Vincent Gray is back with more nuttery at the WUWTery

Anthony Watts is recycling his utter nutters.  This past week he's recycled, among others:

• Tim Ball - conspiracy theorist of the UN/Agenda21/NWO anti-semitic type
• Denier Don Easterbrook still trying to claim his 1999 global cooling prophecy has legs, with his dismal denier mate David Deming
• Coal company director, Viv Forbes telling lies about temperatures in Australia

Now he's recycling Vincent Gray and his greenhouse effect denial. (Archived here.)

Credit: Vincent Gray 
Source: Wikipedia

For someone who only this week got up on his high horse and advocated for "peer review" not "pal review", Anthony sure knows how to pick 'em.  All the above are utter nutters and if any of them tried to put together a "hypothesis" about climate and submit it to a journal, it would land in the waste paper bin or junk mail folder within a split second of the electrons hitting the journal editor's screen.

What does Vincent Gray write about today?  Well, he's decided to wax philosophical about scientific method.  (If his science were as bad as his fuzzy drawings, he wouldn't have had much success.  But he gave up science long ago to become a science denier.)

I won't bother with his long section on the various scientific methods.  I'll write instead about Vincent's strange notions of climate science.

"Climate Change Science"

Here is what Vincent thinks is the basis of what he calls "climate change science" - which is about the silliest concept I've ever heard.  He doesn't say how his notion of "climate change science" differs from "climate science".  Let's look at how he describes it:

Climate Change Science claims that any change in the climate is caused by human emissions of minor trace (“greenhouse”) gases in the atmosphere, notably carbon dioxide. The theory is in complete contrast to the assumptions behind the climate models used by weather forecasters. 

How many "wrongs" can you count in those two sentences?  The first one is plain silly.  You just need to look at a basic description of climate to know that there are any number of things that will bring about changes in climate - at the local as well as global level.  Anything from a slight shift in the orientation of earth to the sun to a volcanic eruption on the surface of Earth - and lots of other things besides - like changes in ocean circulation.

As for the second sentence, if Vincent did his homework he'd have known that the same physics applies to weather as climate.  In fact climate is just a description of expected weather at any location.  Many of the models that weather forecasters use are climate models, although some are designed for the purpose of short term weather forecasts.  One big difference is that weather forecasters continually update the models with observations (via data assimilation) for short term forecasts in particular, whereas models for climate analysis are initialised but thereafter most of them don't get updated with observations. (There are exceptions.)  Here is a good short description from Gavin Schmidt of NASA of the difference between modeling climate and forecasting weather:

Climate modeling is also fundamentally different from weather forecasting. Weather concerns an initial value problem: Given today's situation, what will tomorrow bring? Weather is chaotic; imperceptible differences in the initial state of the atmosphere lead to radically different conditions in a week or so. Climate is instead a boundary value problem — a statistical description of the mean state and variability of a system, not an individual path through phase space. Current climate models yield stable and nonchaotic climates, which implies that questions regarding the sensitivity of climate to, say, an increase in greenhouse gases are well posed and can be justifiably asked of the models. Conceivably, though, as more components — complicated biological systems and fully dynamic ice-sheets, for example — are incorporated, the range of possible feedbacks will increase, and chaotic climates might ensue.

Vincent goes on to describe what he thinks "climate change science" assumes.  I'll take them in turn.  Vincent's notion is in italics - I guess you'll be able to tell that much.

The climate is unchanged without the effects of greenhouse gases - Not true.  The science of climate not only assumes that different forces act on climate, to a large extent these days it can distinguish which forces are acting when.  For example, satellites measure total solar irradiance at the top of the atmosphere to determine how much the sun is affecting climate.  Even the effect of changes as small as the eleven year solar cycle can be measured.  Scientists can also work out how volcanic eruptions affect climate.  And they can work out how changes to the earth's surface, like changing snow, ice and vegetation, can affect reflection of short wave radiation and long wave radiation from the surface.  They can measure how changes in ocean circulation can bring about changes in atmospheric circulation - and work out the impact that has on climate.  Climate science is pretty good when you think about it.  Whereas Vincent Gray is a know-nothing denier.

The earth is flat - I think that most scientists realise that Earth isn't flat.  Perhaps some of Vincent Gray's chemistry colleagues believed Earth was flat, but climate scientists are cluey about such matters.

The Sun shines day and night with the same intensity - Actually, this is about right.  There are slight variations over an eleven year cycle.  But the sun does shine all the time at roughly the same intensity.  It hasn't stopped shining once since Earth was formed AFAIK. Vincent probably thinks that the sun goes out altogether at night time.  He'd be wrong.  It doesn't.  It's just that the bit of Earth that he's on doesn't always face the sun.  Who'd a thunk it?

Energy exchanges are almost all by radiation. Well I don't know what world Vincent inhabits but it's not the world of climate science and it's not WUWT either.  He's not seen this chart. HotWhopper readers have seen it more than once in the past week.  Even WUWT-ers have seen it or one similar.  I guess Vincent doesn't read WUWT.  Look at the chart and see all the different ways energy is exchanged.  And that's just the surface and the top and bottom of the atmosphere.  In addition to that there are exchanges of energy within the ocean that affect climate.  Let's see - radiation, convection, conduction, evaporation and condensation - all sorts of energy exchanges.

Figure 2.11: Global mean energy budget under present day climate conditions. Numbers state magnitudes of the individual energy fluxes in W/m2, adjusted within their uncertainty ranges to close the energy budgets. Numbers in parentheses attached to the energy fluxes cover the range of values in line with observational constraints. Figure adapted from Wild et al. (2013). Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 page 2-127

Energy exchanges are “balanced”. - I get the feeling that Vincent Gray doesn't accept the notion of the conservation of energy or the laws of thermodynamics.  Climate scientists do.

Energy exchanges are instantaneous. - I have no idea what is going on in that head of Vincent Gray's? If energy is exchanged it's exchanged in that same instant as it's exchanged.  Can someone help me out here? Perhaps he is talking about kinetic and potential energy.

No work is done on the system. - again - I have no idea what Vincent Gray is referring to here. Is he talking about forces acting on earth from space or work within the system like, say, wind or ocean currents?

“Natural” climate properties are not only merely “variable” but are also negligible. This is an odd one, too.  What does he mean by "climate properties"?  What does he mean by "natural"? Only then can we consider what is or is not negligible.  There would be lots of little things happening within the earth system that are not "negligible" but are "natural".  For example, the microphysics of clouds operates at a much smaller dimension than your typical climate model, but it's not negligible. If it were then climate scientists wouldn't bother factoring these effects in - but they do.


Now Vincent goes on to say:

There is no reason in principle why such an unlikely theory could not be correct. Planck’s Quantum theory was an example of a theory which was implausible and completely at odds with existing theories of energy transfer, which Planck himself could hardly believe. It has succeeded because it has been comprehensively validated.

I'm not surprised he regards his view of "climate change science" as being unlikely.  Climate scientists would laugh him out of the room if he put his notions to them.

Projections should be validated against future observations!

Vincent has written a lot more than the above, but I'll not waste my time on most of it for reasons that should by now be obvious.  I'll leave you with him bemoaning one aspect of climate science and let you ponder his complaint.

Climate Change models do not make forecasts but merely projections which depend on the plausibility of the model parameters and of the futures scenario details. These projections have never been validated by comparison with a full range of future observations. 

Huh? We wouldn't need models if we had future observations, now, would we!

Do I need to say more?

From the WUWT comments

Most of the fake sceptics don't have a problem with Vincent's twaddle. (Archived here.)


Bob Layson gets into the philosophical spirit of it all and says:

January 21, 2014 at 5:45 am
To be biased is to be. And to be human is to err. Yet bias and error do no harm if a free play of conjectures and open testing, maybe to destruction, of our conjectures is welcomed and facilitated.

A bigot is not someone forthright and wrong but someone who, even if correct, will not seek criticism and counter-argument and dismisses it when it is provided.

Jim Cripwell's mind is boggled by science and he says:

January 21, 2014 at 5:51 am
When I started looking into CAGW about 10 years ago, what Dr. Grey has written was blindingly obvious to me. The way I put it was that you cannot do controlled experiments on the earth’s atmosphere. This must have been obvious to people with names like Houghton and Watson, yet the FAR was still published, making it little more than a hoax. But even in 2013 we have a scientist of the calibre of Lord Reese going out in public and telling “porkies” about CAGW.

http://theconversation.com/astronomer-royal-on-science-environment-and-the-future-18162

The mind boggles.

mib8 is frustrated and mistakenly thinks that climate science hypotheses are not refutable.  In fact people have refuted some of the various hypotheses.  One could also refute the theories if one came up with sufficient evidence and a plausible explanation. mib8 says (extract):

January 21, 2014 at 6:19 am
...The trouble with the climate “scientists” and Freudians and neo-Keynesians, is that their hypotheses are not refutable. No matter what happens, no matter how much the results contradict their predictions, they disingenuously claim that the results support their predictions — at times by modifying and elaborating those predictions after the fact....

Does Anthony Watts know the difference between weather and climate?

Today Anthony Watts has promoted another article (archived here) by Vincent Gray, who took up science denial in a big way six or so years ago when he was 84 years old.  Vincent Gray is a climate crank. He's not a climate scientist. He founded the anti-science organisation the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (which has received funding from the Heartland Institute).  (The title is misleading.  The organisation doesn't do any climate science research it's one of those disinformation propaganda setups that rejects climate science.)

I've written about Vincent Gray before, here and here and here.

Since Anthony Watts prides himself on his past career as a weather announcer on television, I'm surprised that he promotes articles like this one (archived here).  It makes you wonder if Anthony Watts knows the difference between weather and climate.  Else why would he publish this sort of nonsense. Vincent writes, for example, in talking about short term weather forecasts that:

It should be noticed that nowhere in this effective system is there any mention of carbon dioxide or of “greenhouse gases” They have no place in a scientific study of the climate. Most meteorological organisations do not even bother to measure carbon dioxide over land territories

Why would short term weather forecasts allude to CO2?

On the other hand, to imply that meteorological organisations don't "bother to measure carbon dioxide over land territories" is wrong.

In Australia two meteorological organisations jointly monitor CO2, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research.  In the USA NOAA (a weather forecasting agency among other things) is a key player in the CCCG cooperative air sampling network, which coordinates a global network of observations sites for monitoring greenhouse gases etc, with information from different organisations around the world, including those responsible for meteorological sciences and weather forecasting and recording.

Vincent is a nutter.  As an example, he makes the following ridiculous claim:

The climate models favoured by “Climate Change” “scientists” completely ignore the scientific discoveries of genuine climate scientists since time immerorial (sic). They promote completely different computer models based on the following absurd principles
· The earth can be considered flat
· The sun has a constant intensity, both day and night.
· All energy exchanges are by radiation
· Energy entering the earth equals that leaving
· All change is caused by changes in:greenhouse gases
· Natural influences are merely :”variable”

None of the above is true, needless to say.  Vincent would know even less than he does about climate and weather if not for climate scientists.  Vincent finishes with this word of wisdom:

If you want to know about climate science switch on or read about the weather forecast.

Like I said - Vincent Gray is a climate crank.

I don't know why Anthony Watts promotes greenhouse effect deniers like Tim Ball or cranks like Vincent Gray and Christopher Monckton.  May he needs them to broaden his audience to include the wide spectrum of science deniers - from those who specialise in climate science denial to those who are raving mad conspiracy nutters of a more general nature.


By the way, Vincent refers his readers to Wikipedia, from which he nabbed some of the more coherent sentences in his article.

Serial disinformer Vincent Gray flounders in rising seas at WUWT

Anthony Watts, denialist blogger at wattsupwiththat.com has copied and pasted another disinformation article, this time by Vincent Gray from New Zealand (archived here).  Vincent Gray is writing at WUWT about sea level and gets lots and lots wrong.  Which is to be expected.  Vincent Gray has devoted the past few years to his new career of climate science disinformer.

Anthony Watts seems to think he should be shown respect because he's getting very old.  Vincent Gray is a climate science denier going back a few years now.  He founded the science-disinformation organisation "New Zealand Climate Science Coalition" back in April 2006 back when he was a sprightly 84 year old. Here is a bit of background on him from Wikipedia:

Credit: Vincent Gray
Source: Wikipedia

Vincent R. Gray (born 1922, London) is a New Zealand-based chemist, and a founder of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.

Gray has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Cambridge University after studies on incendiary bomb fluids made from aluminium soaps. He has had a long scientific career in the UK, France, Canada and China working on petroleum, plastics, gelatin, timber, paint, adhesives and adhesion, coal, and building materials with well over 100 scientific and technical articles, patents and chapters in books. In New Zealand, he was the first Director of Building Research and later, Chief Chemist of the Coal Research Association.[1][2] He has also published many articles and reports, seven in peer-reviewed journals. 

Some bits Vincent Gray got right...

What does Vincent say that's wrong?  It would take a lot less space to write about what he said that was right.  Here's an example of what he got right:

Chapter 13 of the IPCC 5th WGI Report claims that sea level will rise by an amount between 0.26 to 0.97 metres by 2100 according to which of their new scenarios actually happens

Vincent has given numbers from bottom of the "likely" range of the highest mitigation scenario, RCP2.6, to the top of the "likely" range of the no mitigation scenario, RCP8.5.  This is discussed on page 13-47 of the AR5 WG1 report.  The "likely" ranges are given as 0.4 metres for RCP2.6 and 0.73m for RCP8.5.  So even if we manage to reverse global warming this century (RCP2.6), seas will continue to rise as the earth system moves towards a new equilibrium.

Vincent goes through a few basics by way of introduction.  He is correct that for most of us land-dwelling organisms, it's the height of the sea relative to the land that's of most interest.  But that's about as far as "correct" goes in Vincent's article.

Vincent refers to the rather nice map from the UK's Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL).  You can click on the map to see the local sea level changes for different coastal locations as measured by tide gauges.  PSMSL recommends only using RLR (Revised Local Reference) data for time series.

So Vincent Gray got a couple of things right...but it's not long before he gets it horribly wrong.

Sea level is rising around the world

I won't go through everything that Vincent Gray wrote.  I'll just select a few of his "wrongs".  Vincent put up Figure 13.23 from page 13-117 of the IPCC report.  I took my own snapshot as below.  Click to see the larger version:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 page 13-117

Figure 13.23: Observed and projected relative net sea level change (compare Figure 13.20) near nine representative coastal locations for which long tide-gauge measurements are available. The observed in situ relative sea level records from tide gauges (since 1970) are plotted in yellow, and the satellite record (since 1993) is provided as purple lines. The projected range from 21 CMIP5 RCP4.5 scenario runs (90% uncertainty) is shown by the shaded region for the period 2006–2100, with the bold line showing the ensemble mean. Colored lines represent three individual climate model realizations drawn randomly from three different climate models used in the ensemble. Station locations of tide gauges are: (a) San Francisco: 37.8°N, 122.5°W; (b) New York: 40.7°N, 74.0°W; (c) Ijmuiden: 52.5°N, 4.6°E; (d) Haldia: 22.0°N, 88.1°E; (e) Kanmen, China: 28.1°N, 121.3°E; (f) Brest: 48.4°N, 4.5°W; (g) Mar del Plata, Argentina: 38.0°S, 57.5°W; (h) Fremantle: 32.1°S, 115.7°E; (i) Pago Pago: 14.3°S, 170.7°W. Vertical bars at the right sides of each panel represent the ensemble mean and ensemble spread (5–95%) of the likely (medium confidence) sea level change at each respective location at the year 2100 inferred from the four RCPs 2.6 (dark blue), 4.5 (light blue), 6.0 (yellow), and 8.5 (red).

Vincent makes the claim in relation to the above that:

Every one of these actual measured sea levels have shown no sign of change for at least ten years, yet all the projections claim that this settled behaviour will suddenly change to an upwards level of around half a metre by the end of the century.

No sign of change for at least ten years, he claims.  He's wrong!

Being naturally skeptical of people who have a history of lying, I checked.

Here are charts from the source that Vincent seems to have recommended, PSMSL.  I've managed to plot all but one of the locations he referred to when he said that seas weren't rising.  I couldn't find a recent series for "Bay of Bengal".  I'll leave it to you to decide just how many of the "every one" Vincent got woefully wrong.  As always, you can click the animated image for a larger view.

Data Source: PSMSL

Why Vincent decides on ten years to make a judgement is anyone's guess.  But even looking at a mere ten years of data there are only three of the above charts that Vincent chose for which it could be argued there is no perceptible rise since 2002.  For some of them the recent rise is very large.  And in all of them the seas are rising inexorably over time.

The temperature rise will be greatest in the Arctic

Vincent writes the contrary:

All the models assume that any temperature rise will be least at the poles and greatest at the tropics because the water vapour feedback is lower at the poles..They do not mention Antarctica where the ice is currently increasing

He's got this one back to front.  Models don't "assume", they project.  Models don't indicate that the temperature rise will be greatest at the tropics, they indicate that the temperature will rise most in the Arctic, which is what has been happening.  Here is how the IPCC projects temperature to change in different parts of the world as the world heats up.

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 14 page 14-144

FAQ 14.1, Figure 1: Projected 21st century changes in annual mean and annual extremes (over land) of surface air temperature and precipitation: a) mean surface temperature per °C of global mean change

The chart above indicates that most of the Arctic region will heat up by two degrees or more for every one degree increase in global average surface temperature - except for an area just south of Greenland. The land will heat up more quickly than the oceans.  The Antarctic will rise just a tad more quickly than the average surface temperature - and land areas in the tropics will heat up more than average, but not as much as the Arctic.

You'll have noticed that he got it wrong  about the Antarctic, too.  Sea ice in the Antarctic hit a record high this winter but sea ice doesn't affect sea level.  And on the continent ice is melting.  There is a net loss. Melting ice in Antarctica is estimated to be adding 0.59 ± 0.20 millimeter a year to global sea level. Any accumulation in the east is more than offset by the melting in the west and on the peninsula.

No measurements?

Vincent writes:

There are no measurements of temperatures on ice anywhere, on ice caps, oceans or glaciers. In all cases there are other influences.on their behaviour. In the Arctic it is the temperature of the ocean and the behaviour of the ocean oscillations.

I don't know what he's going on about here.  What does he mean by saying there are no temperature readings or records on ice or in the oceans.  Of course there are.  Denier Don Easterbrook will be very upset with him for telling that lie!

The temperature of the ocean influences temperatures on land in lots of places.  Extra hot oceans are being blamed for Australia's run of broken heat records over the past year.  Thing is, what's causing the oceans to get warmer?  It's all those extra greenhouse gases!

The ice in the Arctic is "growing" because it's winter, dummy!

Vincent writes:

The ice in the Arctic is beginning to grow now

Of course it is.  The Arctic is heading for winter.  But ice in the Arctic is on a death spiral.  Even science deniers should know that:

Getting back to sea level projections

Sea level projections rely on estimates of how quickly the ice sheets in Antarctica and the Arctic will melt.  And how quickly glaciers all around the world will melt.  But particularly the ice sheets on Greenland and in Western Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula.  If the ice sheets melt faster than expected then seas will rise more quickly, needless to say.  As it is, the ice will melt no matter what we do and the sea is going to rise a lot more than half a metre in the next few centuries.  What we can control is how much hotter the earth will get, which will determine to some extent how fast these ice sheets melt and probably how much of them melt.

The IPCC report states on page 13-108 that:

The total sea level commitment after 2000 years is quasi-linear with a slope of 2.3m °C^–1.

So over millenia, seas are expected to rise more than ten metres if the global surface temperature rises by 4.5°C.  And that sort of temperature rise is definitely on the cards the way we're going.

If all the ice were to melt, seas would rise about 70 meters - but that's over thousands of years, not decades. However seas may well rise by more than a couple of meters sometime in the next couple of hundred years - if not sooner then later.  This will spell a lot of trouble.  Not just for people who live on the coast but for the world as a whole.

From the WUWT comments

The comments are archived here with the main article.

Go Home is a lateral thinker and says:

October 30, 2013 at 8:00 pm
Once the seas get too high, we just need to start sequestering water in the antarctic. Problem solved. Probably cheaper than trying to slow the oceans rise by cutting co2.

Mike Smith is not at all sceptical about what Vincent writes and says:

October 30, 2013 at 7:05 pm
The models say the sea levels are rising. So, where’s the missing water? Hiding in the deep ocean?

Lyle's comment could be a Poe:

October 30, 2013 at 6:31 pm
Seems to me that measuring sea level a lot like measuring your altitude while jumping on a trampoline. A host of factors come into play in addition to those mentioned such as volcanoes on land, volcanoes at sea, erosion and kids skipping rocks

Hockey Schtick is a conspiracy theorist (as if you couldn't tell from the cyber-name) and writes (excerpt):

October 30, 2013 at 6:14 pm
No problem, just “upjust” the data:
Satellite sea level data has been “adjusted” upward by 34% over past 9 years alone

Mike is battling to sublimate his scepticism, but merely "thinks" without checking so his scepticism loses.  He says he "agrees with the overall thrust":

October 30, 2013 at 9:29 pm
The author appears to be making the case that we should only look at recent tide data (the last ten years) as this is the most accurate and coincidentally agrees with his point that CAGW is overblown. Since global temperatures have been static for 17 years it would be expected that thermal expansion of the ocean would also tend to become static over the last 17 years (with some lag). This seems to be a somewhat circular argument not withstanding the overarching difficulties of obtaining accurate data in the first place. I agree with the overall thrust of the piece but the evidence as presented doesn’t really support it one way or the other.

Vincent Gray is Slaying Dragons Again

Anthony Watts, who runs an anti-science, scientist-bashing blog (WUWT) likes Vincent Gray for some reason.  Gray used to be a chemist and has changed his profession to that of science denier.  I've already written about his physics-defying ideas.

Anthony Watts has favoured this dragon slayer-style denier with another appearance.  I won't go into too much detail.  Vincent doesn't either, although he writes a lot of words.

What it boils down to is this.

They are so different that... except they aren't

Vincent Gray claims that UAH temperature data set is so different to the surface based data sets that .... well he slips by that one and doesn't finish the thought.  (Gray also lies about the fact that the UAH record was changed after some rather large errors were found by outside investigators.)  Anyway, after spending seven paragraphs arguing that the records are "different" he suddenly stops mid-stream and doesn't finish the thought.  He moves away and decides to compare a tiny subset of UAH record with CMIP5 models.  Let's see why he does that:

Oh - it's because UAH lines up so well with the surface-based record.  Despite the fact they aren't measuring exactly the same thing, the trends are virtually identical. UAH has greater variation than the surface record and I don't know why that is, but someone might be able to give a technical explanation.  Whatever, the signal is almost identical even though UAH is noisier.

They are supposedly perfect but oh so different!

Seeing that Vincent Gray has spent umpteen paragraphs extolling the satellite data, let's compare UAH and RSS, the two main satellite records just for kicks.  They are what Vincent Gray seems to regard as infallible so they should be identical, right?

Ha - there is a much bigger difference between UAH and RSS than there is between UAH and GISTemp.  (Perhaps someone can tell me if the base years are different.  I understood them to be the same but you wouldn't know it, would you.)  Someone needs to tell Vincent Gray to stop making an ass of himself.

Well, what about this...

Okay, so next Vincent Gray argues that because John Christy claims there are differences between the mid-tropospheric record of combined satellite and radiosonde data in the tropics and a suite of CMIP5 model runs, that means that all surface based records are wrong.

But hang on - Vincent has stopped comparing UAH global records with surface based global records.  In fact he's stopped looking at global surface temperature altogether.  In fact he's also stopped considering UAH records because what he's talking about includes other data sets.  Now he's talking about the temperature up in the mid-troposphere in just the tropics, averaged over some widely disparate record sets.  Neat trick, Vincent.  And it's yet to be shown that poses a huge problem at all or if there are differences, then whether it's the data or the models.

Vincent Gray the Dragon Slayer

So having been struck out there, he moves to more comfortable ground for him.  He's found a mate called Murry Salby (see Wotts blog and SkepticalScience) who thinks that burning hydrocarbon doesn't produce carbon dioxide or some such nonsense.  And to think the guy used to know some basic science.

Maybe working with coal has addled Vincent Gray's brain.  Although he does give himself an out by finishing up with this:

All the same, this material from Salby needs to be properly documented before it could be considered seriously.

Indeed it does.  But Salby has been trying for a long time to get his nutty ideas published.  Maybe he'll end up getting his paper accepted by the dog astrology journal, if he's "lucky".

Anthony Watts Promotes Another Greenhouse Effect Denier...

Anthony Watts has made a big to-do about banning Dragon Slayers from WUWT on the grounds they deny the greenhouse effect. However many of his guest posters also deny the greenhouse effect, so I can't see why he makes such a fuss about the Dragon Slayers.

Just yesterday Anthony Watts published an article by Vincent Gray denying the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.  Not only that, as we'll see, Vincent Gray denies not only the greenhouse effect, he also denies that the sun can warm the world and he denies the laws of physics.

Gray starts with this:

There are two gases in the earth’s atmosphere without which living organisms could not exist.

Oxygen is the most abundant, 21% by volume, but without carbon dioxide, which is currently only about 0.04 percent (400ppm) by volume, both the oxygen itself, and most living organisms on earth could not exist at all.

What about nitrogen?

I don't know why Gray leaves out nitrogen, which is the bulk of the atmosphere.  Without nitrogen "most living organisms on earth could not exist at all" either.  Humans are not just messing with the carbon cycle, we're also messing with the nitrogen cycle. (Click to enlarge.)

Source: Wikipedia

The Great Oxygenation Event

Gray also gets his biology somewhat confused, writing:

This (increase in atmospheric oxygen) happened when the more complex of the two living cells (called “eukaryote”) evolved a process called a “chloroplast” some 3 billion years ago, which utilized a chemical called chlorophyll to capture energy from the sun and convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a range of chemical compounds and structural polymers by photosynthesis.

Source: Nature (click to enlarge)

He doesn't mention the prokaryotes photosynthesising.  And photosynthesising eukaryotes have an organelle (not a process) called a chloroplast which contains chlorophyll pigments.  As D.E. Canfield writes in 2005, in his paper The Early History of Atmospheric Oxygen: Homage to Robert M. Garrels:

The evolution of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria was arguably the most significant event in the history of life after the evolution of life itself.

Although Gray's knowledge of biology and paleobiology is outdated at best, that's by the way.  He's sloppy when he writes about how earth's atmosphere became oxygen rich.  To read more about the oxygenation of early Earth, read Canfield, and Bekker et al (2004) or look up the Great Oxygenation Event.  Before that occurred there was some oxygen in the atmosphere as reported by Anbar et al (2007) in Science.

How Gray tries to deceive

Moving along.  Gray put up a chart that is cobbled together by some unnamed person purportedly from material by scientists like Prof. William Ruddiman.  Gray employs the sort of deception practiced by others on WUWT like Don Easterbrook.  Unlike Gray, Ruddiman knows very well that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and acts as a 'control knob' on Earth's climate.  In fact Ruddiman argues that anthropogenic climate change began thousands of years ago.

Milankovitch -> Icey <-> CO2 <-> Warmer <-Milankovitch

Here is a paper by Ruddiman in which he writes about CO2 and glaciation and the effect each has on the other.  I've picked out two sections from the closing summary:

In the hypothesis presented here, intervals of ice-sheet growth during the last 2.7 million years share two characteristics: (1) insolation forcing of linear (“Milankovitch”) icevolume responses at the tilt and precession cycles; and (2) amplification of the forced 41 000-year ice response by CO2 feedback. The growth of 41 000-year ice sheets prior to 0.9 million years ago can be explained by CO2-feedback amplification of the forced ice response to changes in tilt. After 0.9 million years ago, similar episodes of CO2-amplified ice growth continued at 41 000-year intervals, but polar cooling suppressed ice ablation during subsequent intervals. ...

...The CO2 feedback hypothesis can explain why the northern and southern hemispheres responded nearly in phase on terminations (Broecker and Denton, 1989). Near the ice sheets, changes in ice-sheet size set the climatic tempo. Far from the ice sheets, most climatic responses were strongly affected by an atmospheric CO2 signal that was largely controlled by (and in phase with) the northern ice sheets. As a result, most global climatic signals were ice-driven and nearly synchronous.  An exception is the tropics, where summer insolation forcing produced very strong monsoon responses that were largely independent of northern ice (Kutzbach, 1981).

Just, lookey here.  This is a more accurate diagram than Gray's, showing the state of the science in 2007, from the IPCC report.  Looks like a correlation after all.

It's not the sun?

Gray ignores all the evidence and contradicts the author of the material he 'cites' and writes:

It will be seen that there is no correlation whatsoever between carbon dioxide concentration and the temperature at the earth’s surface.

Wrong Mr Gray, as can be seen in the diagram above.  And apart from his suspect cobbled drawings, Gray doesn't consider the sun.  Funny that.  One minute deniers will shout "it's the Sun" (when they aren't shouting "it's insects").  Now Gray ignores the faint sun in early times altogether.

If you're wondering how early earth kept warm, when the sun was much more faint, here are a couple of papers from Science in January this year.  The first from Robin Wordsworth and Raymond Pierrehumbert and the second from James Kasting.

Gray says for most of the Holocene we had a "Dead World"...

Gray then writes the silliest thing:

"The idea promulgated by the IPCC that the energy received from the sun is instantly “balanced” by an equal amount returned to space, implies a dead world..."

Really?  First of all, the whole reason for the IPCC being established is that there is more incoming energy than outgoing and the world is getting hotter.  We've kicked the system out of 'balance'.  Nowhere does the IPCC say what Gray wrote.  It's silly.  He's just making it up.  He's also forgotten all he ever knew about energy and physics.

During the Holocene there was a pretty good balance between incoming and outgoing energy.  That's what happens. That's why the climate didn't change all that much until recently. I wouldn't describe the Holocene as a "dead world".  Would you?  When there are large imbalances on the other hand, then much life can die - like in the various extinction events.

The system seeks balance, otherwise earth would have got out of kilter long ago.  The earth had got to a nice equilibrium state where the incoming energy was matched with outgoing energy.  Now the push comes because CO2 is forcing earth to retain more of that incoming energy.  Because of the extra CO2, energy is taking too long to escape and in the meantime, the sun keeps sending us more energy.  Over time, earth will get to a new energy equilibrium where outgoing radiation will once more balance with incoming radiation and earth will stop heating up.  It will be hotter than it is now, though.

The extent of Vincent Gray's denial

To recap, Vincent Gray denies:

• the greenhouse effect 
• that the sun can warm the world (by denying that the faint sun didn't warm the earth as much) and 
• the laws of physics (that the earth will seek to balance incoming energy with outgoing energy).

Deceiver Gray is just another Disinformation Peddler

Is Vincent Gray merely ignorant? No, given his political lobbying efforts he's a deliberate deceiver, misrepresenting the science.  It's not as if he doesn't have a science background himself.  He has the brains and education to know better so the only explanation is that he's intent on spending his few remaining years on earth making it worse for people not yet born.

As for Anthony Watts accepting the greenhouse effect.  Yes he does but he continues to publish articles like this one from Gray that deny it.