Willis Eschenbach radiates more nonsense at WUWT

I sometimes wonder at the shameless way deniers boast about their ignorance, particularly their lack of understanding of basic science. Willis Eschenbach is a prime example. He doesn't understand science and doesn't make any real effort to understand it. He balks at reading a basic textbook and I doubt he could bring himself to read a science website let alone scientific papers. Yet every now and then he'll decide he's come up with some brand spanking new notion that none of the hundreds of thousands of people who've studied a subject in depth have ever thought of.

Some time ago he figured out what every student (and interested layperson) knew long ago, that storms carry heat from the surface upwards into the atmosphere, thereby cooling the surface; his thunderstorm theory.

This week he's decided there are three what he calls "theories" to the greenhouse effect, demonstrating that he doesn't understand that radiation is the emission or transmission of energy. He was trying to attack a tweet thread by Gavin Schmidt and his attack was laughable (and very very longwinded).

Stefan Rahmstorf wins the AGU Climate Communication Prize, so WUWT compares him to Hitler

Is it the horrors of Hurricane Harvey that have unhinged deniers at WUWT? I don't know, but something has.

There have been two articles bashing Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the world's leading ocean scientists. He is Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The AGU is awarding him the Climate Communication Prize, which he richly deserves. As some sort of payback, deniers are using the Serengeti Strategy to defame Dr Rahmstorf in two (so far) ugly and ridiculous articles at WUWT.

In the first WUWT article, Charles the Moderator has copied and pasted an unhinged article by someone called Duane Thresher, who has a huge chip on his shoulder against climate scientists. Charles the Moderator included a photo of Hitler because that's what deniers do when they want to smear and defame. It's a Law of Deniers. That article is a nasty denier take on how Dr Rahmstorf took a newspaper to task way back in April 2010, after it published false information about an IPCC report. You can read about this on Dr. Rahmstorf's blog (if you don't read German you'll need to translate).

See the update below for more context.

Authoritarian Trump followers at WUWT celebrate USA's secession from the world (and reality)

Over the last few days it's become clear that Donald Trump's minders have been unsuccessful in reigning in his megalomania and malignant narcissism. In the one interview since becoming US President, all Trump could talk about was size, and he told multiple lies in doing so. Read the incredible transcript. It was an extraordinary interview. Trump shied away from discussing important matters of state. Instead, as reported in the Washington Post, he was "endlessly obsessed with his popularity".

You've read about people who seriously believe they are Jesus Christ - well that's how Donald Trump behaved. To my mind, he exhibited all the symptoms of grandiosity, delusion and self-obsession. He falsely claimed he would have won the election by "millions" if not for "millions" of fraudulent votes that all went to Hillary Clinton. He falsely claimed that "we had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches". He even went so far as to claim that his much criticised appalling speech in front of the CIA wall of honour drew "the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl".

Willis Eschenbach beclowns himself as a racist Trump fan who tries to distract people away from reality

President Obama, V-P Biden, and House Speaker Pelosi, 2009
Source: White House

Willis Eschenbach hasn't been wondering as much lately. Perhaps he didn't like the way I discussed his articles. Today he's a lot more positive and forthright - if wrong, conspiratorial, and showing his bigotry.

Willis was whining about the fact that in the Policy Forum of Science today (or yesterday here) there was an article by President Obama. It appears to be a Science mag article, in which case it will probably be in this week's edition, which will come out this Friday. For now the full article is available online (open access).

The article has the title "The irreversible momentum of clean energy" and is about, yes, renewable energy and particularly how mitigation of greenhouse gases can boost the economy, and doesn't have to conflict with economic growth. The subtitle is "Private-sector incentives help drive decoupling of emissions and economic growth".

Atmospheric water vapour is a feedback (not forcing) - on Watts and Eschenbach #AGU16 poster

Willis Eschenbach has a poster at AGU16, to which Anthony Watts added his name. Anthony's now written a blog article about it (archived here). Actually, Anthony put his name first although I strongly suspect he doesn't have a clue what the poster is all about.

They haven't made the poster available on the AGU16 website, or not at the time of this article. It is downloadable on Anthony's blog at WUWT, here.  He's also made available what he calls "data and code". The file is 500 MB or so, therefore I won't be downloading it till I get home in 20 hours or so.

There are a few points I'll make:

• The poster is based on a couple of blog articles by Willis Eschenbach at WUWT, including the one I wrote about here.
• Willis Eschenbach still doesn't know the difference between a forcing and a feedback (more below). Nor does Anthony Watts.
• Their poster supports what real scientists tell us, that there's more water vapour in the air because of global warming.
• Most of the data they use is ocean only, not land.
• They seem happy to rely on RSS data, while disparaging it elsewhere.
• They seem happy with lots of data carefully collected and analysed by climate scientists, despite calling it fraudulent elsewhere, and despite WUWT-ers wanting to stop all research.

Cycling disinformers: A mini update of denier waffle at WUWT

I admit to being bored with the petty deniers and conspiracy theorists at WUWT. What's happening at the political level in the USA and Australia is much more fascinating in a grim way. Still, until I have a bit more time to focus on the blog, you'll have to make do with this mini-update about the goings on in deniersville - from Eric Worrall, Andy May, Willis Eschenbach and Ira Glickstein, PhD.

It's pretty much the blind leading the blind in the sense that there's none so blind...(nothing to do with vision-impairment).

Lying Willis Eschenbach defames a prominent scientist and spreads fake news @wattsupwiththat

Willis Eschenbach is one of the sleazier climate disinformers who tells lies quite freely at WUWT (and is a shameless misogynist). Most of the time he pretends to be a "scientist" who is "just wondering" about something or other. He seems to think he was the first to discover the mechanisms of thunderstorms, for example, which is pretty weird. I mean this has probably been part of Meteorology 101 going way back before Willis was a twinkle in his father's eye.

Sleazy pseudo-scientist - Willis Eschenbach
Credit: unknown

Other times (and often at the same time) he loses his cool and lashes out and all and sundry. That's when he brazenly outs himself as a committed liar. Willis has a very short fuse.

Today he ventured beyond the pale, even for a creep like him. He was complaining about an article in Scientific American: The 9 Best Reactions to the House Science Committee’s Breitbart Tweet. He effectively said he no longer reads SciAm much because it isn't anti-science.

But that's not what I want to write about. That's the norm at the fake science blog, WUWT.

Disgusting untrue defamation

What I was much more disgusted with were the lies he told about the renowned scientist Peter Gleick. Willis told several big whoppers. He falsely claimed that Peter Gleick "was forced to quit his job in disgrace". Which is an outright lie. This is what he was referring to - a transition, four years after the incident with the Heartland Institute and completely unrelated. Willis might as well claim that Obama is resigning from the Presidency because he failed the American people.

Then Willis claimed that Dr Gleick "never did say one word of contrition for his actions". Another huge lie. Here is part of what Peter Gleick wrote after he helped expose the extent Heartland Institute's funding of science disinformation. It includes his apology:

I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so. I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.

Peter Gleick

Why is it that despicable people like Willis Eschenbach tell such outrageous lies about scientists? Is it because they think it makes them look big and important?

Anthony Watts is hustling off to #AGU16 to stalk scientists, and speculates about Superwoman Sou

For a break from the mass insanity that's taken hold in the USA, here's a short article about some insanity in climate conspiracy land.

Anthony Watts seems to be having some trouble getting enough people to pay him to go to this year's AGU Fall Meeting.  He begged his readers to dip into their pocket again not once, but twice now. Other years he's got people giving him big amounts, but not so much this year when the average gift is around $20. (If you want to help him out you can donate by PayPal.)

As in other years, Anthony says he's going to stalk real scientists while he's there. He's added John Cook to the people he's said (in prior years - here and here) that he's creepily stalking (Peter Gleick and Michael Mann).

Is there any difference between Willis Eschenbach's head and his feet?

Science deniers are running out of ideas with the climate change that's happening all about them. Massive floods all around the world these past few weeks. No big La Nina coming to rescue fake sceptics, and the world shows no sign of cooling down. Even the precious satellite record hasn't been doing it's bit to give conspiracy theorists hope of an ice age.

Willis Eschenbach has written how he's throwing in the towel and, instead of talking about science, he's going to ridicule it (archived here). Today at WUWT he wrote a topsy turvy article that shows that he can't make up his mind whether climate change is real or not. He seems to be shifting between two denier stages:

• Climate science is a hoax, and
• If it's not a hoax, there's nothing we can do about it.

Sea level to accelerate more quickly prompts sea level rise denial at WUWT

There's a new paper out that has been picked up by Anthony Watts. Of course he doesn't like it because it's about one of his pet peeves - rising seas. There are few things he is more afraid of, judging by the frantic attempts he's made over the years to deny that seas will rise as the ice melts.

I don't have time to do the paper justice, so I'll point you to the paper and an article by John Abraham at the Guardian. The paper is by John Fasullo, R. S. Nerem & B. Hamlington and is in Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports. The gist of it is that the volcano, Pinatubo, suppressed sea level rise, and it could be about to jump back up again in the next ten years.

The thing I noticed at WUWT is that Anthony Watts will go to great efforts to hide the data. He put up a wonky chart that Willis Eschenbach drew a few years ago. His chart stops some time in 2010 - right before that big dip in sea level when all the water was shifted from the oceans to Australia, South America and Asia.

The water vapour penny precipitates, almost, for Willis Eschenbach at WUWT

There's a new article at WUWT by Willis Eschenbach (archived here, latest here). It took him almost twenty years, but he's finally found the RSS total precipitable water (TPW) record. For years Willis has been arguing that Earth's climate can't change much because of thunderstorms. It seems that he may have finally woken up to the fact that there is more water vapour in a warmer atmosphere than in a cooler one and that this is contributing to the greenhouse effect. He wrote (about the dataset that was reported 20 years ago in 1996): "One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset."

I've been meaning to write about global warming, water vapour and precipitation for some time. There have been several papers on the subject (see below). What's happening is:

• the amount of water in the air is increasing as the world warms,
• the water cycle is intensifying,
• therefore there is more rain (and snow), and
• more greenhouse warming because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas.

Warning: This is a rather long article, with no apologies :)

Willis Eschenbach wonders about ENSO events and rain

Willis Eschenbach is one of the resident pseudo-scientists at WUWT. Today he decided to tackle ENSO events and precipitation (archived here). As is usual, he went to satellite data to get precipitation, which is probably not the best approach. While the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) is a worthwhile project, I don't think it was intended to be used in the way Willis has used it.

Wet and dry regions during ENSO events

Willis took issue with a recent paper in Nature Communications from a team led by Michael Griffiths. (Anthony Watts had earlier said the paper was a bombshell. I don't know why. It's an interesting paper, but not what I'd call a bombshell.) The paper itself was about multi-century shifts in weather patterns in the Pacific.  Willis wasn't writing about that. What he wanted to do was dispute the fact that El Niño years tend to be drier and La Niña years tend to be wetter.

Most of the Arctic sea ice is on land and other WUWT musings

Arctic sea ice from 1953

 Willis Eschenbach has been wondering about sea ice trends of the past few decades. He's written a couple of articles but seems to me to be more interested in hiding the trends than exploring them. In today's article (archived here, latest here), he has used HadISST data from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. I don't know why he chose that over the more often cited Sea Ice Index from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  I think he's meant his title to this latest article to be sarcastic, in the way that the Dunning-Kruger set use sarcasm: "The Awful Terrible Horrible Global Sea Ice Crisis".

Willis decided to look at the data from 1974 only because he found that for Antarctica before that time there was not good data. Then he said he removed the seasonal component, which looks like he deducted something from each month. Since Willis used HadISST data, let's look at what the authors of the authoritative text on the subject found in the 2003 paper by Rayner et al:

Willis Eschenbach and his carbon uptake mistake at WUWT

Willis Eschenbach is wondering about how much extra CO2 can go into the air (archived here, latest here). He's done some calculations and figured that atmospheric CO2 can't double. Even without doing any calculations it's easy to see that he's wrong. This is why.

Willis has used two models for his estimate, and two estimates of fossil fuel available to burn. He got his estimates from a diagram in the IPCC WG1 AR5 report, which put fossil fuel reserves at between around 900 GtC (gigatonnes of carbon) and 2000 GtC.  I will leave it to the experts to quibble over how much of the remaining fossil fuel reserves would be technically feasible to exploit. This article is about how and perhaps why Willis has underestimated the impact - or so it seems to me. Willis' two examples are described here as:

• Example 1: burning 900 GtC by 2100 and
• Example 2: burning an extra 2,000 GtC by 2100.

As far as I can tell, where he went wrong was in using single pulse models. That is, there's an inherent assumption in the models he used that CO2 will be released as a single pulse, followed by nothing. (Willis doesn't assume that himself, but the models he uses do, I think. That leads to a flaw in his reasoning.) Update: Willis mentions a tau of 33 years, suggesting he has factored in additional removal of CO2 from the air, over and above what the biosphere, oceans and land surface can already handle. In other words, he's erroneously double counted.

Conspiracies, volcanoes, and two thousand years of ocean cooling and warming

Deniers at WUWT are (belatedly) trying to shoot down a paper published in Nature GeoScience last month. It's from authors who are part of the Ocean2k project, the ocean component of the PAGES 2K international consortium. The lead author is Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Anthony Watts was first to protest (archived here). In a bout of denial at WUWT, he claimed that just because there were a lot of volcanic eruptions on earth from somewhere around 1200 AD to 1800 AD, it doesn't mean they caused the observed cooling. He wrote a headline: "The new poster child for ‘correlation is not causation’: industrial revolution ended 1800 years of volcanic induced cooling".

In that one headline he rejected both greenhouse and volcanic forcing. Naturally, he didn't say what he thinks caused the earth to cool over time, or what is causing the current warming. More of the WUWT magic?

Anthony Watts denies volcanic forcing

In another fit of Dunning-Krugeritis, conspiracy blogger Anthony Watts is touting Wondering Willis Eschenbach as an expert on volcanoes and climate. Sheesh.  He has picked up a cutesy intro to his copy and pastes of press releases, inserting the words "maybe they should have" in under his "claim" headlines. He's done this for three of his most recent articles. This time (archived here) it was:

Claim: NASA simulation indicates ancient flood volcanoes could have altered climate
From NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER and the “maybe they should have checked with Willis first” department comes this modeling claim: 

Rather than scientific experts asking Willis anything, Willis should be reading more science before putting digits to keyboards. Willis wrote an article a couple of weeks ago in which he was using volcanic eruptions to argue that the climate is self-correcting. He got it mostly wrong as usual. Perhaps an article for another day. (Among other errors, Willis confused forcings and feedbacks.) About the only things his article (archived here) had in common with this new paper were the words "climate" and "volcano" - proving (yet again) that:

• Anthony doesn't read the press releases he copies and pastes, or if he does he doesn't understand them
• Anthony Watts doesn't understand his blog articles from his "guest" essayists (that is, the freeby articles written by his fans), and probably doesn't read them
• Willis Eschenbach once got one thing right: even if Anthony had a year to digest the articles he posts on his blog, he wouldn't be able to tell if it was pseudo-science crap or the real thing
• Anthony Watts promotes fake experts (the No. 1 Telltale Technique of climate science denial).

Putting the foot to the floor - with Willis Eschenbach again

Yesterday I wrote about how Willis Eschenbach, a frequent contributor at Anthony Watts' denier blog WUWT, got his feedbacks and forcings all mixed up. I've been thinking more about where he went wrong. Willis used an analogy of a car with cruise control.

The external forces acting on the car are gravity and friction. Willis didn't mention those forces. The cruise control can kick in to oppose changes in these forces by introducing an opposing force of the engine. It can add fuel to increase or decrease the engine power, apply brakes to oppose the engine, and shift gears to increase or decrease the power of the engine. It will do this when it detects a change in speed. The change in speed trigger will only come about when there is a change in forcing.

On forcing and feedback with Willis Eschenbach

For a long time now (at least six years), Willis Eschenbach has been going on about governors, forcing and feedback. For a long time now (at least six years), the engineers at WUWT have been pointing out where Willis gets his terminology and concepts wrong. For a long time now, Willis hasn't listened to the experts.

Willis Eschenbach maintains, despite all evidence to the contrary, that climate doesn't change. He seems to think that every time a forcing is applied, it will be met with an equal and opposite force. Today he's arguing the same thing that he's argued time and time again.

As in the past, Willis gets quite a bit wrong (archived here):

• uses the analogy of cruise control (wrongly)
• confuses positive and negative feedback
• mistakes feedback for forcing.

This article is about some fundamental concepts in climate science, mainly for the benefit of people new to the subject. (You'd think deniers at WUWT, who've been writing about climate for years, would have grasped these concepts by now. But many of them, like Willis Eschenbach, haven't.)

Reflections from surface and clouds - is there an albedo expert in the house?

Wondering Willis Eschenbach is a mite upset (archived here, latest here) because scientists aren't telling him he's right. In fact, they aren't telling him anything at all. And few of the readers at WUWT are helping him out, though a number are encouraging him with "scientists don't know nuffin'" comments.

Warnings - This article is long and meanders a bit - I have to call a halt at some point. This is just a blog article after all :) If you are looking for definitive answers about albedo, you won't find them. What you will get are some of the interesting bits and pieces I discovered as I went looking. There's no guarantee I've got it all right, either. This is something I've not explored in depth before now. So feel free to quibble in the comments.

Back to Willis Eschenbach. He thinks he's found a problem with a chart in a paper by Graeme Stephens of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (and elsewhere), and colleagues. The paper is about planetary albedo, which is the the fraction of the incoming solar energy scattered by Earth back to space. It's not a bad introduction to the subject, with some caveats as you'll see. The authors make two main points, as described in the abstract:

1. the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (NH, SH) reflect the same amount of sunlight within ~ 0.2Wm 2. This symmetry is achieved by increased reflection from SH clouds offsetting precisely the greater reflection from the NH land masses. 
2. The albedo of Earth appears to be highly buffered on hemispheric and global scales as highlighted by both the hemispheric symmetry and a remarkably small interannual variability of reflected solar flux (~0.2% of the annual mean flux).

Chaotic weather and climate constraints gets Willis Eschenbach wondering

Gavin Schmidt, now Director of GISS, NASA, once wrote:

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. 

Note the words: A statistical description of the mean state and variability of the system. Every word is important. Climate is more than an average of weather. It also describes the extremes of weather, and the extent to which weather is likely to vary within those extremes.

When modeling climate and changes in the earth system, there are certain constraints, or limits, or boundaries. These constraints can include surface boundaries such as continental configurations, topography, bathymetry (topography of the sea floor), and vegetation distribution. On shorter time scales there are constraints relating to ice sheets, oceans and the atmosphere itself. Defining these constraints or boundaries is what scientists do when designing models of the earth system and climate.

This article is about two concepts - both involving the word "boundary", which need to be distinguished:

1. The boundaries to a given climate (extremes of weather), and
2. Boundary conditions, which are set when developing models of climate or the earth system as a whole. These can be any physical constraints.

Willis Eschenbach wonders about boundary conditions

Willis Eschenbach today is wondering what is meant by the boundary conditions problem for climate (archived here). At WUWT he wrote:

I’ve heard many times that whereas weather prediction is an “initial-value” problem, climate prediction is a “boundary problem”. I’ve often wondered about this, questions like “what is the boundary?”. I woke up today thinking that I didn’t have an adequately clear understanding of the difference between the two types of problems.