The social cost of carbon is positive, admits Anthony Watts

Prickly Pear Qld 1930s.
Wikipedia.

At last Anthony Watts admits that there is a social cost of carbon (archived here). He doesn't say what it is, he's not a climate economist after all but at least he admits it. His headline was: "The Social “Cost” of Carbon is Positive".  Unfortunately the article he posted, by ex-coal director Viv Forbes, doesn't discuss the social cost.

Viv Forbes is a climate disinformer from Australia. He's no longer a director of Stanmore Coal, but he used to be. As he's done before, his article is in the form of a letter to some unnamed editor of an unnamed publication. I guess it's to the "editor" of WUWT.

Viv lists "social benefits" of burning fossil fuels in the following terms:

Greens seem unaware that “carbon” coming from man-made CO2 is beneficial plant food supporting all life on Earth including polar bears, cane toads, prickly pear, rain forests and wheat.

No censoring of ice age cometh articles at WUWT

Within hours of Anthony Watts talking about legitimacy, openness and honesty on his blog, he posted an utter rubbish "ice age cometh" article from Stanmore Coal director Viv Forbes (archived here). No openness about Viv's coal connections. Anthony might need more time to "research and write", however by promoting Viv's article he demonstrates that research and writing count for little at WUWT.

Viv claims "it's the sun", though he acknowledges there are also Milankovitch cycles. After dismissing decades of rapid warming as "weather ripples and waves", he wrote:

In the medium term, Earth temperature trends are influenced by variations in solar activities as evidenced by sun-spot cycles. These variations affect solar intensity, cosmic rays, clouds and Earth temperature, causing medium-term climatic events like the Little Ice Age and the Modern Warming. There are persuasive signs that recent solar activity has peaked. So we can expect cooler weather soon.

Curiously, immediately after that paragraph, there was a garish picture showing how the current waning solar cycle was considerable less strong than the previous one, which was also less strong than the one before it, yet global mean surface temperature is at record high levels.

Does conspiracy theorists' paradise, WUWT, beat Judith Curry's denier heaven?

Not wanting to be outdone by Judith Curry's recent demonstration of her blog as denier heaven, Anthony Watts decides to prove that his blog is conspiracy theorists' paradise. (A lot more fodder for Professor Lewandowsky.)

In a wonderful display of paranoia, Anthony Watts has posted another article (archived here) by Stanmore Coal director, Viv Forbes.

Viv Forbes at WUWT takes a shot at Glencore and Tony Abbott

Viv Forbes is lashing out again. This time he's not lashing out at environmentalists so much as Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott and a rival global mining company Glencore. Glencore merged with Xstrata a while back and bought it out in May last year.

Although WUWT doesn't declare the fact, Viv Forbes is a director of another mining company, Stanmore Coal. Both Glencore and Stanmore have operations in Queensland.

That's just by way of background. What Viv Forbes is complaining about is that:

• Australia's car manufacturing industry is no longer - for which Tony Abbott has been blamed, though Viv Forbes doesn't go so far as to mention his name;
• Glencore is sticking with the decision of Xstrata to shut down the copper smelting operations at Mt Isa and its refining operations in Townsville. Viv doesn't approve of Glencore's decision;
• Exploration companies aren't looking for oil in enough places in Australia, or so Viv says.

Viv has somehow linked these three items to the second World War and what he calls "foolish green energy policies and the suicidal war on carbon fuels". He might even be yearning for another war, it's hard to tell. I expect what he's really saying is that governments should bail out car manufacturers and grant huge subsidies to prop up foreign-owned mining operations in Australia.

The links he's made in his article are tenuous at best. But what the heck, anything to have a go at nasty governments (even if they are of your own choosing) and environmental sustainability. Who needs a Tony Abbott or a planet after all, when you've got coal to sell?

You can read his rant here, if you're interested.  (You can also see here and here and here for previous silliness, or type his name in the search bar above)

Weekend Denier Weirdness: How disinformers cope with the stress of climate change

I like summer

There hasn't been much silly stuff in the past couple of days. Or I should say that the silly stuff is too lame even for HotWhopper. Like a content-free letter to the WUWT editor from coal company director Viv Forbes, whose letter can be summed up as: "Summer is nice and warm, and I hate winter therefore global warming is good and anyway an ice age cometh."

Read on for the latest weekend psychobabble from Anthony Watts and Judith Curry. Judith Curry claims that almost all her professional colleagues in climate science (probably 90% or more of the thousands of climate scientists doing research today) are psychologically aberrant, have a God complex and suffer paranoia.

Viv Forbes gets a response to his silly letter to some editor at WUWT

Today Anthony Watts posted a silly substance-free "letter to the Editor" by director of Stanmore Coal Viv Forbes. I've archived here the WUWT article. I couldn't see that any editor, other than the WUWT editor, received or posted the letter. (Though some editors are not at all discerning when it comes to publishing letters.)

Anyway, the editor at WUWT saw fit to post it. And it drew a response from James Abbott, which the WUWT mods allowed through the WUWT firewall. (The WUWT firewall is intended to filter out any comments from people who accept science. Every now and then a normal person will slip through the cracks.)

Below is Viv's letter and I've interspersed the response from James Abbott, and added a few of my own. Viv's nonsense is in blue italics, James responses are in black bold.

Viv Forbes is caught red handed again at WUWT.

Viv Forbes is a director of a coal company in Australia. He has been caught red-handed telling fibs at WUWT in the past and he's at it again.

This time he's making up stuff about sea levels. (Anthony Watts doesn't accept the fact that seas will rise as the ice melts so he often puts up articles protesting rising seas.)

Viv starts off with a classic denier-ism:

Sea levels have been rising and falling without any help from humans for as long as Earth’s oceans have existed.

That's a variation of "the climate is always changing".  He then comes out as a fully-fledged denier, writing:

Currently the world’s oceans are rising at about 1mm per year, which has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945. Amongst all the factors moving the restless sea, man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously an insignificant player. 

That's more than denial - with his "obviously an insignificant player". It includes a lie. Seas are currently rising at 3.2 mm a year, not 1 mm a year. This is what is happening to sea level, from the CU Sea Level Research Group of the University of Colorado:

If seas continued to rise at 3.2 mm a year it would give many of us time to adjust.  They won't though, will they. Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets are melting. They'll continue to melt and seas are going to rise a lot more in the future. In the not too distant future, probably while some people reading this are still alive, seas are going to rise much more quickly. By the end of this century seas could be anything from one to two metres higher than they are now. That's more than six feet for the metrically-challenged. And it won't happen evenly. Some decades could see a rapid rise in sea level, others not so much or none at all. It won't happen evenly everywhere at the same time either. Around the USA, for example, the melting of West Antarctica will cause a greater rise in sea level than in some other parts of the world.

From the WUWT comments

Some of the deniers aren't buying it. Greg Goodman, a regular at WUWT says:

June 17, 2014 at 10:30 pm
Viv Forbes “Currently the world’s oceans are rising at about 1mm per year, which has not changed much with the great industrialisation since 1945. Amongst all the factors moving the restless sea, man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously an insignificant player.”

Well the accepted figure seems to be closer to 3mm/y so a bland assertion of “about 1mm per year” without any reference or uncertainty estimation is meaningless.

“not changed much” , “….obviously an insignificant player.”

Is that any better than an alarmists saying ” sea level has rise a lot, currently rising about 10mm/y. Man’s production of carbon dioxide is obviously a significant player.”

This is the sort of unfounded commentary that rightly draws criticism of being “anti-science” and justifies comments of being “in denial”.

” climate alarmists say we should be scared to death by the threat of seas rising gently at 1mm PER YEAR.”

Sorry that is an out and out lie. It is non factual and you know it is non factual. It is also totally unsubstantiated. Provide one quote from anyone to back that up. No one is saying we should “scared to death” about 1mm/y. Is anyone but Viv Forbes even suggesting such a figure? He appears to have just made it up.

Why Anthony chose to publish this I can not understand. It does nothing but justify those who would criticise WUWT and sceptics in general.

Hector Pascal says:

June 18, 2014 at 12:08 am
You have to be very cautious using historical examples of sea level change from tectonically active areas such as the Mediterranean. Vertical movements can be very large and rapid. I am familiar with and have visited the coast (mountainous/rias) in closest proximity to the Tohoku earthquake epicentre. Harbour quays that previously had about a metre of freeboard were awash. That’s just one event.

Also, areas responding to ice sheet melting are still going up, and areas peripheral to the ice sheets are still going down as the mantle material flows back to where it was displaced from. For example, in the UK, land north of a line going approximately from the Humber to the Severn is rising, and land south of that line is sinking. 

Viv Forbes, coal company director, sez it's not really hot down under (when it is!)

Viv Forbes, a coal company director from Australia, has posted another article at WUWT (archived here).  He put up a map of Australia with a whole bunch of record high temperatures in different years. I think he was trying to argue that Australia's Angry Summer wasn't "unprecedented".  He'd have been wrong.  It was unprecedented in all sorts of ways. What he wrote was:

No doubt we will hear how the current heatwaves in Australia are “unprecedented” and evidence of dangerous man-made global warming.

They are neither “global” nor “unprecedented”.

Okay, so Viv wasn't talking about last summer, he was pre-empting any discussion about this summer.  (Last summer would be hard to beat in terms of heat records.  It's already been documented that last year's summer was "unprecedented".)  As for not being global - of course not.  It's winter up north.  You can't expect heat waves in winter. But first, let's look at the big flaw in his argument.

Hot somewhere some time isn't the same as hot everywhere at the same time

Viv put up a gaily coloured chart modeled on the chart from the then Climate Commission (which re-emerged as the Climate Council after the Abbott Government shut it down).  The difference was that the Climate Commission chart was for a single summer and showed the record heat right across the continent.  Viv's chart by contrast, showed record temperatures at single locations for particular years - which varied from 1912 through to 2009.

Look at the difference in this animated comparison.  The denier chart has to span 97 years to show hot records in a lot of different single locations at different times.  Australia's Angry Summer spanned just 90 days in the summer of 2012-13:

Viv Forbes thinks WUWT readers are pretty dumb.  I don't blame him for thinking this.  They may excel intellectually in other subjects but when it comes to weather and climate they are very dumb.

HotWhopper readers by contrast know very well that you can have a record heat wave across a continent without breaking a heat record in any single locality.  That's because if it's hot everywhere the the whole continent is hot (by definition).  You don't have to break hot records anywhere to be hot everywhere all at the same time.

However even if there's a heat record broken in one place at any one time, it can be cool elsewhere.  So the continent as a whole may not be excessively hot.  (I wrote that bit for the benefit of anyone who's strayed here from WUWT.  By visiting WUWT, they could easily have lost several IQ points and I want to help recover them.  If you need it elaborated further I've explained it with charts and numbers in this article.)

Look at this map of Australia and you'll see what I mean. (As always, click to enlarge).

Source: BoM

Now compare the above with our Angry Summer of 2013 and notice just how widespread that heat wave was, plus the fact it lasted a couple of weeks:

Viv goes on to write about another heat wave.  That one was back in 1896, so it was before Australia-wide records maintained by BoM.  However look at what he wrote:

In the great heatwave of 1896, with nearly 200 deaths, the temperature at Bourke did not fall below 45.6 degC for six weeks, and the maximum was 53.3 degC. Bushfires raged throughout NSW and 66 people perished in the heat.

In 1897, Perth had an 18 day heatwave with a record of 43.3 degC. Other heatwaves were reported at Winton, 1891, Melbourne 1892, Boulia 1901, Sydney 1903, Perth 1906 and so on.

Yes, there have been heat waves in the past in Australia.  However he's lying about temperatures at Bourke - see FrankD's comment below. And do you see what else he's done?  Viv is trying to argue that Australia has been hotter in the past.  All he's actually shown was in different years, different parts of Australia had heat waves.  That's different to what we have been seeing in recent years.  The national record maintained by BoM starts after Viv's last year.  Just the same it's worth looking at the record and comparing early years of the twentieth century with recent years.

Here's an animation showing maximum and mean temperatures for all Australia.  Notice the stark difference between early last century and the last few years.

Source: BoM

For people who are not used to charts, I'll point out that to work out the difference between now and then you need to sum the minuses and pluses.  Last year had an anomaly of almost +1.5 degrees and at the turn of the century temperatures were about 0.5 below zero.  So 2013 was around two degrees Celsius hotter than it was in the early 1910s.  That's for the entire continent for an entire year.  That's a lot hotter!

I hope you now see the tricks deniers play.  Especially people like Viv Forbes who have a vested interest, such as keeping share prices of coal companies as high as possible.  The fact he's a coal company director should have no bearing on his views on climate science.  But now you know that Viv Forbes is a climate disinformer, you could be excused for pointing to his coal company directorship as a reason - but not an excuse.

Viv talked about Australia's heat waves not proving global warming.  Of course they don't.  They are consistent with global warming.  So has the world warmed since Viv's early records around a hundred years ago?  You bet it has.

 From the WUWT comments

The very first comment is a classic denier "I remember when it was hot in summer" from cnxtim, who says:

January 20, 2014 at 8:28 pm
Without doubt this AGW scaremongering is sheer poppycock.
I remember many a stinking hot summer as a child in western Sydney and around 1954 where thetemperature was over 112 degrees Fahrenheit at Penrith in NSW for many days on end over the Christmas holidays at my uncles farm.

I couldn't find any records for Penrith itself for the 1950s, but I did notice that Penrith hit 46.5 degrees last January (115.7 Fahrenheit).  It does get hot there.  Update: I found data for Richmond RAAF, which is only 18.5 km away.  It wasn't hot in 1954 - temperatures then maxed out at 37.3 Celsius in December and there was no monthly average above 30C.  It was a mild summer in Jan-Feb. It wasn't 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958 or 1959 either.  It was cooler in the 1950s than now. I went to Observatory Hill for the early 1950s. Nope - not a hot summer in sight!


craig eyles I think is talking about last week's heat wave when it stayed above 40 degrees for about a week across much of Victoria (Gippsland is in south eastern Victoria and is one of the cooler regions normally).  He says:

January 20, 2014 at 8:48 pm
This is the “anti-global warming” Govt we have in power in Australia. Yes, global warming is shite, but in my 44 years haven’t been in 4 days of 40+ degree temps & I’m in Gippsland. Friday felt like time I went to Sacramento 1999.

There are lots of people who are confusing hot weather in different places at different times with continent wide warming all at the same time.  Stephen B says:

January 20, 2014 at 10:55 pm
Last week was my birthday and I was reminded by my mother that when I was born 55 years ago I came 3 weks premature, brought on by the extreme heat wave that week in Warragul (Gippsland) Victoria – 4 days above 40 degrees. Nothing new.

Nick Stokes (who I haven't seen at WUWT for a while) says:

January 20, 2014 at 11:04 pm
This is an odd post – lots on temps in the past, but no numbers on the actual heat last week. It was very hot (here is my complaint at the time). Max temperatures in Melbourne for the first 5 days of the Australian Open were 31.1, 42.8,41.7, 43.9 and 43.9°C. Or, if you prefer, 88, 109, 107, 111, 111°F.

Now we’ve seen hotter days. And even a longer heat wave, in 1908, where maxima were close to or above 40 for six days. But they are rare. From 1855 to 2013, Melbourne averaged 1.3 days per summer in total exceeding 40°C. For the last thirty years, the average has been 1.7. So four consecutive days well over 40 is bound to attract comment.

That'll about do.  You can imagine the rest.  Mostly of the "I remember when" type or the climate conspiracy variation: "BoM is part of the worldwide climate hoax consortium and has adjusted all the old records".  If you want to suffer more they are archived here.