Anthony Watts publishes another recklessly defamatory article about NOAA scientists, by Tim Ball

Anthony Watts has published another defamatory article on his blog (archived here). I use the term without it being proven in the courts, but if one of the retired scientists mentioned wanted to take him and Tim Ball to court, he'd surely be able to make a case to be heard. Tim Ball started his false claims in the very first sentence.

Some key points about the NOAA temperature reconstruction paper, Karl15

Before going into the despicable actions of Tim Ball and his publisher Anthony Watts, let me remind you about the NOAA work that they don't understand, but dislike so much they'll risk being sued (yet again, in the case of Tim Ball).

The work was built from two main pieces of research. One was an updating of a sea surface temperature record, which was in turn built from zillions of records from different sources, carefully analysed in great detail. The scientists re-aligned the data from different sources so that it provided a more accurate account of how the temperature of the sea surface has changed over time. As an example of this, the authors of Karl15 wrote:

Anthony Watts: Loopy and out of the loop. It's been noticed.

Tom Karl has retired from NOAA after more than 40 years of dedicated service. At HotWhopper, let's wish him well in his retirement and thank him for his valuable contribution, helping everyone understand better how we are changing climates around the world.

I woke up to see an article by Anthony Watts at WUWT (archived here). That's still a rare occurrence. It wasn't so much an article by Anthony as a misleading headline on top of a copied and pasted press release, with Anthony Watts' conspiracy theorising added underneath. At around the same time I got some messages from people who noticed that Anthony is very much out of the science loop.

The press release was to let people know that Tom Karl of NOAA has retired. Anthony's headline was "resigned", probably so that his obedient fans would make up some conspiracy theory about nefarious goings on. Or it could just be another example of Anthony Watts' ignorance. (So far most of his dim deniers have just stuck with Anthony's own conspiracy theory.)

Sheldon Walker gets into a pickle picking pauses at WUWT

Sheldon Walker has written another two articles for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT (archived as Part 1 and Part 2). What Sheldon was trying to do was prove there was a Pause (with a capital P) in global surface warming recently. He didn't manage that, though he thinks he did. What I'm going to show is that in order to pick a Pause, Sheldon had to:

• carefully select a 13-year period for a linear trend (aka cherry-pick)
• avoid an interval just two years longer
• ignore a finding he started out with, that even 15 years is too short to be assured of a meaningful trend
• ignore another finding that non-overlapping trends suggest real differences
• accept that a Pause is not the same as a stop!

2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Dr Thomas Karl, Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA have just given a press conference to to announce the annual average global temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

You will not be surprised to know that 2015 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2014 by a huge 0.13 °C. It was 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial. It is now 106 years since there was a "coldest year on record". (Gavin Schmidt said that 2015 would have broken the record even without the El Niño, though presumably by not as much.)

Anyone who tries to tell you it hasn't warmed since 1996, or 1997, or 1998, is dead wrong. See for yourself:

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature. Anomaly from the 1881-1910 mean. Data source: GISS NASA.

The average global temperature in 2015 was:

• 0.13 °C hotter than in 2014
• 1.33 °C hotter than the coldest year in the record (1909)
• 0,24 °C hotter than the average for 1998
• 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial (ballpark)

Note about the ballpark: I took the pre-industrial benchmark to be 0.3 °C cooler than 1900, from this recent article by Professor Michael Mann in Huffington Post.

Blistering letter from House Committee member to Lamar Smith about his baseless smear campaign against NOAA scientists

You may have read about US Congressman Lamar Smith's ongoing vindictive harassment and smear campaign against scientists at NOAA. You might have also read about his latest allegations of "whistleblowers". If you are wondering if there is anything behind this, other than a deranged attack on science, scientists and the NOAA, then wonder no more.

There is not.

To prove this point, just read the letter to Lamar Smith from Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, a member of the committee of which Lamar Smith is chair - the Committee on Space, Science and Technology.

I'll quote some segments damning the unconscionable actions of this vindictive, out-of-control, grandstanding US congressman, Lamar Smith. The bolding and some paragraph breaks are mine.

Anthony Watts publicly accuses NOAA scientists of fraud (again) - plus his "people go to jail"!

If you mistakenly thought that deniers like Anthony Watts might have some ethics or even a tiny shred of decency hidden very deep, you're wrong. In a topsy turvy and ugly article at WUWT today, Anthony Watts has someone trying to defend his appalling email to Tom Peterson of NOAA, in which he accuses Dr Peterson of fraud. Kip Hansen (archived here) tries to twist this into it being Andy Revkin who committed "a public journalistic offense". (I did say "that's gotta hurt".)

Andy Revkin wrote this after learning about Anthony's defamatory email:

Any notion that Watts is interested in fostering an atmosphere of civility and constructive discourse evaporates pretty quickly in considering how he handled his questions about that paper. Alternating between happy talk about rooftop solar and slanderous accusations is not constructive or civil.

Anthony Watts has discovered pristine US temperature (and MS Excel)

Today, after having no opinion on whether or not greenhouse gases work, Anthony Watts has decided to get an opinion. In his opinion the US temperature record maintained by NOAA is pristine. That is, the NOAA Climate Reference Network is pristine. Just how long he'll think it will remain pristine is the question. He wrote an article (archived here) with the headline: "Despite attempts to erase it globally, “the pause” still exists in pristine US surface temperature data"

This time Anthony had nothing but praise for the scientists who work at NOAA. (He did sneak in some snide comments verging on the defamatory by implication. He's got to keep his disreputable reputation intact.) His praise was only because he liked what he saw or he would have hidden it from his readers. He saw a temperature chart from 2005 to 2014 and figured that was good enough for his purposes. Anthony wrote:

But, what if there were a dataset of temperature that was so well done, so scientifically accurate, and so completely free of bias that by its design, there would never be any need nor justification for any adjustments to the data?
Such a temperature record exists, it is called the U.S. Climate Reference Network, (USCRN) and it is also operated by NOAA/NCDC’s (NCEI) head administrator,Tom Karl:

Given that Anthony has been busy for years trying to prove that the record isn't pristine, this is a bit of an about face. Is he admitting defeat? You might think so, mightn't you. Let's come back in five years time, and see if Anthony still says the data is pristine.

Data source: NOAA

Here is a comparison of the pristine with the non-pristine, on an annual basis. I'll let you spot the difference:

Data source: NOAA

OMG. Anthony Watts is right. The USA temperature has paused! Ooh, it's worse than that - it's cooling!

Let's just see how much the USA has cooled over the past 120 years. If you read WUWT you'll probably think the USA is practically in an ice age.

Pausing for a dozen protests at WUWT

So far there have been 12 articles at WUWT protesting the NOAA paper that came out last Thursday - by my count. Not including the first two, which broke embargo, that's more than two protests a day. We're still waiting for Anthony's promised fatal weakness.

The perversity of deniers - and the "pause" that never was with Tom Peterson

Below is a TedX talk from Dr Tom Peterson on "What is Science: How it Differs from Art, Law and Quackery":

Tom quoted Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard geologist, from the video (which provided the title for this article):

Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.

What follows is copied from a comment posted here at HotWhopper, from Tom Peterson of NOAA, co-author of the new paper in Science, and President of the WMO Commission for Climatology. The email exchange is about a subject of much recent discussion - the new Science paper, which I described here (with lots of links at the bottom for further reading).

Tom has subsequently confirmed the email exchange and kindly gave me permission to repost his comment as a blog article. Apart from remarking on Anthony's conspiracy ideation, there's not really anything more I need add. The exchange speaks for itself - and speaks volumes.

Email exchange between Anthony Watts and Tom Peterson

Dear Sou et al.,

I thought you might find an email exchange I had yesterday with Anthony Watts interesting. 16 hours ago I received this email from Anthony Watts:

NOAA global temperature paper prompts a torrent of paranoid conspiracies at WUWT

If you ever want to get overloaded with conspiracy ideation, just go to a denier blog. It's almost unbelievable that there really are people whose first thought, when they think "climate science" is: it's a hoax; scientists are faking it. Some might argue that it's just that gullible people who are fed lies are being deceived. I don't see it as that. It's that people go to disinformation sites because it's only there that they will find what they want to believe. The visitors to conspiracy theory sites are by nature prone to conspiracy ideation.

This article won't interest everyone. It documents the conspiratorial and illogical reaction to climate science that you read every day on anti-science blogs. This article is a record of some of the reaction to the new NOAA paper on global surface temperature. You can read the main article about Karl15, if you want to know what caused such a knee-jerk response of conspiratorial thinking in the deniosphere.

NOAA: No pause in the global surface temperature

Anthony Watts prepared the ground on Monday, with an article, in which he alleged fraud and skulduggery at NOAA. At the time I wrote the response, I didn't know what he was referring to (and neither did anyone at WUWT). Peter Thorne was awake to it, however, and gave me time to prepare for the upcoming "frenzy of denial". He was coyly referring to a new Science paper about global surface temperature.

Anthony Watts has since written another article, breaking the embargo on this new paper, which was published in ScienceXpress today. He rationalised his behaviour by saying that "multiple sources have sent me a press release and advance copies of a paper", meaning maybe two people.

The new paper is by a team of scientists, mostly from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The title is:

Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus

The paper describes an analysis of global surface temperature trends, using much more data from land stations in particular. It also includes corrections, particularly for time-related bias in sea surface temperatures. The main finding is that the trend in surface temperature this century is indistinguishable from that for the second half of last century. Global warming continues at the surface.

Update: I've added more links to blog articles elsewhere about this new paper.