The last 10 years are the hottest ever, yet deniers are still in denial

Summary: Despite three years of La Nina, 2022 was the sixth hottest year on record. The last decade was the hottest decade on record.

As you all know by now, we're causing the world to heat up. We've not got to a stage where we've stabilised the global temperature. In fact, we seem to be nowhere near stabilisation. Yet strangely there are still a few global warming deniers floating about. These deniers are arguing once again that an ice age is coming, or it's started cooling, or global warming has stopped, or "CO2 warming is a hoax" or some such nonsense. It's prompted me to write another article about how global temperature has been changing.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for 2022 was 0.89 °C. This is 0.13°C below the hottest year so far. The hottest was 2020 at 1.02°C above the 1951 to 1980 average.

Some history that led to Judith Curry hunkering down in the NOAA conspiracy theorists' bunker

The last couple of days has seen ex-scientist Judith Curry hunkering down in the conspiracy theorists' bunker. She is suggesting that the scientists at NOAA are "biasing and spinning climate science to support a political agenda".

If that's what they were doing (it isn't, as climate researcher Peter Thorne explains), they were not doing it at all well. For one thing, they've published papers describing their work in considerable detail, and the data is freely available (here and here and here) for anyone to check. Judith has no expertise in putting together surface temperature records (if you can't tell from reading her articles), so she wouldn't know what to do with the NOAA data any more than Lamar Smith does. (Judith dropped off the Berkeley Earth project team at an early stage, without making any substantive contribution.)

She does know how to insinuate and spread nasty smear campaigns, however. Over the years she's honed that art to a reasonable, if patently transparent, level.

Is this all there is before COP21? Crowd-sourcing the list of climate science deniers from 2009

There's a denier conference being organised for Paris, calling itself the Paris Climate Challenge. I think it's being organised by the Heartland Institute, but whoever is organising it is rather coy, and doesn't say. Going by the speakers, it could just be the political party, the UKIP. On the other hand, if it's the same as the Heartland Institute effort, then it hasn't decided on the name yet - is it Pandemonium in Paris or is it the Paris Climate Challenge?

Anyway, the one that's being promoted at WUWT (archived here and waybacked here) doesn't have much going for it. About all it's got is a plea for some speakers and a letter written six years ago, back in 2009. The 2009 letter is signed by people who are described as "climate experts", but most can make no such claim. Two of those signatories are listed as deceased: Ernst G Beck and Zbigniew Jaworowski. There may be more.

If you're thinking of signing up to fill one of what will undoubtedly be many empty chairs, you will be entertained by a sad and motley lot of ratbags:

• Stuart Agnew - a right wing politican from the UK (UKIP) - see comment
• Piers Corbyn - who manages to sell weather forecasts 
• Philip Foster -possible organiser - a retired vicar and continuing science denier, and director of the company that is listed as accepting donations for the effort, and who may be associated with the UKIP also (he goes to their conferences)
• Roger Helmer - another nutty politician from the UKIP
• Tom Harris - who says that climate science is a hoax, and gets his paleo-climate from the Old Testament 
• Murry Salby - who was sacked from Macquarie University and resurfaces every now and then to show how he can't do CO2 arithmetic
• Donna Laframboise - who writes books about dustbins 
• Viscount Monckton - aka the potty peer, who goes in for childish bluster
• Patrick Moore - who trades on his past time with Greenpeace while denying science 
• Nils-Axel Mörner - who twists charts to deny rising seas 
• Cliff Ollier - another denier for hire
• Ian Plimer - of iron sun fame, who's published (written? who knows) books denying climate science. He's all but disappeared from the scene after his disgrace at the hands of George Monbiot on the ABC with Australia's Tony Jones.
• Roger Tattersall - another organiser - aka Tallbloke, a denier blogger who once tried to get elected - another one associated with the UKIP. For a while he was thought too silly for WUWT, but has since been taken back into the fold. He registered the website for the Paris Climate Challenge (h/t Anonymous in the comments) - see this comment and this comment.

Crowd-sourcing details of deniers

Below is the list of people from the 2009 letter published on the 2015 "Paris Climate Challenge" website, for want of anything more recent. As I said, the list claims the following as "climate experts" but most have no expertise in climate science. They may be "expert" in science denial - a lot of them are associated with denier lobby groups.

I've linked quite a few of them. If anyone is willing to lend a hand, and pick out some and provide links to show their background, whether they are still in the land of the living, main denial "achievements" etc, that would be great. Even if it's only one or two people you look up - every bit will help. It can then be a ready reference for the future. If you do, can you list the number in the list, and their name and I'll add the links.

There are some websites that list science deniers and their background, including desmogblog, the Denier List, and SourceWatch. Links to in-depth articles are also helpful.

WM Briggs thinks the dinosaurs read thermometers

William M Briggs sez he is "statistician to the stars" and claims to "know good physics from bad".  He's wrong. Today he's got an article on some god (US-style) blog, that looks as if it's a libertarian (US-style) god blog. Long on faith and free speech and short on fact. I guess William thought he needed to get it in front of climate conspiracy theorists too, because he had Anthony Watts post a short bit of it at WUWT. (Or maybe it's just that Anthony is stuck for articles to fill up his daily quota.)

William faces a conundrum

William can't reconcile the so-called "pause" with the hottest years on record. He wrote:

Which is it? Either it’s hotter than ever or it isn’t. If it is, then (it is implied) man-caused global warming has not “paused.” If it isn’t, if man-caused global warming has “paused,” then it is not growing hotter.

Now William might want to go and have a chat with his favourite co-author, the potty peer Christopher Monckton. He'd soon set him crooked. Thing is, global warming hasn't paused. Sixteen of the twenty hottest years on record have occurred from 2000 onward, including this year, 2015. According to NASA, the hottest years on record are, so far, and in order:

Every day is denial day at WUWT, with models

Anthony Watts and his readers are deniers. There's no way around that. AP journalists might try calling them "climate change doubters", but deniers have no doubt. They have complete confidence in their conspiracy theory that climate science is a hoax.

A case in point. Yesterday it was greenhouse effect denial day at the climate conspiracy blog WUWT. Anthony Watts has rejected the greenhouse effect, again, publishing an article by some chap from New Zealand who went to see one of the Thin Ice viewings (archived here).

In the past, Anthony has been known to come out and declare that he doesn't exactly reject the greenhouse effect. It's just that he thinks it suddenly stopped working or something like that. This is happening less and less often, as he lets his blog slip further and further into conspiratorial paranoia.

Anyway, yesterday Anthony didn't bother with any disclaimer that he, blog owner, accepts the greenhouse effect. As climate change kicks in, Anthony knows that he must hang onto whatever visitors he can get. If that means letting go of any semblance of reality, so be it. Page hits matter.

No doubt about it: AP's new euphemism for science denying conspiracy theorists is not politically correct

Seems that AP has succumbed to the poor sensitive little science deniers who call for jail time for climate scientists. It's more than political correctness - it's political correctness gone haywire. Usually it's the extreme right wing ideologues who moan about people who conform to "political correctness" - except when they want a euphemism for their own behaviour. Instead of calling climate science denial denial of climate science, AP wants to pretend that rampant deniers only doubt climate science. Which is nonsense. Deniers don't doubt. They just "know" that all the science of the past 200 years is wrong. Deniers reject science. They prefer to think that for the past 200 years there has been a giant hoax perpetrated on the illiterati (that is, deniers).

From denial to doubt? No, it's still denial

Paul Colford wrote at AP about a change to the AP Style Guide:

Our guidance is to use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science and to avoid the use of skeptics or deniers.

From Shakespeare conspiracies to climate conspiracies

Yesterday I came across an article at WUWT (archived here), which Anthony Watts described as coming from an "educated listener". It was nothing but a very, very long denier screed in the form of a letter to Anthony Brandon, WYPR station manager. WYPR is a radio station in Baltimore, and associated with NPR (National Public Radio, USA). Dr. Roger Stritmatter signed himself as "Professor of Humanities Coppin State University".

I wondered why a professor of humanities thought he knew more about climate than all the specialist researchers who've spent their working lives studying the subject. What made him think he knew so much that had escaped the experts?

Another denier who gets his pseudo-science from climate conspiracy blogs

As it turned out, Roger relied on denier blogs like WUWT and Jo "Force X and the Notch" Nova. So he knew nothing about climate but he did pick up a few conspiracy theories in his travels. He's also an "ice age comether", writing:

...the real risk to the future we want for our children and grandchildren is not warming, but serious, widespread, and potentially disruptive cooling.

Yep, that's what the humanities professor wrote after the hottest decade on record, and the hottest year on record, which is about to be beaten by another hottest year on record, and quite probably yet another hottest year on record in 2016.

Judith Curry's conscience

There is not a lot that is more irritating in life than some holier than thou person telling everyone how much holier they are than thou -  most especially when that person is anything but holy. When I think about it, the people who I know who really are holier than most of us mere mortals, don't boast about it. It probably never enters their head to make a "goodliness" or "godliness" comparison. Their essential humility is one reason people choose good people as role models.

What you'll find particularly yucky (the best word I can think of at the moment), is Judith Curry setting herself up as the "conscience of the profession". You think I'm joking? Nope - I'm not.

Marginalised, alienated and put upon: climate science deniers are not innocent

Yesterday's article got a few comments complaining that I went too far when I wrote:

The first hockey stick was, probably correctly, viewed in some quarters as a real threat to the anti-science, anti-mitigation movement. These are immoral people. People who want the world to continue with unfettered burning of fossil fuels, endangering society. People who are willing to sacrifice the well-being of their fellow human beings, their children and their grandchildren and all future generations. Their motives were various - some did it for ideological reasons. Anthony Watts did it because he didn't want to pay tax. Others dispute climate science arguably because that's what they are employed to do. There are dedicated denier organisations who pay people (and get freebies from more) to cast doubt on established science that they see as contrary to their aims. The backers of deniers probably also have mixed motives - pure profit for fossil fuel companies and ideology for others (rampant capitalism/libertarian anarchy gone wild). For some it seemed to be more personal - perhaps professional jealousy mixed with ideology.

There were protests by some people of the type "I am not a bad person" and that I shouldn't impugn motive to the ugly denier.

Scary Movie

Here's something to entertain. I don't live in the USA so am completely impartial on this score. Not quite. What I mean is, I have no say in the matter. However I'll make a pact ...

...if you do live in the USA, ple..e..e..ase don't vote for any of the GOP's not a scientists (or any "not a scientist" for that matter), and I promise I won't vote for any Australian denier politician.

More here.

Australian blogger Andrew Bolt: All attitude - no research

Andrew Bolt is a conservative ideologue who blogs for a Victorian newspaper, the Herald-Sun. He has a bit of a following in Australia. He mistakes ignorance for independence and thinks because he knows nothing about a subject, he is entitled to spread disinformation about it.

I don't follow his silliness as a rule, but I saw in the HotWhopper stats that somehow a comment with a link to HotWhopper got through. This is unusual. In my experience (with the occasional exception), comments that dispute what Andrew writes are more often than not disallowed.

Andrew Bolt - climate disinformer

Today Andrew shows up his ignorance, writing on his blog about climate change and global warming:

Secondly, that it’s caused by humankind...
False. No serious scientist, even die-hard warmists, would agree that all climate change is caused by humans.

Notice what he's done? His answer is not related to the modern greenhouse warming. He appears to be arguing that because climate change of the past was not caused by humans, then the current warming climate cannot be caused by humans either. This is a logical fallacy. Just because the last time your house burned to the ground it was caused by a lightning strike, doesn't mean that this time it couldn't have been caused by you leaving hot oil on the stove unattended.

Another list of 142 cranks at WUWT

You can tell a person's character from the company they keep. There's a list of 137 people who keep company with Tim Ball and E. Calvin Beisner and Joe Bastardi and Joseph D’Aleo and David Legates at WUWT.

Just in case you ever need to check denier "credentials".

Related, with some overlap

• List of scientists "respected in their field" - only @wattsupwiththat - take on the EPA
• Las Vegas Denier Fest: Awards for best con artists, denial propagandists and plodders for hire
• The Wrong Climate Stuff

In defence of climate science denier!

Update: Science of Doom has responded to the feedback his article got. You can read his comment here. It's very good and not just because he acknowledges that not everyone views the term as he did. (h/t verytallguy)

Sou 8:16 pm 5 February 2015

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Science of Doom has a great blog explaining many aspects of climate science, with an emphasis on the underlying mathematics (and some of the physics). If you want to learn the maths and physics underpinning the greenhouse effect and lapse rates and adiabatic processes, you'll probably at some stage come across an article by Science of Doom.

A day or so back, for some very strange reason (ostensibly because he was reading a book), Science of Doom decided to fan the flames of climate science denial, unwittingly I would think.

HadCRUT4 - equalling (slightly besting?) the hottest year with a lie from Anthony Watts at WUWT

HadCRUT4 is out. It's another hottest year ever on record result at 0.563C above the 1961-1990 mean. That just tops the next hottest, 2010, which was 0.555C above the mean if you go by straight numbers. It makes it equal hottest once you allow for confidence ranges.

Some people were wondering if HadCRUT4 would come out on top. It could be argued that it did. Just. The Met Office is being cautious, saying it is too close to call, which is fair enough. From their press release - my emphasis:

26 January 2015 - Provisional full-year global mean temperature figures show 2014 was one of the warmest years in a record dating back to 1850.

The  HadCRUT4 dataset (compiled by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit) shows last year was 0.56C (±0.1C*) above the long-term (1961-1990) average.

Nominally this ranks 2014 as the joint warmest year in the record, tied with 2010, but the uncertainty ranges mean it's not possible to definitively say which of several recent years was the warmest.

Colin Morice, a climate monitoring scientist at the Met Office, said: "Uncertainties in the estimates of global temperature are larger than the differences between the warmest years. This limits what we can say about rankings of individual years.

"We can say with confidence that 2014 is one of ten warmest years in the series and that it adds to the set of near-record temperatures we have seen over the last two decades."

WUWT and GWPF - disinformers lie through their teeth!

There is no such hesitation or caution among the climate disinformers though.  Professional liar denier Anthony Watts claims, wrongly, that:

"UK Met Office says 2014 was NOT the hottest year ever due to ‘uncertainty ranges’ of the data". 

That's wrong. The UK Met Office did NOT say 2014 was not the hottest year ever. It's one thing to say it's too close to call even though the numbers show it the hottest. It's quite another to say that it was NOT the hottest year ever. Just how desperate must he be feeling. Honestly, you've got to wonder if Anthony Watts can lie straight in bed!

His headline was above a "press release" by the GWPF, which is an anti-mitigation lobby group from the UK.  In the body of the release, David Whitehouse, who I guess is paid to tell fibs, wrote:

Quoting the temperature to one hundredth of a degree and the error on that measurement to a tenth of a degree is not normal scientific practice. It is against normal scientific practice to have an error of the measurement larger than the precision of that measurement. This means that most scientists would have rounded the data so that it was 0.6 +/- 0.1 °C. If this is done to the HadCRUT4 dataset it is even more obvious that there has been a warming “pause” for the past 18 years.

That's not right or correct or accurate. The Met Office provides data to three decimal places and reported it to two decimal places. 0.563C was the reported median and 0.529  and  0.600 were the lower and upper bounds at the 95% confidence interval.

I guess when the disinformers can't claim that an ice age is imminent, muddying the hottest year with a pause is the next best thing.

I'm very pressed for time this week but will just add two more things. First a chart of HADCRUT4 - click to enlarge it:

Data Source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

No time for comments - you can read the WUWT archive here.

Two Million Views

Secondly, yesterday HotWhopper had it's two millionth page view. Thank you to everyone!

Tricks used by David Rose, denier "journalist", to deceive

This is just a short article to show the journalistic tricks that professional disinformers use. It's excerpts from an article by denier David Rose, who is paid to write trash for the Mail, a UK tabloid of the sensationalist kind. He'd probably claim that he's just "doing his job". His job being to creates sensationalist headlines and not bother too much about accuracy, but try to do it in such a way as to stop the paper ending up in court on the wrong end of a lawsuit. Just. (The paper probably doesn't mind so much getting taken to the Press Complaints Commission. )

Here is what David Rose wrote:

The Nasa (sic) climate scientists who claimed 2014 set a new record for global warmth last night admitted they were only 38 per cent sure this was true.

First of all notice the use of the word "admitted" - as if it was something that the scientists were forced into, whereas in fact that they provided all the information in their press briefing. Notice also that David doesn't even know how to spell NASA. Then notice his straight up lie. It's not true. David has taken one number and used it out of context.  The 38% number is the probability that 2014 is the hottest year compared to the probability that 2010 and other hot years are the hottest. 2010, the next hottest year, only got a 23% probability by comparison. Here is the table showing out of 100%, what the different probabilities are:

You can see how David misused the 38% number. In fact the odds of it being the hottest year on record are the highest of the lot.

What is David's next atrocity:

In a press release on Friday, Nasa’s (sic) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) claimed its analysis of world temperatures showed ‘2014 was the warmest year on record’.

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa (sic) admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.

See how David Rose distorts things. How he uses rhetoric, abusing words like "emerged" and "claim" and "admits". He is flat out lying about the "far from certain". He just made that one up. It may not be "certain", but it is much more certain than "far from".  And it is more "certain" that 2014 was the hottest year than that any other year was the hottest year.

If David Rose were arguing that you beat your wife, even though you don't, he'd probably write it up as:

The so-called scientist claims that he doesn't beat his wife. He admits that he cannot prove he doesn't beat his wife. However this journalist can show that it has emerged that his claim is subject to a margin of error.  95% of wife-beaters deny beating their wives.

And I doubt he'd add the confidence limits to the 95% number!

David Rose continues his deception writing:

Yet the Nasa (sic) press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C. The margin of error is said by scientists to be approximately 0.1C – several times as much.

That section by David Rose contains the same misprint of NASA (as Nasa), plus the same journalistic tricks of rhetoric, as well as a lie. The margin of error of the annual averaged global surface temperature is described in the GISS FAQ as ±0.05°C:

Assuming that the other inaccuracies might about double that estimate yielded the error bars for global annual means drawn in this graph, i.e., for recent years the error bar for global annual means is about ±0.05°C, for years around 1900 it is about ±0.1°C. The error bars are about twice as big for seasonal means and three times as big for monthly means. Error bars for regional means vary wildly depending on the station density in that region. Error estimates related to homogenization or other factors have been assessed by CRU and the Hadley Centre (among others).

If the press release didn't include any confidence limits, then where did David Rose get his numbers from? you ask. That's a very good question. It turns out that NOAA and NASA held a press conference, during which they showed some slides and explained the confidence limits, among other things. So David Rose was being very deceitful, wasn't he. Which isn't a surprise.

What bit of deception does he swing to next? Well here it is. You be the judge:

As a result, GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond. Another analysis, from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, drawn from ten times as many measuring stations as GISS, concluded that if 2014 was a record year, it was by an even tinier amount. 

More rhetorical tricks using words like "admitted". More deception by David Rose tabloid denier extraordinaire. When and how and where did David Rose ask Gavin Schmidt the question? I don't know. It looks as if it was via an accusatory tweet of the type "have you stopped beating your wife", like this one:

@ClimateOfGavin why didn't you mention the size of the 2014 "record" and the uncertainty in the GISS press release? Do you regret this?
— David Rose (@DavidRoseUK) January 17, 2015

Yet Gavin Schmidt did respond to David Rose, so it was David Rose who told the lie:

@DavidRoseUK Were you on the press call? The uncertainties were directly addressed. pic.twitter.com/1LYbvOf9Rr
— Gavin Schmidt (@ClimateOfGavin) January 16, 2015

That's about it. I'll leave it to you to decide who is the grand deceiver.

I'd not trust David Rose, denier journo, with a single fact.  It is alleged that he is a master of deception. He'd probably try to claim he is just doing his job.

Climate disinformer Judith Curry, "pragmatic ethicist" despicably perpetuates a lie....

Update: After this article which I tweeted to @curryja at the time, comments from Kevin O'Neill and Izen and two days after writing it, Judith has finally commented that she has changed her article (compare original to revised). She now refers to the headline but does not clarify what Professor Torcello actually wrote or the context or that she grossly misrepresented him and his views. She left the word "outrageous" to refer to Lawrence Torcello's "thinking about climate ethics", suggesting she views the organised funding of misinformation campaigns as more than perfectly okay. Does it fit with her "pragmatic ethics"?

Curry as amended... Torcello famously wrote an essay entitled Is misinformation about the climate criminally negligent? More traditional (less outrageous) thinking about climate ethics ...

Curry's original and very wrong portrayal... Torcello famously wrote that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”.  More traditional (less outrageous) thinking about climate ethics

What Lawrence Torcello wrote (my bold italics):

When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent

Of interest may be the comments like this and this and these, especially in light of the fact that Lawrence Torcello's article attracted so much venom on denier blogs and upwards of 700 hate emails and telephone calls.

Following the disinformation on denier blogs earlier this year, Professor Torcello wrote a strongly worded very clear statement  (h/t MikeH in the comments below).

(Note also that in this article I have not discussed the suspect ethics and absurdly impractical suggestions that Judith was promoting to try to justify her push to not reduce CO2 emissions and not mitigate climate change, which could be worth an article in its own right.)

Sou 12:27 pm AEST 27 July 2014 - amended 12:58 pm to compare changed wording and add more for clarification.

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I don't go there too often - it's too awful. However today I visited Judith Curry's blog and I found her perpetuating an old lie (archived here). Since, as a bully herself she gets so upset about people "bullying" (ie calling her out on her disinformation and worse), you'd have thought she'd be more cautious.

No, I won't yawn, Judith, I'm outraged

What was her lie? She was repeating the nonsense about the Laurence Torcello article in The Conversation back in March this year. You know, the one that prompted all the hate mail from deniers, some of whom could well have been part of an "organised campaign funding misinformation".

Judith has to know it's made up baloney. She even linked to the article itself.  So this is just one more piece of evidence to add to her long list of sins.  I can totally believe that Judith would "yawn" at ethics. This is what Judith wrote [now inserted full paragraph for comparison with the update above Sou 12:27 pm AEST 27 July 2014 ]:

My recent post Why scientists should talk to philosophers elicited a comment on twitter (that I can’t find) that recommended Lawrence Torcello as a philosopher that I should be paying attention to.  In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, Torcello famously wrote that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”.  More traditional (less outrageous) thinking about climate ethics is typified by this Nature essay by Stephen Gardiner.My response to most writings on climate ethics that I’ve encountered has ranged from outrage to a yawn..

No, that's not what Lawrence Torcello "famously wrote". He said nothing of the kind. He didn't say that climate scientists should face trial.  Perhaps the philosophers Judith talks to encourage her to be immoral and unethical (Judith's "pragmatic ethics"), although she needs no encouragement.

Compare what Judith wrote with what Lawrence Torcello actually wrote:

The importance of clearly communicating science to the public should not be underestimated. Accurately understanding our natural environment and sharing that information can be a matter of life or death. When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on. With such high stakes, an organised campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.

No mention of climate scientists except to say that the majority agree on global warming. Professor Torcello was talking about "an organised campaign funding misinformation", not climate scientists.

What Lawrence Torcello did say was that he didn't believe poor scientific communication should be criminalised:

I don’t believe poor scientific communication should be criminalised because doing so will likely discourage scientists from engaging with the public at all.

Well, Judith Curry is one of those rare scientists who should most definitely not be engaging with the public. She's not to be trusted.

(I've just had a thought. Maybe Judith, climate scientist, is admitting to being part of "an organised campaign funding misinformation". That could let her off the hook, couldn't it? Maybe - at a Curry-style stretch. Especially with her "pragmatic" ethics. Only to hang her on another hook, of course.)

Justice for deliberate disinformers who are in positions of influence

Let's hope that one day there will be justice for people like Judith Curry. People like Judith Curry, who used to be a Departmental Chair at Georgia Tech professorial chair at a minor university, should be held to higher standards than plebs like the normal denier crowd at WUWT.

[Georgia Tech is a very worthy institution and is not a minor university by any means. I apologise without reservation for the unintended slight to all the current top notch staff, students and alumni. The intended slight was aimed at the single individual who has diminished its reputation somewhat. There are duds in the best universities. Sou 1:16 pm  AEST 26 July 2014]

You know what was the razor blade in the soap? Judith wrote her lie under a headline:

Towards a pragmatic ethics of climate change 

Is it her pragmatic ethics that allows Judith to promote disinformation? Does it allow her to disregard any twinge of conscience or does she have no conscience?

I'd say if the former, she hides it very well, as evidenced by her testimonies to the US Government.

Anthony Watts shames former Apollo Astronaut, Walt Cunningham

Update

This tweet from @rubiginosa sums up Anthony Watts' article better than anything:

pic.twitter.com/Hp6C4G6A7j #climate MT @wattsupwiththat Apollo Astronaut: Climate Alarmism Is the ‘Biggest Fraud in the Field of Science’
— rubiginosa (@rubiginosa) July 6, 2014

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Anthony Watts is mocking the 84 year old Apollo astronaut, Walt Cunningham. He's posted a rather embarrassing article about the poor chap, written by Eric "eugenics" Worrall** (archived here, latest here). Anthony's headline was: "Apollo Astronaut: Climate Alarmism Is the ‘Biggest Fraud in the Field of Science’".

Walt is wheeled out by the professional disinformers from time to time and made to perform in public. I've written about it once before.

If Walt wanted to, he could be remembered for his glory days. Instead he spends part of his retirement waving his hands about, weakly protesting climate change muttering paranoid conspiracy theories and making inane, nonsensical comments such as these, quoted on Anthony Watts blog:

“Since about 2000, I looked farther and farther into it,...I found that not one of the claims that the alarmists were making out there had any bearings, whatsoever. And, so, it was kind of a no-brainer to come to the conclusion.”...

...“The media are largely to blame for public misconceptions – not because they’re intentionally misleading the public, but because they “just don’t want to go into the time and trouble to find out.” “If they do go into it and look at it for themselves, they become a lot more neutral in their presentation,” 

...“I can only tell you that, even back in the days of Apollo, we didn’t have to face this kind of nonsense” 

Full of substance, eh? Just what he has looked into, neither Anthony Watts nor Eric Worrall is saying.  I doubt Walt has a clue.  He just knows that the Arctic can't be melting, the oceans can't possibly be getting more acidic, the surface temperature can't be going up and the seas couldn't possibly be storing more heat. Nor could the seas be rising.

Data sources: NODC/NOAA, PIOMAS, NASA (GISTemp), CU Sea Level Research Group University of Colorado

I suppose this is the first of a series of empty, meaningless protests at global warming and climate change that will be paraded at the denier festival at Las Vegas this week. Fodder for HotWhopper.

I do think it's a bit unfair of the science denial brigade to take advantage of a former astronaut who's lost the plot. Still, he's his own person and if he wants to make a fool of himself in his old age, then there will always be unscrupulous people waiting to make the most of the opportunity.

**Eric Worrall earned the nickname "Eugenics" because he made a habit of likening climate science to the study of eugenics in the 1930s, particularly when he commented at Watching the Deniers. It's his version of Godwin's Law.

From the WUWT comments

Sweet Old Bob says he wishes mainstream media was as cruel to the poor chap as Anthony Watts is:

July 6, 2014 at 6:22 am
If only the MSM would cover this speech…

Is Jeremy taking a swipe at the Rocket Scientist from Luna Park and his Force X? He says:

July 6, 2014 at 6:24 am
So true! Climate science is not rocket science – it is BS for Geography types – those people with coloring crayons who incapable of logical scientific enquiry and deduction. 

John piccirilli has been studying climate science in depth for a whole "twenty minutes" and says:

July 6, 2014 at 7:56 am
Follow the money..skeptics make $0 while alarmists and so called “green” energy scams are making millions. I looked into this “debate” for myself, it took all of 20minutes to know the truth.

Same old, same old from WUWT deniers

There's not been much happening in the climate denier blogosphere worth writing about with some exceptions, which I'll address in a future article.

Anthony Watts is copying and pasting some stuff from WUWT deniers like Larry Hamlin and paid disinformers like Pat 'n Chip, wailing that "all the models are wrong".  The same nonsense that Anthony wheels out when he runs out of ideas for new material.

It's nothing new.  They are trading on the false idea that global warming has stopped.  I guess they figure that they need to get in while they can because the slow down in global surface temperatures won't last.  And if the anticipated El Nino eventuates and it follows the pattern of previous ones, then next year would be hotter than any previous El Nino year, which would make it the hottest year on record. Hotter even than 2010. Which would mean the deniers would have to write about something else altogether to try to persuade the public that:

• global warming isn't happening, or
• if it is it's not bad, or 
• if it is bad, we'll adapt, or 
• if it is bad, some of us will adapt and
• if it is bad and some of us manage to adapt, it won't cost much to adapt, or 
• if it is bad and some of us manage to adapt and it does cost a lot to adapt then taxpayer's shouldn't have to pay to adapt - or 
• something.

I'm a bit too busy to go through their articles and arguments line by line, so I'll just put up a couple of charts that highlight the problem we are facing.  First, earth is still getting hotter as seen in multiple ways:

Next, we're not even close to cutting CO2 emissions yet.  And time is running out:

Adapted from IPCC AR5 WG1

Finally, from WGIII Summary for Policy Makers, the longer we wait the fewer options we'll have:

Delaying mitigation efforts beyond those in place today through 2030 is estimated to substantially increase the difficulty of the transition to low longer‐term emissions levels and narrow the range of options consistent with maintaining temperature change below 2°C relative to pre‐industrial levels.

From the WUWT comments

You'll all have read the empty protests, like those archived here and here before.  I won't bother picking holes in them - the IPCC reports themselves do that.  Here are some choice comments from the WUWT deniers to Pat 'n Chip's article (archived here):


Latitude opts for the fantastical climate hoax conspiracy theory favoured by many science deniers and says:

April 16, 2014 at 6:10 pm
Why do so many people discuss the science or computer models…without first acknowledging they are all based on fraudulent temperature records that have been fudged.
Even if they had invented the perfect model…they would never know it….because the models are all tuned to temp histories that have made the past colder and the present warmer….to show a faster rise in global warming…

They cooked their own goose with this one…they will never get an accurate computer model…with out first admitting they cooked the temp record

SIGINT EX is, I think, trying to be clever or funny or something and says:

April 16, 2014 at 7:42 pm
IPCC Titanic.
Do not trust the … “Captain” !
The “Watch Maker” turned “Ship Designer” on 2nd Deck standing by the spiral staircase and looking at the Ship-clock and glancing to his Swiss Chronograph on his wrist … knows !

Joel O'Bryan opts for ethno-religious imagery and says:

April 16, 2014 at 9:29 pm
This analysis is devastating to the “CO2 is evil” CAGW believers.
Ayatollah Al “Jezeera” Gore will issue a Fatwah against this blasphemy any day now.

Bob Greene's intuition is off.  Climate models are geared for long range not short range.  In the short term, random weather fluctuations can dominate. In the long term, these even out.  And like many others, he seems to be held in thrall by the mighty dollar and says:

April 16, 2014 at 9:15 pm
Results of 108-114 models were compared to actual temperatures. The models give a wider spread of results (0.4°C) for shorter time periods (Fig. 1 a and b) and a narrower spread for the longer time period. This seems to be intuitively wrong if the models had any capability to match reality.

Models that don’t work so large numbers are used to create reality. How many wrongs do you have to use to make a right? The ensemble doesn’t do too well at matching reality. It’s total gibberish. How many billion dollars were poured down this rat hole? And they give advanced degrees and nice tenured professorships for this?

norah4you says something about "courses to learn".  It looks as if she could do with some "learning" herself:

April 16, 2014 at 9:59 pm
Had been better had IPCC sent their so called experts on courses to learn by understanding Theories of Science what they forgot to learn during attending same courses once upon a time….

Peter Miller brings up the subject of satellites and says:

April 16, 2014 at 10:40 pm
And let’s not forget our gratitude for the satellites which measure global temperature, for they have kept the statistics reasonably honest for the past 35 years. Prior to the late 1970s, the manipulation/torture/homogenisation of temperature data has run riot, especially the GISS numbers.

Without the satellites acting as the police, the IPCC models would have undoubtedly been shown to be ‘correct’. 

Not a bad note to end on. Let's compare the two satellite records of lower troposphere temperatures (UAH and RSS) with that recorded below on the surface (HadCRUT4 and GISTemp). Click for larger view:

Living Dangerously: Jim Steele denies Texas warming

Jim Steele seems to be addicted to making up stuff.  Today he wrote a long article for Anthony Watts' blog WUWT, picking on Katharine Hayhoe and Don Cheadle, who featured in the Years of Living Dangerously (which I haven't seen). Jim wrote a long article short on facts and long on his normal rejection of science (archived here).  At one stage he wrote:

The truth is there has been no climate warming in Texas. 

To support his claim he put up a chart that he described as "Plainview TX temperature trends found online from the US Historical Climate Network".  I don't know why he stopped at 2012.  Anyway, I've got a better chart if you want to know about Texas temperatures.  It's a statewide chart, not just one small town in the north of the state.  The data is from NOAA. I converted it from Fahrenheit to Celsius and plotted it as an anomaly from the twentieth century mean.

Data Source: NOAA

You can see how much hotter it's been getting, consistently - in Texas. It's been hotter for longer for any time in the record going back to the late 1800s. Much hotter, with 2012 being nearly two degrees Celsius above the twentieth century average.

I can't be bothered going through the rest of Jim's diatribe.  He does end up blaming Joe Romm for whatever Katherine Hayhoe said.  Jim's a climate science denier.  He's written a book about his denial. It pays to check every word he writes.  What I suggest for anyone who's come looking to find out more about Jim Steele, you can type his name into the search box above.  This is by no means the first time he's lashed out at scientists or misrepresented data.

You can read about how Jim doubled down when I pointed out he'd got his seas wrong and his seasons wrong.  [Update: You can see Jim continues to "double down" in the comments below. Not once has he conceded that the NOAA data shows warming or that the paper he himself cited states that Texas has warmed (which  it does).  Not only does the paper state that Texas has warmed, it attributes some of this warming to human factors! Sou 2:10 pm AEST Thurs 17 April 2014]

Better yet, have a look at the Years of Living Dangerously and tell us what you think of it.

How Anthony Watts turned three weeks into "almost a year" at wattsupwiththat!

Anthony Watts has commented on a new article in Nature "news and views", which suggests that multi-decadal periods of high and low variability in ENSO may be "entirely unpredictable".

Anthony comments (archived here) - my bold italics:

I suppose this explains why this model has been doing so poorly for the last year in predicting a new El Niño, it has been showing an El Niño just months away for almost a year. 

First of all, while I can't read the article itself (paywalled), it's obvious from the abstract that it's referring to multi-decadal periods of variability, not year on year ENSO events.  Anthony's comment is misplaced for that reason alone. (See update below.)


There's more. I was curious as to where Anthony got his "almost a year" from, because I watch the BoM ENSO page and it was only this month when there was the first sign of the possibility of an El Niño later this year.

So it wasn't from the Bureau of Meteorology.  Perhaps NOAA?  I checked NOAA and there was no active alert for March, April, May, June, July, August or September last year.  There was mention of an ENSO alert in its bulletin of the 4th October 2013, a mere six months ago.  Even then it was very cautious, writing:

Synopsis: Borderline ENSO-neutral/ weak El Niño conditions are expected to continue into Northern Hemisphere winter 2012-13, possibly strengthening during the next few months. 

However the NOAA November, December, January and February bulletins were back to a "not active" ENSO alert.

Three weeks is not "almost a year"

So the current bulletin has been active only since 6 March this year.  A mere three weeks.  That's around 49 weeks shy of "almost a year". Even so the synopsis is for only a 50% chance of an El Niño developing during the summer or fall:

Synopsis: ENSO-neutral is expected to continue through the Northern Hemisphere spring 2014, with about a 50% chance of El Niño developing during the summer or fall. 

Just more evidence (for anyone that cares) that WUWT cares not one whit for facts opting instead for disinformation.

BTW - you can read the comments here - I don't have time to read them in depth. I scanned them quickly but didn't see anyone pick Anthony up for his two bloopers.  Typical of the fake sceptics at WUWT.

(Strictly speaking Anthony probably made three bloopers.  He linked to a "news and views" article about another paper but I doubt he realised that.  Going by what he wrote, Anthony mistook the Nature article for the research paper itself.)

Update

The "news and views" article is, as far as I can tell, about a new paper in BAMS Journal of Climate.  The abstract (my paras):

Observations and climate simulations exhibit epochs of extreme El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) behavior that can persist for decades. Previous studies have revealed a wide range of ENSO responses to forcings from greenhouse gases, aerosols, and orbital variations, but they have also shown that interdecadal modulation of ENSO can arise even without such forcings.

The present study examines the predictability of this intrinsically generated component of ENSO modulation, using a 4000-yr unforced control run from a global coupled GCM [GFDL Climate Model, version 2.1 (CM2.1)] with a fairly realistic representation of ENSO. Extreme ENSO epochs from the unforced simulation are reforecast using the same (“perfect”) model but slightly perturbed initial conditions.

These 40-member reforecast ensembles display potential predictability of the ENSO trajectory, extending up to several years ahead. However, no decadal-scale predictability of ENSO behavior is found. This indicates that multidecadal epochs of extreme ENSO behavior can arise not only intrinsically but also delicately and entirely at random. Previous work had shown that CM2.1 generates strong, reasonably realistic, decadally predictable high-latitude climate signals, as well as tropical and extratropical decadal signals that interact with ENSO. However, those slow variations appear not to lend significant decadal predictability to this model’s ENSO behavior, at least in the absence of external forcings.

While the potential implications of these results are sobering for decadal predictability, they also offer an expedited approach to model evaluation and development, in which large ensembles of short runs are executed in parallel, to quickly and robustly evaluate simulations of ENSO. Further implications are discussed for decadal prediction, attribution of past and future ENSO variations, and societal vulnerability.

---

Pedro DiNezio, "Climate science: A high bar for decadal forecasts of El Niño." Nature 507, 437–439 (27 March 2014) doi:10.1038/507437a

Wittenberg, Andrew T., Anthony Rosati, Thomas L. Delworth, Gabriel A. Vecchi, Fanrong Zeng, 2014: "ENSO Modulation: Is It Decadally Predictable?". J. Climate, 27, 2667–2681. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00577.1