Various views flying about at WUWT

There's not a lot happening in the deniosphere today as far as I can see. Anthony Watts posted another of his "claim" headlines, this time with slight variation (archived here). His headline read "Model claim: airplanes of the future won’t be able to take off at some airports due to global warming". His headline implies some airports would have to close, which isn't what the paper said.

The copy and paste this time was the abstract from a paper in the AMS journal, Weather, Climate and Society, about how the increase in surface temperatures is affecting aircraft. (For some reason, Anthony Watts said it was published in BAMS, but it wasn't.) The abstract, which was all Anthony published, states in part:

For a given runway length, airport elevation, and aircraft type there is a temperature threshold above which the airplane cannot take off at its maximum weight and thus must be weight restricted. The number of summer days necessitating weight restriction has increased since 1980 along with the observed increase in surface temperature. Climate change is projected to increase mean temperatures at all airports and significantly increase the frequency and severity of extreme heat events at some.

It goes on to discuss how it will be a particular problem in the future for airports having short runways and no room to extend them.

Denier weirdness: It's not CO2, it's aeroplanes

More denier weirdness from WUWT.  Willis Eschenbach has decided that it's not CO2 that's causing global warming, it's occasional landings at remote airports.

Maybe that's what HotCopper's beretta based this idea of his on.

Just for fun, let's analyse what Willis E is saying.

On day one an aeroplane (A1) lands at a remote airstrip.  On day 61 another aeroplane (A2) lands on that same remote airstrip.  The heat produced by aeroplane A1 defies physics and doesn't dissipate, it has magically hung around and is added to the heat produce by aeroplane A2.  After twenty years and (let's be extravagant) 500 landings, the temperature at that remote airstrip has risen by the amount of heat from A1 + A2...A500.

Sheesh, that airstrip is probably really hot by now isn't it.  No wonder the world is heating up :D

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Addendum:

To show how sceptical "fake sceptics" are, and whether or not they check sources, compare the following comment from a WUWT reader...

sunshinehours1 says:
April 4, 2013 at 9:20 am   UHI exists. If the BEST team can’t find UHI, they should keep trying. And quit pretending UHI doesn’t exist.

...with the first paragraph of the BEST paper that Willis 'discusses'.

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect describes the observation that temperatures in a city are often higher than in its rural surroundings. London was the first urban heat island to be documented [1] but since then many cities have been identified as urban heat islands [2-5]. A well-known example is Tokyo where the temperature has risen much more rapidly in the city than in nearby rural areas: Fujibe estimates excess warming of almost 2°C/100yr compared to the rest of Japan [6] The warming of Tokyo is dramatic when compared to a global average as seen in Figure 1. The UHI effect can be attributed to many physical differences between urban and rural areas, including absorption of sunlight, increased heat storage of artificial surfaces, obstruction of re-radiation by buildings, absence of plant transpiration, differences in air circulation, and other phenomena [7].

Note for fake sceptics: The BEST paper is not disputing UHI (which is real, was first discussed more than two centuries ago and has been well-documented by climate scientists for decades).  It is looking to see if UHI has biased the record of global land surface temperature anomalies or if it has already been sufficiently factored in or is otherwise inconsequential.  Like every other similar (published) analyses, it has concluded UHI has not biased the records.