Anthony Watts tries for world's dumbest blog

Anthony Watts has posted some dumb things in his time, and his latest article is right up there with the best of them.

Watts confuses local with global - yes, again!

Watts once again confuses average global temperature with local temperature.  Now you might say, what's new about that.  This time he writes about a video mix including some of a Ted talk, in which David Roberts points out that if we don't cut CO2 emissions enough soon enough, more places will get too hot for people to survive there.

Roberts speculates that if average surface temperature rose by 12°C, places that today average around 80°F would then average 180°F. (I don't know if that's correct or not.  I do know that humans would find it impossible to survive in more and more places if we pushed global surface temperature up by 12°C.)

Anthony misrepresents the segment, acting as if Roberts is talking about a global average surface temperature of 180°F.  In fact Roberts was talking about a global rise of 12°C leading to some places getting as hot as 180°F.  Anthony even puts up a chart of global temperatures with a spike going up to 95.5°F - yeah, really!

Did he understand that Roberts was talking about local temperatures?  It depends on whether he has a brain and is a professional disinformer, or if he's as clueless as he pretends to be and is one of the 8%.  So far none of his commenters have picked him up on his 'mistake'.

My advice to Anthony: run your articles by your dog Kenji before you post them.

How hot does it get today?

I went exploring to see just how hot some places get today and found this page, where temperatures at Flaming Mountain in China are thought (by some) to have reached 175°F.  That's nearly 80°C.  As the NASA article points out, there aren't too many weather stations in the world's most inhospitable places.

In Australia, the hottest official temperature ever recorded is 50.7°C at Oodnadatta.

When is hot too hot?

There are limits to what humans can cope with as Steve Sherwood and Matthew Huber explain.  We and other mammals cannot tolerate temperatures higher than wet bulb temperature of 35°C for extended periods.  That means that if global average temperatures rise by 7°C we will see large areas become uninhabitable.

Dumbest Post Comp on HotCopper

Is there a competition among deniers on HotCopper to see who can win the dumbest post award?

Two examples from a single thread in the HotCopper science and medicine S&M club.

There's astrayalien (he already has one dumbest post award plus a dishonourable mention) who, in response to a post reporting the BoM announcement of Australia's record hot summer, asks:

Why is the Bureau of Meteorology changing past data?

Astrayalien thinks a day somewhere = summer all over Australia

Apparently astrayalien has Watt's disorder and doesn't know the difference between the Australian national aggregate for an entire summer season and a local daily maximum at a single site.

The 'evidence' he submits, presumably originating from BoM itself, is a list of places and the date they set a high temperature record.  His point apparently being that not every single individual location in Australia had its temperature record (for the hottest day or longest heat wave) broken this past summer.

Going by astrayalien's comment, he thinks a single day is equivalent to a summer.  And he thinks a single site is equivalent to a nationwide aggregate of sites.

Here's a gif animation of the record-smashing January heat wave that covered the continent:

Ronsterm compares a denier blogger with some of the world's leading experts in a miscellany of fields

Ronsterm tries to compete for the worst denier, by asking why Jo Nova (a holder of nasty conspiracy theories and science denier blogger) should not be considered as 'credible' as this assortment of renowned and highly respected leading academics, political leaders and government advisers (most of whom do not have any relationship with the Bureau of Meteorology).

• Algore (sic) (I think Ron might have meant Al Gore, past vice-President of the USA, who advocates for action to reduce global warming; rather than algor or algorithm)
• Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK and one of the world's leading experts on the historical surface temperature record and paleoclimate.
• Professor Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director, Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, and one of the world's leading paleoclimatologists.
• Sir Nicholas Stern is a leading economist who has held a number of posts in government and academia.  He is also a Member of the House of Lords in the UK. Prof Stern led the Stern Review, an examination of economic implications of global warming.
• Dr Rajendra K Pachauri is Chief Executive of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute) and holds numerous other academic and directorial positions internationally, including Chairing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 
• Professor Tim Flannery is Chief Commissioner of the Australian Government Climate Commission, Chair of Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University and has held numerous other positions nationally and internationally.  In 2007 he was honoured by the then Prime Minister of Australia, Mr John Howard, as Australian of the Year.
• Jo Nova is the pseudonym of a climate science denier and paranoid conspiracy theorist.

None of the above work for the Bureau of Meteorology. Professor Tim Flannery would have close dealings with the Bureau, particularly in his role as Chief Commissioner of the Australian Government Climate Commission.