No discernible change points in WUWT temperature conspiracies

The hogwash from science deniers continues, this time with a rather silly claim by Bob Tisdale. He doesn't accept the maths behind the use of anomalies in science, and reckons the reason anomalies are used to illustrate changes in global temperature is to hide seasonal differences throughout the year, or between land and oceans, or some such nonsense.

Bob Tisdale is what at best could be termed a pseudo-scientist. He specialises in rejecting climate change science, usually using very poor and unscientific graphs to get his audience to clap. And he chooses to publish on denier blogs where the audience will clap anything, as long as it's one of climate science is a hoax, the world is cooling, it can't be happening, Trump is the best, and all the scientists in the world are wrong, or stupid, or similar.

Today he's "supported" his silliness by putting up some charts, which he says he based on data from Berkeley Earth and NOAA's sea surface temperature, ERSST v5. He seems very surprised to find that the hottest months globally are July and August.

David Archibald tells lies about Australia's climate, at WUWT

David Archibald is someone who often predicts the world is about to get very, very cold. He's not a denier, he's a disinformer. He tells lies. One of the many who Anthony Watts promotes on his climate conspiracy blog WUWT.

I couldn't let this one pass, because this time he was claiming it hasn't warmed in Australia in 40 years. He's wrong. It has.

Below is a chart showing the surface warming from data recorded and analysed by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology, one of the foremost climate and weather offices in the world. It includes a LOESS smooth (red line) and a linear trend line from 1979 to 2017.

Give us your climate predictions, Andy May

Every so often WUWT publishes what it describes as "failed climate predictions". It is often timed to distract from more bad climate news, such as the fact that last year there was a record increase in the annual rise in atmospheric CO2.

The list published today, from Andy May at WUWT, follows the normal pattern. It takes a bunch of statements that were published at various times, including several from 27 years ago, and claims they are failed predictions. This includes statements that refer to things that may happen by 2100.

Yep, science deniers tend to oscillate between living in the past and living way ahead in the future. Tim Ball, one of Anthony's pet conspiracy theorists, rarely manages to emerge beyond 1970. Andy May (and Anthony Watts) both implicitly claim they have a time machine that has taken them into the future.

There are two other points worth making before I give you some examples of the low regard they (rightly) hold for WUWT fans. (They know they are a the dullest of the dim-witted.)

Hurricane Harvey through the eyes of science deniers

This image of Hurricane Harvey from NOAA and GOES shows water vapour is, in parts, almost off the scale.

The recent 5:00 am CDT statement from the National Hurricane Center includes these tidbits:

A NOAA tide gauge at Port Lavaca, Texas, recently measured a water level of 6.6 feet above Mean Higher High Water.

An automated mesonet rain gauge near Victoria, Texas, is reporting a 24 h precipitation total of 16.43 inches.

From the deniosphere

It's wrong to regard climate science deniers as being harmless idiots. It's not enough for them to deny, lie and play down the dangers of climate change. Not acting on climate change will cause a lot of death and destruction and ruin the livelihoods of many. It will also threaten world food supplies in future.

As can be seen today, climate science deniers are a threat to people in the here and now. In the last day or so, prominent climate disinformers have been playing down the dangers of Hurricane Harvey. Their motive seems to be, as always, because they want people to reject the fact and risks of climate change. Why they would want to downplay an immediate risk for ideology is unfathomable.

Bob Tisdale's trick of hiding the data, revisited

I've written previously about the trick Bob Tisdale uses to hide the fact that observed temperatures are now very close to modeled projections. He uses the same trick every time he posts his update to global mean surface temperatures (as archived here). It's an obvious trick, which should fool no-one except people who aren't familiar with charts and disinformer tricks, and those who want to deny global warming. I shouldn't need to repeat what he does, but I will, briefly. The wonder is that Bob keeps repeating his trick, even though he knows it's deceptive for two reasons:

1. Firstly it's deceitful because Bob chops off much of the past two and a half years of data, by plotting a 61 month moving average.
2. Secondly it's wrong because he doesn't let his readers know that the CMIP5 data he's using has only estimated forcings since 2005. The actual forcings had a net effect lower than what the CMIP5 models were based on.

Bob Tisdale tries to hide the massive warming

How do you get rid of warming that you want to deny? That's easy. You just subtract it from the record and ignore it.

Bob Tisdale is a pseudo-scientist at WUWT who doesn't believe that CO2 is warming the planet. He's a greenhouse effect denier. His notion is that El Ninos are what's warming the Earth by magic, or what he calls "sunlight-created warm water". I didn't know that sunlight created water, but who am I to say?

In a new article (archived here), Bob is trying to persuade the climate conspiracy theorists that the big spike in the global mean surface temperature was just what he expected. That's despite his numerous articles where he tried to show this El Nino isn't as big as the 97/98 one. And despite the fact that it's way hotter now than it was in the late 1990s. Bob weirdly thinks that the recent rise in global surface temperature has nothing to do with the increase in greenhouse gases.

Bob is wanting to divert attention from the unrelenting rise in global surface temperature.  The linear rate of warming since the mid 1970s is around 0.17 °C each decade. Bob Tisdale doesn't want his readers to notice that, so what he did was subtract 0.42 °C from the 2015/16 monthly temperatures and superimposed the plot on a chart of 1997/98 global monthly temperatures. He was trying to make the last 18 years of global warming disappear. In fact he over-reached, as I'll show you.

Kip Hansen's badge of dishonour

I was going to add this in reply to a comment from Kip Hansen but since it's a pointer to just a few of the ongoing science scams and lies from his fellow crooks, it's worth an article. Kip Hansen, in a fit of denier weirdness, regards it as a badge of honour to have his nonsense ridiculed. Kip seems to think that his fellow climate science denying conspiracy theorists are the "best company in the world".

Kip said I didn't understand his denial but, as is common with deniers, (and unlike yours truly) doesn't say where he thinks I was wrong. Do I need to point out that it's Kip and the immoral, heinous crowd he hangs out with who either don't understand climate science or knowingly lie about it? It's Kip Hansen who is an anti-future activist who rejects 97% plus of two centuries of science.

This is what is happening, while the Kip Hansen's of the world strongly agitate for more heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts, civil unrest, famine, and worse:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature change of the past 165 years. Data source: UK Met Office.

Desperate Deniers Part 7: Roy Spencer PhD tells fibs and flips and flops

Roy Spencer is a rather nasty little man who has said some horrible things about his fellow scientists as well as leaders of nations all over the world. He has made vile racist posts, called fellow scientists "nazis" and wished that the people attending COP21 were shot at by terrorists.

Roy is an "intelligent design" believer who doesn't "believe in" evolution. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly) he doesn't espouse Christian ethics or teaching or moral code. Instead he belongs to a pseudo-religious cult called the Cornwall Alliance, which believes that it's every man's (probably not woman's) right if not duty to pillage and plunder the planet. His particular cult expects their god will clean up the mess afterwards. His god is not all powerful, however. His powers  (Roy's particular god is undoubtedly of the male gender) don't extend to cleaning up economic messes, as Victor Venema has pointed out.

I don't bother with Roy's blog very much. It's ugly and uninteresting and mostly wrong. I go there about once a month to pick up the latest satellite data. I was told that Roy had posted a scatty article about the hottest year on record (thanks, D). So I figured I'd include it in the current "Desperate Denier" series, which is devoted to the multiplicity of imaginary reasons deniers and conspiracy theorists are inventing to try to dispute the fact that 2015 really is the hottest year on record.

Desperate Deniers Part 5 - Anthony "surface station" Watts flunks NOAA temperature chart 101

Just when you think that Anthony Watts couldn't make a bigger fool of himself, you find out that he can. This is more properly an update to the previous article, but given the crazy reaction to the hottest year on record, it's worth a separate article. In that article I groaned at Anthony saying it couldn't be the hottest year ever globally because in the USA it was "only" the third hottest year ever.

I should know by now that with Anthony Watts you have to check every little thing. Thanks to Mark in the comments, I've discovered that Anthony "surface station" Watts can't even read a temperature anomaly chart.  Harbouring all sorts of paranoid conspiracy theories, he wrote:

When you look at temperature that isn’t biased by continuous adjustments, such as NOAA’s highly questionable fiddling with sea surface temperature data this year, you find that 2015 was not the hottest record at all according to the U.S> Climate Reference Network data, which is a state of the art system designed to need no “corrections” of any kind. 2015 comes in third for the USA:

Let's not dwell on Anthony not wanting sea surface temperatures to contaminate the US land surface data (come again? Are there ships and buoys on land now?).  Let's look at his evidence...

Lesson 1,126½ in how to be a science disinformer, featuring Bob Tisdale

In this lesson about how to be a climate disinformer, I refer to a recent article by Bob Tisdale (archived here, cached here). In fact I refer to umpteen articles by Bob Tisdale, because his articles are often copies and pastes of his previous articles, with slight updates.

You can also watch a video with Tom Peterson, who gives The Story of Climate Data. This article is worth it for that alone. Dr Peterson is President of the World Meteorological Organization's Commission for Climatology, and recently retired from NOAA.

The purpose of the lesson, and hiding the closing of the gap

The purpose of the deception is to "prove" that all models are useless by hiding the closing of the gap.

Before you start, it's important to see what the observations actually show. Below is a chart of HadCRUT4, plotted with the multi-model mean of CMIP5. The 95% probability is for all uncertainties for HadCRUT observations - measurement and sampling, bias and coverage uncertainties. The uncertainties relating to the multi-model mean of CMIP5 are not plotted. As always, click on the chart to enlarge it.

Fig 1 | Global mean surface temperature observations and multi-model mean.
Data sources: UK Met Office Hadley Centre and KNMI Climate Explorer (CMIP5)

As you can see, with 2015 year to date (to September 2015), the observations are now approaching the CMIP5 multi-model mean. This closing of the gap must be hidden from WUWT deniers at all costs. And it's not hard to do so if you follow the steps in the lesson.

A challenge to climate science deniers

Anthony Watts, who runs the climate conspiracy blog WUWT, tries to make a living from a couple of sources these days. One relies on science and the hard work of scientists to forecast weather. Anthony puts all his faith in models, piggy backing on the efforts of scientists to sell his weather wares.

The other source of his income is rejecting the work of those same scientists. He earns a few bucks from denying climate science.

If you think that's odd, well he's not the only one. There are a few science denying weather people in the USA who make a living regurgitating the weather forecasts of NOAA and science from NASA, while denying the science itself. Joe Bastardi for example.

Today Anthony is claiming that it's not true that 97% of the scientific literature that looks at the causes of global warming attributes it to human activity (archived here). This is despite the fact that there are a number of studies that have provided evidence of this. He hasn't put forward any evidence disputing this number. Nor would he (or could he). Anthony Watts is in the disinformation business, not the information business. He thinks it quite sufficient to repeatedly claim something is "bogus" for his readers to believe it's bogus. He thinks that if he tells a lie often enough, there will be some people foolish enough to believe him. And he's correct. There are people in the world who are so keen to "believe" him, that they'll put their own willingness to believe the lie ahead of the welfare of the human species and every other species on the planet.  They'd rather see the world as we know it end than "believe" climate science.

So I am issuing a challenge.

Update: After four days, not one person has come close to accepting the challenge. Not one. Not even the vaguest of attempts. No-one will be surprised at that.

Sou 11 October 2015

Denier Cherries: Big changes to come in climate or same old same old?

There's an article on the climate conspiracy blog, WUWT, which illustrates the tunnel vision or selective bias of deniers. It is another example of blatant cherry-picking. Eric Worrall repeated nonsense that he read on a denier website (archived here). He wrote about a recent publication from the UK Met, which has the title:

UK Met: "Changes Underway in the Climate System?"

The misleading headline at WUWT reads:

WUWT: "UK MET: Global warming pause may continue". 

That's right. Compare the two titles. The UK Met booklet is suggesting there may be big changes underway, while the WUWT article is suggesting the Met Office is saying there'll be more of the same.

Anthony Watts' conspiracy blog and distorted representation at Spiegel Online

Several days after the article appeared in Der Spiegel, Anthony Watts found out about it (archived here). After months of drought, he finally got another mention in mainstream media. In an article by Axel Bojanowski in Der Spiegel - or more correctly, in Spiegel Online. That's as big a deal as getting a mention in one of Rupert Murdoch's papers, like the Australian. Or a mention in the Herald-Sun on the blog of Australia's Andrew Bolt. Der Spiegel has not got an unblemished reputation when it comes to climate science.

WUWT is accused of distorted representation

Still, Anthony thinks he's got reason to celebrate, writing a headline: "German newspaper Spiegel names WUWT the most prominent climate skeptic blog".  He didn't seem to notice that Axel Bojanowski wrote about the distorted representations from denier blogs:

Sogenannte Skeptiker (siehe Grafik) sorgen besonders in den USA mit verzerrten Darstellungen von Forschungsergebnissen dafür, dass Warnungen aus der Klimaforschung als übertrieben gebrandmarkt werden. 

Which Google translated as:

So-called skeptics (see chart) provide particularly in the US with distorted representations of research results that warnings of climate change research are branded as exaggerated.

Faint praise indeed.

It was cold in the 1930s, really it was (compared to now)

There's little if any quality control at WUWT. Blog-owner Anthony Watts doesn't have what it takes to do the job, according to his friend Willis Eschenbach. And I'm inclined to agree with Willis, which makes a change, since I don't often agree with him.

Today there's an unsophisticated article that Anthony's posted (archived here). It's by someone I've not come across before to my knowledge, Sheldon Walker. Sheldon is wanting to tell WUWT readers about the change in trends in global mean surface temperature since records began.

Matt Ridley spins Lysenko conspiracy theories and more in a classic denial of science

Was it Pope Francis who pushed deniers over the edge? Is it the climate negotiations taking place this year? Matt Ridley, a science denier from the UK who claims to be a "lukewarmer", has written a Gish gallop worthy of Tim Ball. It's as if he collected up all the worst WUWT conspiracy theories and rolled them into Quadrant.

Quadrant is a right wing outlet for the extremists. It publishes dumb articles from deniers fairly often. Today Matt Ridley, a denier turned defamer has written an article (archived here). Anthony Watts has published bits of it on his blog, too (archived here).

Matt Ridley's Lysenkoism conspiracy theory

Matt lurched from one conspiracy theory to another. To illustrate how far he's gone he starts out with the Lysenko conspiracy theory that deniers call upon when they run out of ideas. The conspiracy goes something like this. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was an agricultural official who rose to prominence under Joseph Stalin. He denied genetic inheritance in plants (as described by Gregor Mendel in his famous experiments with peas in the 1800s). He even managed to outlaw research in genetics. It set plant breeding back a lot in the Soviet Union. Well, the climate conspiracy theorists claim that Lysenkoism is alive and well throughout the entire world, and has been for the past couple of hundred years. I've never seen anyone name a person who is supposedly filling the role of Lysenko and banning climate science research of any kind. Nor have I ever seen anyone say just what aspect of climate science is forbidden.

I wonder if Matt will be calling upon Hitler and Osama bin Laden next (like Tim Ball has done)?

Anthony Watts alleges fraud by the NOAA

Anthony Watts is spreading his tattered wings, reaching beyond the Serengeti Strategy of isolating a single animal from the safety of its herd, to targeting an entire herd. Today, as if tempting a defamation suit, he boldly alleged that the NOAA is committing fraud (archived here). He wrote:

Grandma Learns About Data Adjustment: A little story about how data adjustment might work in everyday life.
Anthony Watts / 8 hours ago June 1, 2015
Note: On Thursday of this week, NOAA/NCDC will attempt to rewrite the surface temperature record yet again, making even more “adjustments” to the data to achieve a desired effect. This story by Mr. Core is worth noting in the context of data spin that we are about to be subjected to – Anthony Watts

Here is the global surface temperature anomaly as reported by NOAA:

Data Source: NOAA

On Seeps and SCAMS Part II: Pat'n Chip'n David Fake a Debate.

In Part I of On Seeps and SCAMS, I wrote about the new paper on how denialist talking points can influence climate science. A day or so ago, there was an article at WUWT (archived here), by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger (Pat'n Chip), in which they commented on that paper. Their WUWT article had the title: Lewandowsky’s Competing Theories for Source of Bias in Scientific Research. [This is Part II of a three part series. Click for Part I and Part III.]

The title was misleading. Pat'n Chip's WUWT article was more a promo for another article by David E. Wojick and Patrick J. Michaels. Their's is not a scientific paper, it's a CATO article. It would take a huge stretch of imagination to consider the denier lobby group, CATO, to have any relation to science.

What they wrote about could have been an interesting topic I suppose, though it demonstrates a naive view of the world on the part of the authors. They were ostensibly exploring whether or not government funding can bias research. Their paper had the title:

Is the Government Buying Science or Support?

A Framework Analysis of Federal Funding-induced Biases

They claim:

The research question is clear: does biased funding skew research in a preferred direction, one that supports an agency mission, policy or paradigm?

The reason I say it could have been an interesting topic is that research that is primarily funded by government is subject to the vagaries of government priorities. Not in the results, but in what areas research is undertaken.

Bombshell! Dumb Denialism from Anthony Watts about Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly, yet Anthony Watts sez it may rebound! Is he claiming that an ice age cometh? Not really. He usually leaves that nonsense to his "essayists" like David "funny sunny" Archibald. Yet if you read his headline without the article he copied and pasted (archived here), that's the conclusion you'd draw.

Here's Anthony's wrong headline:

BOMBSHELL: Scripps says Arctic Sea Ice may return, forecasts of loss based on ‘oversimplified arguments’

Once again, as usual, Anthony couldn't understand a simple press release - or if he did he decided to mislead his readers.  (Which is worse - being seen as an idiot or as a liar?)

Anthony Watts and his bombshells are usually a flop - his bombshells have a habit of going pear-shaped:)

The paper that he referenced was by Till J.W. Wagner and Ian Eisenman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was about how:

• Arctic sea ice is disappearing because of global warming, but
• IF greenhouse gases dropped (or we were desperate enough to do some geo-engineering) and the Earth cooled again
• THEN the disappeared Arctic sea ice would come back
• ELSE it won't! 

Is climate science denial going out of fashion? Recycling Fred Singer and his predictions

Update: I've added another chart to illustrate the size of Fred Singer's big Little Ice Age bounce :)


Are climate science deniers taking tentative steps away from denial? Lindsay Abrams wrote at Salon recently:

...it’s no longer fashionable to be a climate denier, or to promote climate denial. And it’s proving to be a rather unprofitable position as well. This has put the group in the rather awkward position of having to defend its belief in climate change.

She was writing an article about how, after lots of prominent companies quit, ALEC (the private sector "regulator") decided to come out and try to paint itself as not really rejecting climate science. Or not all of it.

Fred Singer takes one step forward

Today at WUWT (archived here) Anthony's dredged up and recycled an article from another science denier, Fred Singer. Harrytwinotter noticed that Anthony first posted this article more than three years ago - or part of it (archived here).  He's recycling again. How green can you get :)

In the article, Fred is trying to dissociate himself from the wackier end of climate science denial and paint himself more as a luke warmer. Or is he?

Worried by facts, quote-mining tides Anthony Watts over at WUWT

Anthony Watts is worried, because WUWT won't pass the fact test

In the comments, Chase Stoudt pointed out that Anthony Watts is worried about Google. In a paper in arXiv, a team of people from Google write how in future it might be possible to list results from Google search according to their factual content, putting disinformation sites (like WUWT) way down low:

The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.

Anthony told Fox News how this worried him a lot. He said: "“I worry about this issue greatly… My site gets a significant portion of its daily traffic from Google,”.