Absurd levels of cranked up disinformation from Bob Tisdale at WUWT

This article will be short, I promise. It will be much shorter than Bob Tisdale's latest protest (archived here). Bob's posted a bunch of charts that show just how hot February was. The contrast between Bob's first lot of charts and what he wrote is quite extraordinary. (Bob then fudged the next lot of charts to make the warming go away, which is typical behaviour from him.) Bob thinks that people are silly to react to this chart of global mean surface temperature - and this is only since 1997!

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature since 1997. Data source: GISS NASA

No doubt about it: AP's new euphemism for science denying conspiracy theorists is not politically correct

Seems that AP has succumbed to the poor sensitive little science deniers who call for jail time for climate scientists. It's more than political correctness - it's political correctness gone haywire. Usually it's the extreme right wing ideologues who moan about people who conform to "political correctness" - except when they want a euphemism for their own behaviour. Instead of calling climate science denial denial of climate science, AP wants to pretend that rampant deniers only doubt climate science. Which is nonsense. Deniers don't doubt. They just "know" that all the science of the past 200 years is wrong. Deniers reject science. They prefer to think that for the past 200 years there has been a giant hoax perpetrated on the illiterati (that is, deniers).

From denial to doubt? No, it's still denial

Paul Colford wrote at AP about a change to the AP Style Guide:

Our guidance is to use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science and to avoid the use of skeptics or deniers.

How Expert is Arctic Climate Expert Judith Curry?

Judith Curry has a blog post (archived here) in which she tries to justify this statement she made in her written testimony to a recent US Senate Committee Hearing.

Further, Arctic surface temperature anomalies in the 1930’s were as large as the recent temperature anomalies.

The Arctic and Antarctica

Judith made the statement in a section of her testimony about sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctica.  Judith included the following sentences in her written testimony, relating to Arctic sea ice and Antarctic sea ice.  Unlike other science I've read and despite the gross differences between the two regions, Judith packaged the Arctic and Antarctica together.  She wrote:

The increase in Antarctic sea ice is not understood and is not simulated correctly by climate models. Further, Arctic surface temperature anomalies in the 1930’s were as large as the recent temperature anomalies. Notwithstanding the simulations by climate models that reproduce the decline in Arctic sea ice, more convincing arguments regarding causes of sea ice variations requires understanding and ability to simulate sea ice variations in both hemispheres.

Her first sentence is more definite than the science I've read suggests.  If she'd written "is not completely understood" or even "not well understood" it would be a more accurate representation of the state of science.

Her second sentence is most likely incorrect, as we'll see below.  (I've emphasised that sentence in bold italics because it is going to be the main focus of this article.)  But while we're here, let me just ask the question - if the Arctic was as warm in the 1930s as it is now, how is it there was so much more ice in the Arctic region back then than there is today? On land and sea.

Her third sentence is out of the blue and as far as I can make out, doesn't link directly to anything else in her testimony (except it fits her general theme of "scientists don't know nuffin' so forget-about-it").

The differences between the Arctic and Antarctica are vast.  About the only similarity they share is they are both cold places with lots of ice. I'd be interested in what readers think about the "more convincing arguments" comment and just what Judith might mean by that.  Sure it applies to Antarctica, but I can't see that the Arctic and Antarctica are linked as closely as Judith seems to be suggesting.  I'm not arguing that what happens in Antarctica is divorced from the rest of the world or that it could not possibly have any impact on the Arctic.  Merely that what happens in Antarctica is unlikely to have any greater impact on the Arctic than it has on anywhere else in the world.  Similarly, what happens in the Arctic would not necessarily affect Antarctica any more than it would affect other regions in the world. And being in different hemispheres, they'd both arguably have less impact on each other rather than more.

So while it will be nice when all the different forces acting in the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere are better understood, I don't understand why Judith links Arctic sea ice with sea ice in the southern oceans.

However in this article I particularly want to discuss the recent blog article of Judith's in which she tries to justify her statement and respond to Tamino's criticism of Judith's writing:

Further, Arctic surface temperature anomalies in the 1930’s were as large as the recent temperature anomalies. 

(Tamino has also written a response, so I'll try to keep this short.)

Judith Curry is an expert on the climate of the Arctic

Now Judith introduced herself to the US Senate Committee as an expert on the climate of the Arctic.  The first two sentences of her written testimony show how she presented herself:

I am Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I have devoted 30 years to conducting research on topics including climate of the Arctic, the role of clouds and aerosols in the climate system, and the climate dynamics of extreme weather events.

So the first area of expertise she listed was that of the climate of the Arctic.  So if anyone knows about the climate of the Arctic then she should.  I am aware Judith has had quite a few papers about the Arctic published, her most recent being as co-author of one of Marcia Wyatt's "stadium wave" papers I believe.

However, rather than cite any of her own work on the Arctic to support her statement that the Arctic was as hot in the 1930s as it is now, what Judith does in her blog article is select three passages from the IPCC AR5 report in the section on Arctic sea ice (plus some other material).  These are the sections she quotes - note they are not sequential in the IPCC report and are not adjacent to each other, though in her blog article Judith runs them all together as if they were a single segment.  All are from Chapter 10, "Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional".

The first segment is from page 10-27 of AR5 WG1, in Section 10.3 Atmosphere and Surface:

Gillett et al. (2008b) detect anthropogenic influence on near-surface Arctic temperatures over land, with a consistent magnitude in simulations and observations. Wang et al. (2007) also find that observed Arctic warming is inconsistent with simulated internal variability. Both studies ascribe Arctic warmth in the 1930s and 1940s largely to internal variability. Shindell and Faluvegi (2009) infer a large contribution to both midcentury Arctic cooling and late century warming from aerosol forcing changes, with greenhouse gases the dominant driver of long-term warming, though they infer aerosol forcing changes from temperature changes using an inverse approach which may lead to some changes associated with internal variability being attributed to aerosol forcing. We therefore conclude that despite the uncertainties introduced by limited observational coverage, high internal variability, modelling uncertainties (Crook et al., 2011) and poorly understood local forcings, such as the effect of black carbon on snow, there is sufficiently strong evidence to conclude that it is likely that there has been an anthropogenic contribution to the very substantial warming in Arctic land surface temperatures over the past 50 years.

The above does not support or refute her contention that the Arctic was as warm in the 1930s as it is now. It's mainly blog padding.

The second segment is from page 10-43, except that Judith left out the first sentence of the paragraph, which I'll include as italics enclosed in square brackets.

[A question as recently as six years ago was whether the recent Arctic warming and sea ice loss was unique in the instrumental record and whether the observed trend would continue (Serreze et al., 2007).] Arctic temperature anomalies in the 1930s were apparently as large as those in the 1990s and 2000s. There is still considerable discussion of the ultimate causes of the warm temperature anomalies that occurred in the Arctic in the 1920s and 1930s (Ahlmann, 1948; Veryard, 1963; Hegerl et al., 2007a; Hegerl et al., 2007b). The early 20th century warm period, while reflected in the hemispheric average air temperature record (Brohan et al., 2006), did not appear consistently in the mid-latitudes nor on the Pacific side of the Arctic (Johannessen et al., 2004; Wood and Overland, 2010). Polyakov et al. (2003) argued that the Arctic air temperature records reflected a natural cycle of about 50–80 years. However, many authors (Bengtsson et al., 2004; Grant et al., 2009; Wood and Overland, 2010; Brönnimann et al., 2012) instead link the 1930s temperatures to internal  variability in the North Atlantic atmospheric and ocean circulation as a single episode that was sustained by ocean and sea ice processes in the Arctic and north Atlantic. The Arctic wide temperature increases in the last decade contrast with the episodic regional increases in the early 20th century, suggesting that it is unlikely that recent increases are due to the same primary climate process as the early 20th century.

Judith bolded the second sentence in the above passage and omitted the first.  A couple of people have made much of this, and I agree that it is ambiguous.  The second sentence could be read as a continuation of the first with the meaning: "As recently as six years ago it appeared as if Arctic anomalies in the 1930s were as high as those of the 1990s and 2000s".  Or it could be read as a standalone separate sentence, meaning that "today it appears as if Arctic anomalies in the 1930s were as high as those of the 1990s and 2000s".

If you choose the second interpretation then that second sentence is the only bit of Judith's IPCC quotes that supports her contention that the Arctic was as warm in the 1930s as it is today.  However it isn't consistent with anything else I've read in the IPCC report and I found no other statement of that nature in the report.

Not only that, but the very last sentence in the above passage should have been enough to alert Judith to the inconsistency - that the recent warming is Arctic-wide, unlike the warming in the early twentieth century, which was described as "episodic regional increases".

What is most concerning for people who might still harbour hope that Judith Curry has a bit of the scientist left in her, is that in talking about Arctic temperatures, Judith selected that particular passage and ignored conflicting passages.

The third passage Judith quoted is from page 10-42, still in the Arctic ice section of the report.  The sentence in square brackets and italics was not quoted by Judith but is part of the same paragraph so I've included it for completeness.

Turning to model based attribution studies, Min et al. (2008b) compared the seasonal evolution of Arctic sea ice extent from observations with those simulated by multiple GCMs for 1953–2006. Comparing changes in both the amplitude and shape of the annual cycle of the sea ice extent reduces the chance of spurious detection due to coincidental agreement between the response to anthropogenic forcing and other factors, such as slow internal variability. They found that human influence on the sea ice extent changes has been robustly detected since the early 1990s. The anthropogenic signal is also detectable for individual months from May to December, suggesting that human influence, strongest in late summer, now also extends into colder seasons. Kay et al. (2011b), Jahn et al. (2012) and Schweiger et al. (2011) used the climate model (CCSM4) to investigate the influence of anthropogenic forcing on late 20th century and early 21st century Arctic sea ice extent and volume trends. On all timescales examined (2–50+ years), the most extreme negative extent trends observed in the late 20th century cannot be explained by modeled internal variability alone. Comparing trends from the CCSM4 ensemble to observed trends suggests that internal variability could account for approximately half of the observed 1979–2005 September Arctic sea ice extent loss. [Attribution of anthropogenic forcing is also shown by comparing September sea ice extent as projected by seven models from the set of CMIP5 models’ hindcasts to control runs without anthropogenic forcing (Figure 10.16a; Wang and Overland, 2009). The mean of sea ice extents in seven models’ ensemble members are below the level of their control runs by ~1995, similar to the result of Min et al. (2008b).]

The above should have been a signal to Judith to look further to make sure her claim of 1930s warming was correct.  While it doesn't directly conflict with her claim, it states that recent warming is outside the bounds of natural variability, whereas the second passage she quoted above stated that the 1930s warming could be explained by natural variability.  Anyone with half a brain would be asking themselves if that might mean that it was hotter recently than in the 1930s.

To sum up then, of all those passages, there is only one sentence that relates directly to Judith's claim.  That's the sentence in the second passage that reads:

Arctic temperature anomalies in the 1930s were apparently as large as those in the 1990s and 2000s. 

Thing is, that sentence is, as we've seen, ambiguous in the context of the paragraph.  Not only that it is well and truly contradicted elsewhere in the IPCC report.  I don't know who wrote it or why it slipped through when it could be read as conflicting with findings described elsewhere in the report.  It could be an oversight.  Yes, it could be a difference of opinion among scientists.  If so then normally it would have been described as such in the report.  So I'm thinking it's an ambiguous statement that no-one picked up on to remove the ambiguity.  Maybe because the actual meaning was obvious to the IPCC authors and they didn't see any ambiguity.

To recap, Judith is attempting to justify her own statement to the US Senate Committee that:

Further, Arctic surface temperature anomalies in the 1930’s were as large as the recent temperature anomalies.

The above isn't an IPCC quote, it's Judith's own considered opinion as an expert on the Arctic climate.  Like I said, in her blog justification she picked three passages from the IPCC section on Arctic sea ice, of which only one sentence of one passage could be argued as being supportive of her claim.

The evidence Judith Curry ignored

What Judith chose not to quote was this passage on Arctic temperatures in Chapter 14, pp 14-39 and 14-40 (my bold italics):

The surface and lower troposphere in the Arctic and surrounding land areas show regional warming over the past three decades of about 1°C/decade—significantly greater than the global mean trend (Figures 2.22 and 2.25). According to temperature reconstructions, this signal is highly unusual: Temperatures averaged over the Arctic over the past few decades are significantly higher than any seen over the past 2000 years (Kaufman et al., 2009). Temperatures 11,000 years ago were greater than the 20th century mean, but this is likely a strongly-forced signal, since summer solar radiation was 9% greater than present (Miller et al.,
2010). Finally, warmer temperatures have been sustained in pan-Arctic land areas where a declining NAO over the past decade ought to have caused cooling (Semenov, 2007; Turner et al., 2007b).

Now there are two conflicting statements in different chapters of the IPCC report (assuming Judith's interpretation of the ambiguous sentence). The one a sentence that Judith quoted from Chapter 10, and the above paragraph from Chapter 14.

I looked further to see what else was in the IPCC report that Judith may have chosen to omit from her testimony.  Here is a passage from page 5-33 of Chapter 5 of the IPCC report.

Since AR4, regional temperature reconstructions have been produced for the last 2 kyr (Figure 5.12; PAGES 2k Consortium, 2013). A recent multi-proxy 2000-year Arctic temperature reconstruction shows that temperatures during the first centuries were comparable or even higher than during the 20th century (Hanhijärvi et al., 2013; PAGES 2k Consortium, 2013). During the MCA, portions of the Arctic and sub-Arctic experienced periods warmer than any subsequent period, except for the most recent 50 years (Figure 5.12) (Kaufman et al., 2009; Kobashi et al., 2010; Vinther et al., 2010; Kobashi et al., 2011; Spielhagen et al., 2011). Tingley and Huybers (2013) provided a statistical analysis of northern high-latitude temperature reconstructions back to 1400 and found that recent extreme hot summers are unprecedented over this time span. Marine proxy records indicate anomalously high SSTs north of Iceland and the Norwegian Sea from 900 to 1300, followed by a generally colder period that ended in the early 20th century. Modern SSTs in this region may still be lower than the warmest intervals of the 900–1300 period (Cunningham et al., 2013). 

Further north, in Fram Strait, modern SSTs from Atlantic Water appear warmer than those reconstructed from foraminifera for any prior period of the last 2000 years (Spielhagen et al., 2011). However, different results are obtained using dinocysts from the same sediment core (Bonnet et al. (2010) showing a cooling trend over the last 2000 years without a 20th century rise, and warmest intervals entered at years 100 and 600.

The words in the above passage do not by themselves directly refute Judith's one sentence claim that the Arctic was as hot in the 1930s as it is now.  Nor does it lend any support to her claim.  According to my reading of the above, the Arctic reconstruction suggests that recent temperatures in the Arctic are the highest they've been since the Medieval Climate Anomaly at least and probably the highest they've been in nearly 2000 years (at least).  The "last fifty years" is not the 1930s but the period since the 1960s. We can leave aside the "portions of the Arctic" sentence because the issue is around the Arctic as a whole.  The "recent extreme hot summers" is likely more relevant, but I haven't read the cited paper to see if it's "whole of Arctic".

Anyway, here is figure 5.12 which was referenced in the first paragraph of the above quote, which Judith chose to not divulge to the US Senate Committee:

Figure 5.12 IPCC AR5 WG1 [Arctic only] Regional temperature reconstructions, comparison with model simulations over the past millennium (950–2010). Temperature anomalies (thick black line), and uncertainty estimated provided by each individual reconstruction (grey envelope). Uncertainties: Arctic: 90% confidence bands. ...Simulations are separated into 2 groups: High solar forcing (red thick line), and weak solar forcing (blue thick line). For each model subgroup, uncertainty is shown as 1.645 times sigma level (light red and blue lines). For comparison with instrumental record, the CRUTEM4 dataset is shown (yellow line). Green bars in rectangles on top of each panel indicate the 30 warmest years in the 950–1250 period (left rectangle) and 1800–2010 period (right rectangle). All lines are smoothed by applying a 30 year moving average. ... Reconstructions: from PAGES 2k Consortium (2013). Models used: simulations with strong solar forcing (mostly pre-PMIP3 simulations): CCSM3 (1), CNRM-CM3.3 (1), CSM1.4 (1), CSIROMK3L-1-2 (3), ECHAM5/MPIOM (3), ECHO-G (1) IPSLCM4 (1), FGOALS-gl (1). Simulations with weak solar forcing (mostly PMIP3/CMIP5 simulations): BCC-csm1-1 (1), CCSM4 (1), CSIRO-MK3L-1-2 (1), GISS-E2-R (3, ensemble members 121, 124, 127), HadCM3 (1), MPI-ESM, ECHAM5/MPIOM (5), IPSL-CM5A-LR (1). In parenthesis are the number of simulations used for each model. All simulations are treated individually, in the timeseries as well as in the MCA–LIA bars. More information about forcings used in simulations and corresponding references are given in Table 5.A.1.

Now given that Judith is a self-professed expert on the Arctic climate and has the publication history to prove it, there is no excuse in my mind for her to not divulge this to the US Senate Committee.  She can't complain that she didn't know about it.  It's in the very same document from which she selected her own quote.

Even if she disagreed with the latest research, she was being irresponsible at best, given that the above research is what is presented as being the current state of knowledge.  Had Judith been acting as a scientist rather than a political stooge for the denialist party (Republicans), Judith would have presented the full spectrum of research and explained why she disputes the more recent findings.

In her blog article she didn't refer to the above either.  She focused on material to support her claim (Wondering Willis style) while ignoring conflicting evidence.  And it's especially damning that she put forward some guff from a blogger/denier (not a climate scientist) who thinks we're on the verge of an ice age and who can't read a simple chart of the Central England temperature (in which he ludicrously claims fame and expertise). (Another main bit of "evidence" Judith drew on in her blog article was some unpublished "work" one of her pet fake sceptics, Tony "ice age cometh" Brown who barracks for the Central England team of deniers. So if you needed more evidence that she was searching for material to support her claim rather than reporting the science no matter what it showed, there you have it.)

Since I started this article, Tamino has written his second blog article about the matter with more evidence against Judith.  I might as well add this contribution to the mix since I've gone to the trouble of pulling it together.

The other reason I decided to go ahead and publish this is that Judith is flinching a bit and any bit of encouragement to act like a scientist could be worth it.  I don't think Judith enjoys being shown up as just another ordinary fake sceptic blogger.  I doubt she will change now, she's made her bed, chosen her path, whatever.  Still, it's not too late for her to put aside her denier garb and don her white lab coat again, should she change her mind.

I'll leave it at that.

Bob Tisdale hides the warming and tries out a conspiracy theory at WUWT

Did I ever say that Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale can be very long-winded?

If one didn't know better on would mistake today's WUWT article as a Poe.  (Archived here.) But Bob Tisdale is ever so serious.  He didn't see the humour in Tamino's take-down of his antics a couple of weeks ago, and I guess he's been stewing on it ever since.  And as regulars know, Bob has a crush on Dana Nuccitelli, who gets more than a mention.

To cut to the chase, Bob reckons that 1990 wasn't a hot year because, wait for it, he says:

1990 was an ENSO-neutral year, according to NOAA’s Oceanic NINO Index. Therefore, “1990 was…” NOT “…an especially hot year”. 

In Bob's world, if there is neither an El Nino or La Nina, the surface temperature must be normal.  (Tell that to us in Australia!)  The temperature can't lie above the trend unless there's an ENSO event according to Bob.  It doesn't matter to Bob that in 1990 the global surface temperature was above the trend line.  It "was an ENSO-neutral year...Therefore, “1990 was…” NOT “…an especially hot year"!

Did I say Bob Tisdale can be a bit odd?

At this point I can hear some readers say "well, Bob Tisdale might be tedious and a bit odd, but Sou at HotWhopper repeats herself".  And you'd be correct.  Here's a chart from when I wrote about his first attempt, that prompted Tamino and me to respond earlier this month.

Data Source: NASA and WUWT!

The chart above shows 1990 compared to prior years and to the trend, which it lies above.

How Bob hides the warming

Now Bob has a good trick to show that 1990 wasn't warm at all.  He disputes the record and I think he's trying to argue that 1990 wasn't really the hottest year on record until 1995 (which it was).  Here's Bob's "proof".

Source: WUWT of course!

Really and truly.  Bob removed the heat to prove it wasn't hot in 1990!  ha ha ha...

I wonder why he included the years after 1990, which of course over time (from 1995) got warmer because of global warming.  I did say one could mistake his article for a Poe.

(Update: It's been pointed out in the comments that the point of detrending the data is to show how much or how little the temperature deviated from the trend - in Bob's case he wanted to show that some deviations were greater than that of 1990.  But that's not the issue as I discussed previously here.  Tamino showed the same but in his case it was to determine by how much 1990 deviated from the trend, not to see if other years deviated.  The deviation of other years is not relevant.  All that is relevant is by how much 1990 deviated because it gives an indication of how much the model runs were wrongly shifted upwards.

The point about the problems with the display of model runs was twofold.  Firstly: The model runs were all aligned to a single point, which was wrong.  They didn't all converge to a single point in 1990 let alone converge exactly on the observed average global temperature anomaly, and shouldn't have been shown as if they did.  Secondly: that point lay above the trend, which meant that the model runs looked higher than they were in reality.  Both of these combined to make the chart wrong.  So Bob going on and on about whether or not 1990 was especially hot or not isn't the point.  The fact that Bob goes to such lengths is doubly odd given that the heat record broken in 1990 wasn't broken again until 1995.  So it really was especially hot in 1990 - and even more "especially hot" since, as Bob pointed out, it wasn't an El Nino year!)

Bob writes more...

Now for the long-winded observation.  Bob took nearly 3,000 words to say that 1990 wasn't a hot year because it was ENSO-neutral.  This time around.  The first time it took him about half as many words.  Next time will it take him 6,000 words?

(For the curious, this article has 494 words down to the WUWT comments, and 1008 words in total. And I'm not known for being parsimonious with words!)

It's a guvmint plot!

If you're wondering where the conspiracy theorising comes into the picture, this is from Bob's latest attempt to turn 1990 into a year that wasn't hot:

Adapted from source: WUWT of course!

He seems to think that the final draft AR5 report was changed by politicians.  AFAIK it was the second order draft, not the final draft in which the authors changed the chart.  But I could be wrong, because they may have still been doing the model runs up until the final draft.  I don't know. Whenever it was introduced I know for a fact that the "politicians" had nothing to do with it.  The changes to AR5 following the meeting with member governments and observers are listed here.  The chart wasn't changed.  (As you'll recall the chart in the first order draft was flawed.)


I've written enough.  I'll hand you over to some WUWT-ers for their reaction to Bob's tedious, long-winded, serious, boring article :)

From the WUWT comments

Here is a short selection for your edification (archived here).  Just so you know that the scientists are right about being wrong or wrong about being right or whatever twisted logic the WUWT-ers are coming up with today.


François GM has his own conspiracy theory and it's a cute one (my bold italics).  Now this might be a Poe, but who can tell at WUWT?

October 26, 2013 at 4:37 pm
Wonderfully entertaining, Bob. And so much work ….

Amazing how they never thought of disappearing the 1998 temperature peak in the early 2000s when the ENSO-induced warming trend suited their purpose.

Now that the 1998 peak belittles the recent temperatures, they attempt to make it go away by de-ENSOing it. Pathetic. So much deception.

Bill Illis says a whole lot more than this.  I've just chosen enough to give you the gist:

October 26, 2013 at 4:58 pm
1990 was the most neutral year one can get.
The average ENSO value (with a 3 month lag) was 0.03C (certainly Zero in ENSO terms with an impact on the global average temperature of 0.002C).

BarryW is having trouble with his anomalies and says:

October 26, 2013 at 7:02 pm
Comparing anomalies is ridiculous if you don’t align them to the same absolute starting conditions. It’s like taking a 100 volt signal and saying it matches a 1 volt signal because I can aline them on the oscilloscope. The only thing I can compare is the pattern of the two signals. The real values are not comparable by using anomalies. The only valid comparison here is the trends.

Theo Goodwin makes no pretence at scepticism and says:

October 26, 2013 at 7:14 pm
Great work, Mr. Tisdale. Thanks for keeping us up to date on what I will call Tamino’s childish efforts at misinformation.

Post script - what's in a name?

Incidentally, there's a lot of discussion of Tamino's name in the comments.  A whole lot.  By lots and lots of people, starting with Anthony Watts.  Bob Tisdale doesn't buy into it (not so far anyway) and I'm thinking it's just possible that Bob Tisdale is not Bob Tisdale's off-screen name (July 1, 2011 at 3:52 pm).

I could be wrong and it doesn't matter one iota to me and neither to any HW regular I should think.  But such things seem to be important to WUWT-ers.  If someone knows if it is his name (or not) they might let me know privately or here, because I don't want to go spreading unfounded rumours.  It's just a thought I had when I read that comment of his some time back.  Plus I don't think he's ever referred to me as anyone but Sou (plus adjectives), unlike his host.  So whatever name he goes by on or off the internet, Bob does seem to respect other people's preferences, which is a mark in his favour.


Anthony Watts behaves like a jerk again and whistles his WUWT dogs:

October 26, 2013 at 4:06 pm
@Bob Tisdale.

Don’t give this jerk “Tamino” the benefit of anonymity. His name is [Sou: redacted out of courtesy to Tamino], he lives in [Sou: redacted out of courtesy to Tamino].

Use his name when discussing his claims, if he stands behind his work, then he should have any problem with his name being applied to it.

The Mice Play - More Fake Forcings from 'Wondering' Willis on WUWT

I don't pretend to be an expert in mathematics, statistics or climate models but I'm going to make a short comment on 'Wondering' Willis Eschenbach's latest foray into fitting an equation to the outputs of climate models.

He's done this before on WUWT as he says, here and here.  What Willis does is fit a linear equation to climate model outputs.  Fortunately he doesn't go so far as make projections or predictions.

Willis' closing derogatory comments are nonsense. He writes:

Does this mean the models are useless? No. But it does indicate that they are pretty worthless for calculating the global average temperature. Since all the millions of calculations that they are doing are functionally equivalent to a simple lagged linear transformation of the inputs, it is very difficult to believe that they will ever show any skill in either hindcasting or forecasting the global climate.

Climate models might not be perfect but they are far from useless and are used for much more than surface temperature.  Indeed they used not just to make climate projections but increasingly to forecast weather on a seasonal basis. (More about POAMA here.)

Willis shows some skill with Microsoft Excel.  However he demonstrates a remarkable lack of understanding of climate forcings and climate models for someone who's been writing about them for so long.

To save you a Google search, let me point you to Tamino's explanation in case anyone is under the false impression that Willis' mathturbation™ is anything other than an exercise in curve-fitting after the event.  Here are some excerpts.  They are just as relevant in this case as they were to Willis' previous articles.

The first excerpt relates to Willis' adjustment for volcanic forcings:

Let me translate: the actual forcing didn’t fit his preconception, so he changed it to a fake forcing.

What he doesn’t do is make the connection: that the short-lived volcanic impulses have reduced impact, not because the GISS modelE treats them differently from all the others, but because they are short-lived and there’s more than one time scale for the model’s climate system response. There is for the real climate system, too — a potent argument for the fundamental soundness of the GISS modelE.

The second excerpt relates to curve fitting in general (as done by a recent visitor here - though Dan's equations were way more extravagant than Willis')

Bottom line: if you put in enough parameters, and fake the data because otherwise your model isn’t very good, you can get an excellent fit to the GISS modelE output. But it’s nothing but curve-fitting; the work of Willis Eschenbach and Paul_K is an outstanding example of mathturbation.

There’s no justification for them to fake the forcing, physical or mathematical. There’s no investigation of “effective forcing” to see how different forcings might actually have a different impact (in part because of feedbacks). That’s an effort which has been pioneered by James Hansen and colleagues. To contribute meaningfully, you’d have to do some actual science other than make an ad hoc change to the forcing data so you can impugn the results of somebody’s climate model.

For once Eric Worrall is spot on when he writes:

May 21, 2013 at 10:01 pm  HIlarious Willis...

Feel free to add your tuppenthworth

or maybe we should just ask Kenji :D

---

Postscript: McIntyre's a dill, too

23 May 2013: In case anyone still harboured the false impression that The Auditor, Steven McIntyre knew what he was talking about when it comes to climate science, this comment from him should settle the matter.  Steve can't tell the difference between a curve-fitting exercise in Excel and a simple coupled climate model.  He is most impressed by Wondering Willis' fancy fudginations and has some wonderings of his own:

Steve McIntyre says:
May 22, 2013 at 9:55 am  Willis, nice spotting with the digitization and the fitting of the function. That there was a relatively simple relationship between model forcing and model global temperature is something that has been chatted about from time to time, but the fit here is really impressive. Wigley and Raper’s MAGICC program, used in past IPCC studies, also emulated key model outputs from forcings: I wonder if it does something similar.

According to this page, no.  MAGICC is a suite of models not a fudged curve fit, which is hardly a surprise. (But hey, who cares?  Now The Revered Auditor has elevated Wondering Willis' curve fitting fiasco to the level of 'real proper science' in the minds of the deluded Dismissives.  Doesn't matter that he's talking through his hat.)

MAGICC consists of a suite of coupled gas-cycle, climate and ice-melt models integrated into a single software package.

You can read more about MAGICC and its history here.

Still More on: Parody or the Real Thing?

Global warming in the imaginary world of science deniers

Behold a lesson on the greenhouse effect by johnmarshall.  It was posted on the anti-science website WUWT (under the fake drawing by David Rose in the article by Anthony Watt's birther-mate Monckton).

Once again, on WUWT it's generally hard to tell the people who are sending up Watts from the Dunning-Kruger examples (people who are ignorant about the subject but don't know just how extraordinarily ignorant they are).

Monckton and David Rose look to be out to deliberately misinform based on their past behaviour.  Tony adds Dunning-Kruger ignorance mixed with ad homs.  There are other comments some of which do look to be from 'fake deniers' (as opposed to 'fake skeptics').

That one from johnmarshall has got to be mocking Tony and his loony mob, don't you think?  It just can't be for real.  (fairyland, 'evapouration', adsorbs, the GHG thing, violates the laws of thermodynamics!)  

Here's another beauty from WUWT I came across a little while ago, in case you missed it.  (The sky is so full of CO2 that the pressure stops water evaporating.)

Global warming in the real world

By the way, here's an article by Tamino on how the world is warming at least as quickly as expected.  In the chart below he models the warming with the effect of the Southern Oscillation Index (ENSO) removed:

Imagine what will happen when the next El Nino emerges.

Don't forget the melting Arctic.

Horseshit from the USA

Sea level change is due to horse-diving, according to prominent global warming scientists deniers Willie Soon and Nils-Axel Morner.

From the Washington Times:

While examining tide gauge records from Atlantic City's Steel Pier, Mr. Galvin discovered a remarkable effect apparently caused by spectators who came to watch horse-diving between 1929 and 1978. From old photographs, it was estimated that there must have been about 4,000 spectators who would come to watch. Given that this crowd probably weighed about 150 tons, the pier was subject to significant loading and unloading cycles. The initial 1912-1928 data showed the sea level rising at a rate of 0.12 inches per year. The rate tripled around 1929 when the horses began diving. When the shows were suspended from 1945 to 1953, sea level fell at a rate of 0.06 inches per year. When the diving resumed, the sea level rose again at a rate of 0.16 inches per year. Such clear documentation of the direct influence of local weight loading and unloading activities on tide gauge reading should add a cautionary note to connecting tide gauge data series to man-made greenhouse gas global warming phenomena.

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I seriously doubt anyone would take the article seriously, not even a reader of the Washington Times.  But deniers are often complete cranks so who knows.

People Power

Just in case there is someone stupid enough, Tamino took Soon and Morner to task and pointed out that those 4,000 people standing on the pier watching the diving horses not only changed the sea level in Atlantic City, they changed the sea level right up and down the east coast of North America! 

Just goes to show what people power can do!