twitter isn't the ideal forum for discussing science - though it's excellent for finding out about new papers and articles.  It's like jumping from horse to horse on a whirling carousel.  Fake sceptics can make your head spin while they leap from topic to topic without taking a breath.

If you thought that WUWT was full of utter nutters, WUWT articles appear almost sane when compared to the weird out there in cyberspace.

Cold hobby horse

As I recall, my foray into tweet-weird started with one of the nuttier nuts, "SteveSGoddard", who replied to my tweet about the new paper by Gavin Schmidt and colleagues.  Steve (not his real name) claimed:

Look, I agree the 70s were pretty cool.  I spent some time in London hobnobbing with some muso's and artists who were pretty cool.  That was after spending time in the USA and Canada, meeting some really cool people as well.

However I was easily able to show he was wrong about the 1970s.  Strictly speaking you could argue that the seventies were one of the eight coldest decades of the twentieth century.  In fact they were the eighth coldest of ten decades in the twentieth century, being beaten by seven colder decades before them and only being colder than two decades - the eighties and nineties. I was able to show this by generating a chart from GISTemp, which took only a few seconds:

Data source: NASA

Steve didn't dispute my chart, but he followed up his silliness by tweeting this "chart":

I have no idea where he dug it up from.  You'll no doubt have noticed that his chart stops in 1970 for some reason.  It looks like it's meant to be global surface temperature anomalies. You'll also notice that doesn't show the rise in the rate of global warming after 1970.  And it was nothing like any surface temperature chart that I'd ever seen.

The USSR hobby horse

Steve then resurrected an old chart.  Steve didn't say where it came from but it turns out that he copied it from a 1982 paper by Alan Robock, based on data collated by scientists in the USSR up to the late 1970s (see below for the reference to Vinnikof - I can't find the paper online).

Source: Robock (1982)

The problem was that Steve's chart was based on northern hemisphere only, extrapolated from land to sea surface and even then the records only covered less than 60% of the NH land at best, (and only between 17.5N and 87.5N), with early records only covering about 8% of the surface according to Bradley and Jones 1985 .  It was a good effort for the time and studied by others who were putting together a set of global temperature records.  Compared to what is available today - well all I can say is that The Auditor would be in clover if a climate scientist today put it forward for serious consideration today.  (The Auditor doesn't usually bother taking down science deniers like SteveSGoddard as far as I can tell.)

Data source: NASA

Sky dragon hobby horse

Steve Goddard eventually got bored and stopped responding.  I guess he didn't like his silliness being broadcast beyond his normal audience of science deniers.  However another wacky science denier took over.  This one goes by the name of hockeyschtick1.  Now hockeyschtick1 is another a gish galloper and wandered all over the place in his/her denial of science.  Over time it became apparent that s/he is a "slayer" and doesn't accept the greenhouse effect.  Hockeyschtick1 at one point tweeted:

@SouBundanga @SteveSGoddard Only simpletons don't know about Henry's Law and that CO2 lags T on short, intermediate, & long-term timescales
— hockey schtick (@hockeyschtick1) February 28, 2014

Given that hockeyschtick1 has heard of Henry's Law, you'd have thought s/he would be asking themselves why the oceans continue to absorb a lot of the extra CO2 we are emitting, what with the partial pressure from CO2 increasing.  But no.  Hockeyschtick1 couldn't manage to concentrate long enough for that, quickly moving to arguing that nitrogen is causing global warming.  At least that's what it appeared to be.

The nitrogen hobby horse

The argument moved along the lines that nitrogen has built up so much that its pressing on the hard wall surrounding Earth.  I say this, because hockeyschtick1 suddenly started tweeting about nitrogen with this:

The pressure hobby horse

Then jumped to pV=nRT as if our atmosphere is surrounded by a dome made of some impermeable substance close enough to the surface of Earth that it's causing an increase in pressure.

It reminded me of a comment on WUWT by ferd berple, who reckoned that CO2 is causing the 1 atm at sea level to rise so high that it's stopping water from evaporating from the oceans.  He wrote:

If you add CO2, then the atmospheric pressure goes up and it is harder to evaporate water, so water vapor decreases, restoring the original pressure. This leads at best 0 warming as you add CO2.

In that case, too, Earth would have to be surrounded by an impermeable dome close to the surface that restricted the movement of gas molecules and caused an increase in atmospheric pressure at all levels as CO2 was added to the air.  The fact that CO2 has gone from 280 ppm to a mere 400 ppm, which would hardly make much of a difference in the total number of molecules in the air, isn't a barrier to ferd's theory.  The fact by far the bulk of the atmosphere is nitrogen and oxygen didn't dissuade ferd berple.  You can see the similarities with hockeyschtick1's theory of pressure from an increase in a trace gas being enough to cause global warming.  Here is one of hockeyschtick1's tweets, for example:

Now you'll also notice how ferd berple and hockeyschtick1 depart from the normal fake sceptic's stance of "it's only a trace gas how could it affect Earth's temperature".  Not only do they seem to be arguing that a trace gas can't affect earth's temperature while at the same time arguing that it can, they seem to be arguing that an increase in a trace gas can have a huge impact on atmospheric pressure, or at least that's ferd's argument.

The solar hobby horse

The gist of it seems to be that nitrogen is causing global warming.  When I asked how nitrogen caused ice ages, I was told that it was the sun that caused ice ages.  When I suggested that this would mean very high climate sensitivity, hockeyschtick1 said that s/he argues for low sensitivity.  I didn't get to ask what is causing global temperatures to go up now.  Hockeyschtick1 doesn't accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas so maybe s/he is arguing that it's the increase in CO2 pressure - minute though the increase in CO2 is by comparison with other atmospheric gases.  Goodness knows what hockeyschtick1 thinks happens when water evaporates.  That can cause big shifts in atmospheric pressure!

Anyway, hockeyschtick1 jumped to another argument - that a drop in solar activity can cause global cooling. Which would be fair enough.  It could, all other things being equal.  But it takes more than a small shift and remember, hockeyschtick1 argued that climate sensitivity is "trivial". And anyway, despite a drop in solar activity, Earth is still warming.

So is it nitrogen?  Well, since nitrogen isn't a greenhouse gas and since Earth isn't capped by an impermeable dome and since the sun is less active at the moment while Earth is still heating up - ...

At around this point while I was trying to work through the endless maze of hockeyschtick1's weird thought processes, I was told:

Thing is, hockeyschtick1 didn't block me on twitter, so I don't know what s/he meant by a "permanent ban".

The merry-go-round goes round and around

If your head is spinning by now, just imagine what must be going on in the heads of the "anything but CO2" crowd like the SteveSGoddards,  ferd berples and hockeyschtick1s of the world.

Now because I don't follow hockeyschtick1 on twitter, I didn't notice all the other discussions going on between him/her and other people.  I've since looked at hockeyschtick1's tweets and see that s/he was having numerous discussions with a whole lot of different people all at the same time.


I've decided that riding a merry-go-round is a similar experience to swapping tweets with a fake sceptic, but riding a real merry-go-round is a lot more fun.

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Bradley, R.S. and Jones, P.D., 1985: "Data bases for isolating the effects of the increasing carbon dioxide concentration. Chapter 3, in: Detecting the Climatic Effects of Increasing Carbon Dioxide", MacCracken, M. and Luther, F. (eds.), U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, D.C.

Robock, Alan. "The Russian surface temperature data set." Journal of Applied Meteorology 21, no. 12 (1982): 1781-1785.

Vinnikov, K, GV Gruza, VF Sakharov, AA Kirillov, NP Kyvyneva, E Ya Ran'kova (1980) "Modern changes in climate of the Northern Hemisphere", Meteor. Hydrol., No. 6, 5-17

Have all the deniers gone barking mad?

Anthony Watts has a post about how Grover Cleveland caused 23 more hurricanes than has President Obama.  I think he also thinks that the Whitehouse knows of and cares very deeply about what some idiot who goes by the name of Steve Goddard tweets.

This WUWT article will go down as an Anthony Watts classic!

Are all deniers barking mad or what?

Interesting too that Anthony's palling up with Steve Goddard again after giving up on his silliness, making up stuff about sea ice.  He's running out of allies and must be turning to whoever he thinks he has left. Even idiots like Steve Goddard.  (Not his real name, but as long as he's a climate science denier he's not an anonymous coward as far as Anthony is concerned.)

Interesting to see Andy Revkin apparently consorting with and promoting the idiot Goddard, too.  And even Andy seems to think the White House cares two hoots about a dumb denier blogger and that it is all powerful and can just pick up a phone or something to Jack Dorsey and he'll hack the system and delete a tweet for them.

Whatever your views on #AGW, disturbing to see @WhiteHouse delete factual tweet on hurricane history: http://t.co/NWakXMz9Om Open society?
— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) June 24, 2013

Even if the White House had ever heard of or cared about some crazy blogger, even it can't just get into Twitter and delete someone else's tweets.  Here's a live link to the tweet that all the climate science deniers (except Steve Goddard probably) thinks the White House cared enough about to use the Patriot Act or whatever to delete. (Does the USA still have a Patriot Act?):

@whitehouse During Grover Cleveland's tenure as president, the US was hit by 26 hurricanes, compared to only 3 under Obama. #EndSuperstition
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) June 24, 2013

The world sometimes seems to be a madhouse.   Deniers are nuts and getting nuttier day by day.  You'd think they'd limit themselves to just one conspiracy theory a day, wouldn't you.  A case of one is never enough I suppose.

PS My readers know already that Twitter is too complex for Anthony Watts.  Looks like Andy Revkin is flummoxed by it as well.


PPS Comedy gold!  I was wrong about Steve Goddard knowing his tweet wasn't deleted.  Apparently he doesn't know how to check his own timeline.   Now he's trying to claim that not only did the White House delete his tweet, the White House put it back again!  Face palm, as they say in the USA :D

Weird to see inside the mind of a conspiracy theorist.  Does the word megalomania spring to mind?  Do they think the White House is running Twitter now?  Deniers are bloody barmy, as we say down under :D

@dana1981 @wottsupwiththat @SouBundanga @Revkin Andrew Holland already admitted that they took it down. Perhaps they put it back up?
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) June 24, 2013

Courtesy of Anonymous in the comments and conscious of the fact that someone will cry "Godwin's Law" but this one is funny :D

PPPS More comedy.  Now Anthony Watts in another fit of conspiracy ideation has decided to test the power of the White House.  I'm not kidding!

Apparently he wants to be as important as he thinks Steve Goddard is (and John Cook).  You'd think after making such an idiot of himself with his ignorance of Twitter he wouldn't be so willing to do it again.  But Anthony never learns...He seems to really and truly think that the White House is trying to hide the history of the weather in the USA..  Not only that but he thinks the White House cares enough about a dumb denier blogger to notice his tweet.  Not only that, he thinks/hopes they'll take so much notice they'll remove it.  Not only that, he thinks that the White House can remove a silly tweet just by snapping its fingers.  (Does the White House have fingers?)  Look!

@whitehouse confirmed by NOAA huricane data, Grover Cleveland had 9 times more hurricanes than Barack Obama: http://t.co/YNOd4LjER1
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) June 24, 2013

Sheesh. And to think there are still a few people who take these idiots seriously. 

It's not the White House it's the NSA

Crikey, they aren't finished yet.  Now they reckon the NSA has got involved.

_Jim says:
June 24, 2013 at 1:59 pm  Are we sure that wasn’t actually an “NSA pull”, for, you know, possible ‘national security’ reasons?

And they really do not understand Twitter and think the White House not only can alter Twitter but that it takes any notice of a tweet from a complete nonentity.  Does anyone else think that some people must have a really, really hard time surviving the real world?

Snake Oil Baron says:
June 24, 2013 at 2:55 pm
It seems they deleted it from their White House site tweets which is possible but it still existed on Twitter. I was confused about that at first. It is still a sissy thing to do but not a sinister thing to do.

No, Snake Oil, that's not how Twitter works.  You can't delete a tweet from any 'site'.   More than conspiracy ideation, these people have real delusions of grandeur.

PPPlosingcountS

"Steve Goddard" thinks that his megalomania has something to do with first amendment rights.  He still seems to think the White House did something with his tweet.  Nutty as...

@SouBundanga @dana1981 @wottsupwiththat @Revkin I see, so First Amendment rights don't apply to little people. Thanks for clearing that up.
— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) June 24, 2013