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.

Quote of the Day at WUWT: Beginner's Mind or Fools Rush In

From Wondering Willis Eschenbach today at WUWT (archived here):

Now most folks would likely do a search of the literature first, to find out what is currently known about the subject.

I don’t like doing that. Oh, the literature search is important, don’t get me wrong … but I postpone it as long as I possibly can. You see, I don’t want to be mesmerized by what is claimed to be already known. I want to look whatever it is with a fresh eye, what the Buddhists call “Beginner’s Mind”, unencumbered by decades of claims and counter-claims. 

That short passage sums up why Willis Eschenbach gets into strife so often. He claims to "postpone it" but is there evidence that Willis ever reads the literature? (I'm not talking about a random paper here or there that he might try to pull to bits, I'm talking about a proper literature review on a subject of interest.)

The above passage by Willis was from a lead in to an article about beryllium isotopes and solar cycles in which Willis confesses he did do a search, apparently for a data set not the literature on the subject.  He found one, for which he provided a title and abstract but not the authors or source or any other information.  A quick search shows Willis found the data at NASA.  He ignored the requested citation, which is:

Pedro, Joel and Smith, Andrew M (2012, updated 2012) Annually-resolved polar ice core 10Be records spanning the Neutron Monitor era Australian Antarctic Data Centre - CAASM Metadata (https://data.aad.gov.au/aadc/metadata/metadata_redirect.cfm?md=/AMD/AU/Neutron-Monitor-era-annual-10Be)

And Willis seems to have ignored the associated paper (available here):

Pedro, J. B., Simon, K. J., Smith, A. M., van Ommen T. D. and Curran, M. A. J. (2011), High-resolution records of beryllium-10 in ice from Law Dome, East Antarctica: measurement, reproducibility and principal trends, Climate of the Past, 7, 707-721, doi:doi:10.5194/cp-7-707-2011 

There is much more research that he could have found had he really been interested in the subject.

Fools rush in...

Once again Willis has rushed in to a field, found some data, performed a couple of simple plots and decided that all the scientists are wrong.  He expects either pats on the back from the WUWT-ers, or for someone else to do the hard work.  Mostly the former from what I gather.

Willis' did go as far as look at the notes to the data set and found that the scientists commented on the difference in solar cycle correlation between concentration and flux:

Concentrations at both DSS and Das2 are significantly correlated to the 11-yr solar cycle modulation of cosmic ray intensity, r = 0.54 with 95% CI [0.31; 0.70], and r = 0.45 with 95% CI [0.22; 0.62], respectively. For both sites, if fluxes are used instead of concentrations then correlations with solar activity decrease.

He wasn't at all happy.  He put a question to WUWT-ers (not the researchers themselves) (my bold italics):

If you use flux rates the “Correlations with solar activity decrease”??? Yeah, they do … they decrease to insignificance. And this is a big problem. It’s a good thing I didn’t read the notes first …

Now, my understanding is that using 10Be concentrations in ice cores doesn’t give valid results. This is because the 10Be is coming down from the sky … but so is the snow. As a result, the concentration is a factor of both the 10Be flux and the snow accumulation rate. So if we want to understand the production and subsequent deposition rate of 10Be, it is necessary to correct the 10Be concentrations by using the corresponding snow accumulation rate to give us the actual flux rate. So 10Be flux rates should show a better correlation with sunspots than concentrations, because they’re free of the confounding variable of snow accumulation rate.

As a result, I’ve used the flux rates and not the concentrations … and found nothing of interest. No correlation between the datasets, no 11-year periodicity, no relationship to the solar cycle.

What am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? How can they use the concentration of 10Be rather than the flux? Are we getting accurate results from the ice cores? If not, why not?

It's not that the questions themselves are unreasonable for a "beginner".  The problem I have is that Willis goes barging in without doing any reading on the subject. And his questions are like a red rag to a bull at WUWT.  It means all the science is wrong! (In fact, Willis has some fans and some who really don't like him at WUWT, so he often gets a mixed reception.)

I'm not the person to answer Willis' question.  All I can do is suggest he read the literature. As the authors of the above paper say (my bold italics):

...obtaining reliable information from the 10Be record requires proven sample processing and measurement techniques, along with a good understanding of the sequence of environmental processes controlling production in the atmosphere and ultimate storage in the ice sheet.

There's more, in a discussion of how best to "test the response of 10Be concentrations in ice to variations in the atmospheric production rate", for example:

By contrast, the sunspot record is less useful since the relation between sunspots and 10Be production is neither linear nor direct.

My question to Willis is: Why don't you read the literature?

From the WUWT comments

Quite a few people try to help Willis out.  None of them come right out and ask - "why don't you read the literature?" However a number of them did just that and quoted various papers on the topic (not all of them reliable sources, needless to say).  Plus one for WUWT commenters, FAIL for Wondering Willis Eschenbach.

Tom in Florida isn't one for reading literature - he says:

April 13, 2014 at 4:28 pm
“What am I missing here? What am I doing wrong? How can they use the concentration of 10Be rather than the flux?”
I believe you know the answer,…………. it gives them the results they were seeking.

Brad who is not an expert on beryllium in ice but a building auditor, says:

April 13, 2014 at 4:32 pm
Willis,
It is obvious what you are missing, GRANT MONEY!!!! You could have strung this out for at lest a few years and made a million or more, plus publishing rights. You also need to run it through the DIY a few times to get it thoroughly “scientificey”, so most eyes will glaze over and bow to the master. sarc/off

Your “beginners eyes” are greatly appreciated… that is a term I will remember in the future when auditing commercial buildings. I always tell operators they have blinders on when it comes to some problems. They just can’t see it, and will argue until the cows come home.
A new set of eyes can see that which others can’t.

scarletmacaw takes a wild guess but comes down on the side of the scientists, not Willis and says:

April 13, 2014 at 5:38 pm
I would think the difference between flux and concentration depends on how the Be10 is deposited. If it is captured in ice crystals and deposited in snow fall, then using concentration makes sense. I guess my question is where does the Beryllium come from?

Cynical Scientst goes a bit further and says:

April 13, 2014 at 6:07 pm
It depends strongly on how the beryllium is being deposited.

Flux is the appropriate measure only if we assume that beryllium is deposited evenly and steadily across the entire surface of the planet. But it seems much more likely to me that beryllium is transported out of the atmosphere by precipitation and hence is deposited quite unevenly and unsteadily across the planet. Areas with high precipitation would then be expected to receive a high beryllium flux while those with low precipitation will get only a small amount. In this scenario concentration is much better measure than flux of the rate of beryllium production as in a well mixed atmosphere the rate of beryllium production should determine the concentration of beryllium in precipitation.

Look to see which of flux or concentration is least strongly correlated with local rates of precipitation. That would be the best measure to use.

markx might not understand what's been written, but he likes the style. He says:

April 13, 2014 at 6:12 pm
Very interesting, and very nicely laid out.
Willis, you write very clearly.
We would all do well if scientific papers were written in a similar clear prose, instead of being immersed and obfuscated in the accepted contemporary ‘scientific’ phrasing and jargon.

bushbunny takes exception to something Willis wrote and says:

April 13, 2014 at 7:53 pm
Willis I appreciate your hard work producing these graphs. They must give you some exciting work and I commend you for that, but remember that most of us here haven’t a deep scientific understanding to comment on your graphs To stipulate whom should respond to them is a bit elitist and selective in my opinion. I say no more.We know cosmic rays are deflected from earth due to solar activities, hence less contact with water vapour in our atmosphere.

Ignoble cause: Anthony Watts tells a lie to stoke conspiracy theories - or justify his lies?

Anthony Watts is over the moon.  He's been told there's a paper that says it's okay for him and other science deniers to keep lying about climate.  Of course that's not the tack that Anthony is taking.  (Archived here.)

Irony: manipulating information to stoke a conspiracy theory

In an irony heaped on an irony, Anthony Watts is lying and exaggerating about a research paper on exaggeration and information manipulation - to stoke the conspiracy theory that climate science is a hoax.  The other irony is that the research is based on a model.  Deniers usually reject outright any finding that's based on a model.

What Anthony and organised disinformers are feigning is shock and horror.  Anthony gives credit to the disinformation lobby group CFACT, for drawing his attention to a paper that says it's okay to exaggerate global warming.  Even though that's not what the paper is saying, going by the abstract.

Still, Anthony Watts and his fellow disinformers must be feeling all warm and fuzzy, saying to themselves that all their lies (including the current one about this very paper) are quite alright, because a paper that (doesn't) say it's okay to lie is (not) saying to the academic world that it's okay to lie.

Are you following all that? No?  it's just another example of how climate disinformers twist the facts to support their agenda of - bring on global warming.  Here is the abstract of the paper and its title:

Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements
It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency by using a modified International Environmental Agreement (IEA) model with asymmetric information. We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA, which will eventually enhance global welfare. From the ex ante perspective, however, the impact that manipulating information has on the level of participation in an IEA and on welfare is ambiguous.

Compare what Anthony writes...

Climate Craziness of the Week: Peer reviewed paper says it’s OK to manipulate data, exaggerate climate claims

Noble cause corruption gone wild. People tend to think of scientists as being unbiased, in climate science, apparently if you aren’t biased, you aren’t doing useful work.

...with what the abstract states:

news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate

See how Anthony Watts goes beyond accentuation and exaggeration to fabrication through innuendo!  He's spinning that this is about bias of climate scientists.  It's not.  He talks about noble cause corruption.  Anthony is a despicable "champion" of ignoble causes, who spreads his disinformation arguably for money (his tip jar, his plea for his readers to pay his (free) "entry" to AGU etc etc)


Oh, in his next paragraph lying Anthony Watts writes:

A new peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, titled “Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements”, is openly advocating that global warming proponents engage in mendacious claims in order to further their cause.

The paper itself is reporting research on whether exaggerations in news reporting and environmental activism makes a difference to participation by countries in international environmental agreements and if so to what extent.  It found that ex post suggests yes, while ex ante is ambiguous.  The research is based on a model, which seems to have passed by WUWT-ers.  (Normally deniers poo poo any research based on a model, but not in this case.)


PS. Here's another paper by one of the authors, for people interested in the general subject of the economics and politics of international environmental agreements (downloadable).

From the WUWT comments

Climate disinformer Anthony Watts has told a big fat lie.  As usual he implies that climate scientists are the culprits.  The abstract says nothing about climate scientists.  It is talking about news media and "some pro-environmental organizations".  And it doesn't give the "permission" or "advocate" anything.  It certainly doesn't advocate that Anthony Watts and other deniers and disinformers lie.  But that's what Anthony does to supplement his income and push his cause.  And a prime example is this very article (archived here).

The conspiracy wingnuts come out in force

leon0112 has jumped right through Anthony Watts hoop to the wrong conclusion that climate scientists are lying and says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:18 am
Wow. Next time someone throws the phrase “peer reviewed literature” at me, I will point to this one.

Dire Wolf says "it's all a conspiracy":

April 4, 2014 at 8:30 am
Let’s parse this. A paper from China (which will never, ever restrict its CO2 output) says that it is good to manipulate the media (that is the media outside of China) to “[induce] more countries to participate in an IEA” which will cripple the industries of those countries leaving China untouched and unrivaled. So, how much is the chinese equivalent of the KGB paying them?

jauntycyclist is an easy mark for Anthony's spin and says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:34 am
manipulation is so common , entrenched, accepted and expected in climate science it has its own study? maybe it should become a subject with its own faculty that rates climate papers on a beerosphere-o-meter?

Peter Hanely is another willing conspiracy theorist says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:36 am
“Its ok to lie to people for their own good.” Typical left wingnut rationalization.

cnxtim goes even further and says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:37 am
These CAGW devotees have made criminal behavior a science

mpainter seems to think the finding should have been kept under wraps and says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:48 am
It is well that such a paper publicly says what many privately believe.Such extremism will be the undoing of the movement. Staggering that it was published in such a journal. What rot.

Barry Cullen says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:51 am
This from the little despots in training in leadership positions descended from despot Mao and friends. Not surprising. Anything to gain and maintain control over a populace is acceptable.
The “peer” reviewers must, by definition, share similar political views.

Col Mosby says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:53 am
Thru this published paper, we have acheved total corruption of a scientific discipline. I wonder if these two brainless authors realize the contradiction implicit in their argument : Claim that something not dangerous is dangerous, to induce folks to take actions to prevent this (non-dangerous) something. 

markstoval decides this paper confirms his conspiracy theory that climate science is a hoax and says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:53 am
“Peer reviewed paper says it’s OK to manipulate data, exaggerate climate claims”
It is good to see the climate “scientists” admit they have been doing this since they have been doing it for at least 30 years. It is good for them to tell us that their “science” is all fiction. We knew it all along, but it is damn nice to get peer-reviewed conformation on that issue.
Modern “climate science” is pure baloney.

chinook reminds me of the utter nutters at HotCopper when s/he says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:54 am
They’re just following the now fashionable Post Modern Scientific Method that’s become pervasive, esp in America. In order for the ersatz religion of ‘environmentalism’ and climatchondria to spread far and wide like the plagues of mentally impaired rationalizing that they are, anything goes. Possibly, real scientists who believe in the scientific method, the honest ones who leave advocacy, politics and dogma out of their work will slowly turn the tide back.

tgasloli says:

April 4, 2014 at 9:18 am
What would you expect from Chinese Communists? This is why the “greens” should be considered “watermelons”. 

Some WUWT-ers are more astute and aren't buying Anthony's spin

Anthony had better watch it. Not all of his readers are buying his spin.

Bloke down the pub says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:26 am
Are they advocating it or just saying ‘hey man, sh*t happens’

AnonyMoose says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:48 am
They’re saying that exaggeration happens, and they’re not judging whether it is wrong, but the distorted information can increase participation in environmental agreements, and that end result is always good. They seem to be assuming that environmental agreements always have good results for the general welfare, and anything which enhances the general welfare is good. (Are “general welfare” and “enhance” defined?)

Mark 543 says:

April 4, 2014 at 8:57 am
You have misread the paper, or have not read it. By “rationale” they mean a rational explanation for the observed phenomena, not a moral justification for the behavior. The paper goes on to say “However, because people update their beliefs using the Bayesian rule, such information manipulation has a negative externality on the other state when climate damage is really huge, in which case the aforementioned information provider will not be sufficiently trusted even if it indicates the true state.” In other words, crying wolf leads to greater skepticism.

The paper also makes serious claims about errors in Al Gore’s film and an earlier IPCC report.

Aphan says:

April 4, 2014 at 9:16 am
Hang on a moment, I hate it when the AGW crowd says something about a paper that the paper itself doesnt actually say. We also wouldn’t to be guilty of “exaggerating” the claims in this paper would we?

The “article” (as opposed to a study) as represented above does NOT say anything about scientists manipulating data or using corrupt methods in scientific studies. It speaks to how the MEDIA and environmental groups manipulate and exaggerate “the damage done by climate change” to further their agendas.

Those are two very different things and I think we on the sceptical side of things need to be just as careful with how accurately we reflect the conclusions of papers we dont agree with as we are the ones we do.

Conspiracy theorists vs sceptical readers

There are many more comments archived here, which can largely be split into two types as above:

• the conspiracy theorising deniers - of whom Anthony Watts is one in this instance, and
• the sceptical deniers - and there are a small number who aren't taken in by Anthony's spin.

---

Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao, "Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements", Am. J. Agr. Econ. (2014); doi: 10.1093/ajae/aau001


There's another paper here that you might be interested in:

Hong, Fuhai, and Larry Karp. "International environmental agreements with mixed strategies and investment." Journal of Public Economics 96, no. 9 (2012): 685-697.

A Habitat of Denial: Polyploidy weeds out the illiterati plants at WUWT

This time Anthony decides to mock a scientific paper with a "Friday Funny" (archived here).  The paper is a comparing diploid and polyploid populations for a number of different species of plants.  The scientists found that "more often than not, polyploids shared the same habitats as their close relatives with normal genome sizes."  They concluded that the general wisdom, that polyploidy conferred an advantage in helping plants survive new extreme environments, may be wrong.  Their conclusion:

“This means that environmental factors do not play a large role in the establishment of new plant species and that maybe other factors, like the ability to spread your seeds to new locations with similar habitats, are more important,” said Glennon.

You can read about the paper here at The University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.  Or if you have a subs, you can get the paper here at Ecology Letters.  Supporting info is downloadable.

Selective breeding for climate change

Anthony Watts is missing the point of the research when he writes:

Apparently, all that work in selective crop breeding won’t overcome ‘climate change’

Selective breeding is done to express particular attributes to better suit the environment in which a plant is to be grown.  It is a deliberate selection.  There are limits to the conditions any particular plant species can thrive in, even with genetic modification. So in future, some crops will no longer be able to be grown profitably (or at all) in regions where climate changes. In that sense, selective breeding won't overcome climate change in many locales.  But it will help in others where the changes are not too extreme.

Polyploidy and agriculture 

Anthony displays his lack of research skills as well as his ignorance of agriculture and plant research when he writes:

I’m thinking they’d test this on actual crops, like corn, wheat, soybeans, or the like, crops we consume and that are important to economies. That would make sense, right? But then, I remembered that this is about ‘climate change’, where nothing makes much sense anymore.

Does he realise that "actual crops" are highly domesticated and there aren't too many populations of "wild" modern varieties of "corn, wheat, soybeans or the like".  And although there may (or may not) be polyploid populations of the progenitors or wild relatives of modern "corn, wheat, soybeans or the like" growing alongside diploid populations, for the purposes of the study itself, it doesn't matter what species were studied.

Anthony's ignorance of plant science and agriculture is one thing.  He is also lazy and didn't investigate the research itself.  Anthony decides that the researchers only studied one plant species, Larrea tridentata (creosote bush).  He was wrong.  The scientists studied several different species directly.  In addition they did a literature survey of several other species, which they documented in the supporting information.

Whether the researchers are likely to be correct in their conclusion or not, I'm not in a position to judge.  It's obvious that plants must be able to spread seeds to new locations if the species are to survive beyond a change to their original habitat. The extent to which those new locations must have similar conditions to the ones the original population had is the question and the point of the research.  These scientists propose that the habitat must be not too different and their research supports that conclusion.

The implications for agricultural crops is that there is a limit to what selective breeding can do in regard to developing varieties resistant to climate change.  For example, large changes in rainfall patterns, total rainfall, temperature (frost days, excessive heat) etc will be too much for some crop species even with selective breeding.  So some cropping areas will probably revert to grazing or different crops.  Some pastoral areas will get even drier, requiring a reduction in the stocking rate (or none at all). Other areas may get more and better rainfall allowing more productive pasture species and a higher stocking rate - depending on the soil.

The Diploid/Polyploid Fake Sceptic doesn't thrive outside its normal habitat

Are the various Fake Sceptic Spp. diploid or polyploid or are there both?  What happens to the denialiati when they try to leave their habitat?  In my observations of the occasional specimen that strays onto a science blog, these Fake Sceptic Spp don't thrive outside their normal habitat.

From the WUWT comments

Most of those commenting are just boasting about how they place no value on scientific research (but they are willing to reap the benefits).  Archived here.

vigilantfish says let's go for rational solutions. Does he mean the rational solution that these wheat farmers in WA have opted for?:

February 21, 2014 at 6:12 am
Gee, I wonder how wheat crops will fare when the climate ‘changes’? Oh, wait… different varieties have already been bred to grow in a wide range of climatic conditions.
I guess we’re too stupid to be able to continue using rational solutions. Actually, given the recent focus and conclusions of so many scientIFic studies, perhaps, worryingly, we are becoming that stupid. Aaargh!

Ljh disputes the relative stability of the climate of the Cape Region of South Africa and says:

February 21, 2014 at 6:26 am
The claim that the climate of the Western Cape has been stable for hundreds of thousands of years is absurd. The tiny, but phenomenally rich, floral kingdom found there, is presently the recipient of winter rainfall brought by the westerly wind belt shifting north and kept dry by prevailing southeasterly trade winds in summer. At the end of the last Ice Age it received exclusively summer rainfall with a period in between when it received both, all within thirteen thousand years.

Scientists don't agree with Ljh, for example this paper refers to climate stability since "sometime after the beginning of the Pliocene", which began about 5.3 million years ago (my bold italics):

Species richness in the Cape Region is hypothesized to have resulted from the presence of a complex mosaic of diverse habitats and steep ecological gradients against a background of relatively stable climate and geology after the mediterranean climate was established there sometime after the beginning of the Pliocene. A local or ecological mode of speciation may have been more important under these conditions than allopatric speciation.

MamaLiberty says food crops can grow in "almost any climate imaginable".  Mama's heading off to do some farming on the top of a mountain in the Antarctic interior after trying her/his hand in the Simpson Desert  (excerpt):

February 21, 2014 at 6:31 am
...As for food crops, all that is really necessary is abundant and low cost energy to deal with almost any climate change imaginable. Green houses and subterranean farms would be effective almost everywhere. The climate hysterics insist on attempting to pour two quarts of liquid into a one quart container – and call it “science.” 

Patrick doesn't know the difference between weather and climate and says:

February 21, 2014 at 6:50 am
Creosote bush? I used to live in the High Desert area of Southern California where the creosote bush thrives in summer daytime temperatures exceeding 115F while dropping to about 70F at night. Now, that’s climate change!

Big Don makes a valid point but he didn't understand the research did look at plant populations in different locations and examined the climatic differences.  In other words, they did what he suggested.

February 21, 2014 at 7:04 am
I don’t understand how the conclusion of the study was reached. If the polyploid and diploid variants of a given genome were living in the same environment, wouldn’t you expect them to resemble one another? What would be the driver for one plant to morph into something else? Wouldn’t it be a better experiment to look for species in neighboring, yet contrasting environments (Mountain tops vs. low valley at the base, for example) to see if there are polyploids that have similar genomes, yet have quite different adaptations?

I wonder if Robert W Turner uses groundwater for irrigation? He says:

February 21, 2014 at 7:45 am
Right, we were thinking in Kansas of switching out wheat for coffee in preparation for climate change but then remembered we don’t live in the same fantasy world as these clowns.

TonyG might not recognise the truth in what he writes when he says:

February 21, 2014 at 12:19 pm
If it gets any warmer, our crops won’t be able to handle the heat. They’ll burn up, we won’t have as much food, and we’ll all starve.

If it gets cooler, they won’t be able to take the cold. They’ll freeze, we’ll have shorter growing seasons and the crops won’t grow as well, and we’ll all starve.

So I’ve been told.

Pathway seems to not be aware of the famines and the consequent loss of life in the Little Ice Age. Nor is he aware that we are heading for a much greater change in the climate than the relatively small drop in temperature that caused the Little Ice Age when he says:

February 21, 2014 at 12:34 pm
Because we are onmivors we adapt our food sources to survive. During the depth of the Little Ice Age european culture moved from cereal crops to tubers and increase their live stock inventory and got along just fine. Human occupy every niche on the planet. A one or two degree increase in temperature, especially at the poles is not going to make any difference in our survival.

AndyG55 didn't even get as far as the location of the University and says:

February 21, 2014 at 1:52 pm
“Although her study examined plant species from North America and Europe only, she is looking forward to testing her hypotheses using South African plants.”
——————-
Been to North America, toured Europe..now looking forward to her taxpayer funded trip to South Africa. 

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Kelsey Glennon. Evidence for shared broad-scale climatic niches of diploid and polyploid plants. Ecology Letters, 2014 DOI: 1111/ele.12259

Goldblatt, Peter. "Floristic diversity in the Cape flora of South Africa." Biodiversity & Conservation 6, no. 3 (1997): 359-377. DOI 10.1023/A:1018360607299

Roy Spencer's Dummy Spit shows his lack of education

Roy Spencer has spat the dummy, blown his top, ranted and raved and fulfilled Godwin's Law (archived here - h/t Dumb Scientist).  Roy Spencer has decided to object to the term "denier" to describe him, writing:

When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it.

They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.

Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison. It’s time to push back.

I’m now going to start calling these people “global warming Nazis”.

If I understand Roy correctly, he is agreeing that he doesn't think global warming is "necessarily all manmade" and saying that he doesn't think it is a serious problem.  In other words he denies the science - and is sexist, too.

Global warming isn't all "man" made.  It's likely that more than 100% of the current warming is because of human activity.  "Made" by men and women. And it's definitely a serious problem and going to get worse if we don't do something about it.

Roy Spencer doesn't just deny the science, though, does he.  He fudges charts to try to make it appear that model projections are more off than they have been in reality.

Under-educated Roy Spencer

Roy has signed up to the illiterati, equating what he calls over-education with fascism.  Here is what he wrote:

This authoritarianism tends to happen with an over-educated elite class…I have read that Nazi Germany had more PhDs per capita than any other country. I’m not against education, but it seems like some of the stupidest people are also the most educated.. 

Now Roy is from the USA.  Americans don't speak the Queen's English. They speak a dialect known as American English.  (Australians, by contrast, speak Strine.)  Not only that, but Roy's from Alabama, which is not probably considered the home of elite US society and is arguably not the first place one would equate with a quality education.  So he can perhaps be excused for not understanding the Queen's English.

So let this Strine-speaker educate American Roy Spencer on the definition of the word "denier" in the Queen's English - using the Oxford Dictionary:

In the interest of full disclosure, I joined the Oxford logo onto the Oxford definition rather than post the entire web page.  You can view the definition here on the Oxford Dictionary website.

A prominent denier of climate science

If Roy Spencer was, for a change, being brutally honest about himself.  If he was arguing that he doesn't admit "the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historic evidence", then he is a climate science "denier".  He's tried his best to rise to prominence by touting himself as a climate science denier to the Republican Party in the USA to such an extent that he was invited by them to present to a committee of the US government, arguably because of his denial.  So he could even be referred to as "a prominent denier" in climate science denying circles in the USA.

If you want to read Roy's dummy spit - go here.  It's not the sort of thing you'd expect a climate scientist to write.  It's not even the sort of thing you'd expect to read on a snark blog, like HotWhopper. It is the sort of thing you'll find every day on the more extreme anti-science websites.

PS Roy's article didn't make the cut at WUWT - or not yet that I've seen.

Anthony Watts in Somerset: not back-peddling, dredging up dredging at WUWT

As Bob Ward wrote, the terrible UK floods are doing strange things to fake sceptics.

After I wrote this article about how Anthony Watts decided that mammoth floods in Somerset were all because "the one pump" was "turned off", he shifted tack.  He isn't back-peddling, he's shuffling sideways - morphing into dredging.

Who cares why? Blame it on the guvmint!

Anthony has re-written his headline and changed his introduction.  He's decided to jump on the "dredging" bandwagon instead of the "one pump was turned off" silliness.  This latest idea of Anthony's doesn't have too many takers outside of the anti-science mob in cyberspace and a few people in the UK who are looking for someone to blame.  Anthony Watts wants to blame the "guvmint", so he's prepared to sacrifice evidence and expert advice for the sake of keeping his ideology-driven denier mates happy.

(It's interesting that he's not saying that people are to blame for living on the Somerset Levels. It would be supremely ironic if fake sceptics got so incensed with guvmints that they started blaming them for adverse weather events.)

This tweet from Anthony Watts:

and this headline (as archived here and as I discussed here)

The real reason for flooding in Somerset Levels? Not global warming – the pump was turned off!

has become this (archived here):

The real reason for flooding in Somerset Levels? Not global warming – river management
...The real issue has to do with the lack of flow capacity in the Kings Sedgemoor Drain, (gravity drain, not pumped) due to silting and vegetation encroachment, as well as similar issues in the River Parrett where a campaign was launched in 2013 to get it dredged, to no avail. ...

Anthony Watts refuses to acknowledge that the real reason for the flooding in Somerset Levels is unrelenting record rain and storms.  

Anthony Watts couldn't accept that rain can cause floods. I don't know why he won't accept that.  It's probably the same disability that stops him from accepting that as the ice melts, sea levels will rise.

Dredging won't prevent floods like this, say the experts

As for dredging, the experts say that's not the answer.  From the BBC:

Dredging is a "cruel offer of false hope" to those living in flood-prone communities according to a new report.

The document is the work of an independent body of experts from the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM).

It says that solely relying on dredging could make some areas more vulnerable to rising waters.

The CIWEM says working with nature to slow down the rate that landscapes drain water is a more practical option.

From New Scientist:

The trouble is, the recent deluge has been so sustained that nothing could have prevented all the flooding, says Cloke. "I've just been down to the Thames, and it's really full. It would be unrealistic to think you can control these enormous floods with any measures."

"The solution for residents and communities is to adapt to living with it," Cloke says. "They shouldn't expect the government or the Environment Agency to protect them from a flood that's impossible to protect against."

From the Guardian:

The Somerset Levels sit near sea level, such that the river-to-sea gradient is very shallow. This means that even if they are dredged, rivers will only drain during low tide. And widening the channels will actually allow more of the high tide to enter.

Land and waterways can be managed to reduce the damage caused by heavy rains and flooding and undoubtedly these latest floods will result in changes.  However, it won't stop rain or storms or floods from ever happening again.

Eventually, as sea levels rise and if the recent trend to flooding continues, the UK might have to adopt similar strategies to the Netherlands for low-lying areas like the Levels.

Anthony Watts takes on Kevin Trenberth and loses big time

I often wonder, as I'm sure you do, if Anthony Watts ever reads any of the articles he puts up at WUWT.  Today he's posted about an article in Nature, which in part draws on a paper by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo published late last year.

Thing is, Anthony has already posted a number of articles about Trenberth and Fasullo (2013).  There is this one by Bob Tisdale, which I wrote about here. And this one and this one - both also by Bob Tisdale.  Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale was trying to argue that Trenberth and Fasullo were cheating or something silly like that.  (Since I wrote the main article, Anthony has elevated his piece to a "sticky", which just shows what HotWhopper readers know from past experience, Anthony's memory is not that great.)

In this latest WUWT article (archived here), Anthony wrote this, as if it was the first article about the Trenberth Fasullo paper at WUWT, instead of the fourth in a just a little over a month:

From the “settled science” department. It seems even Dr. Kevin Trenberth is now admitting to the cyclic influences of the AMO and PDO on global climate. Neither “carbon” nor “carbon dioxide” is mentioned in this article that cites Trenberth as saying: “The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,”

This is significant, as it represents a coming to terms with “the pause” not only by Nature, but by Trenberth too.

For anyone who knows of Kevin Trenberth's work, to say that first second sentence of Anthony's is ludicrous would be an understatement.

Kevin Trenberth has been publishing papers about the oceans for more than forty years.  He knows more about oceans than all the purported hundreds of thousands of WUWT readers combined. John Fasullo is younger, but if you combine them, they have more than 55 person years of science between them.

If Anthony Watts is interested in tracking the history of discovery of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, he could do a lot worse than starting with the following two seminal papers by Kevin Trenberth, going back nearly 25 years:

Trenberth, Kevin E. "Recent observed interdecadal climate changes in the Northern Hemisphere." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 71, no. 7 (1990): 988-993.

Trenberth, Kevin E., and James W. Hurrell. "Decadal atmosphere-ocean variations in the Pacific." Climate Dynamics 9, no. 6 (1994): 303-319.


Since we're tracking back history, this 1981 paper might be of interest - though it's probably peripheral to the subject, it was cited in Mantua, Hare et al (1997).

Trenberth, Kevin E., and Daniel A. Paolino Jr. "Characteristic patterns of variability of sea level pressure in the Northern Hemisphere." Monthly Weather Review 109, no. 6 (1981): 1169-1189.

What caught my eye was the opening sentence, particularly given Anthony's opening comments about Dr Trenberth "finally admitting to ... cyclic influences":

The atmospheric circulation is characterized by various "centers of action" which are spatially interdependent.

Since I've plugged the references here, I'll add the PDO paper:

Mantua, Nathan J., Steven R. Hare, Yuan Zhang, John M. Wallace, and Robert C. Francis. "A Pacific interdecadal climate oscillation with impacts on salmon production." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 78, no. 6 (1997): 1069-1079.


Back to the Nature article - here are some key excerpts discussing the "hiatus" in surface temperature rise in recent years:

Trenberth, ... estimated that aerosols and solar activity account for just 20% of the hiatus. That leaves the bulk of the hiatus to the oceans, which serve as giant sponges for heat. And here, the spotlight falls on the equatorial Pacific.

...Just before the hiatus took hold, that region had turned unusually warm during the El Niño of 1997–98, which fuelled extreme weather across the planet, from floods in Chile and California to droughts and wildfires in Mexico and Indonesia. But it ended just as quickly as it had begun, and by late 1998 cold waters — a mark of El Niño’s sister effect, La Niña — had returned to the eastern equatorial Pacific with a vengeance. More importantly, the entire eastern Pacific flipped into a cool state that has continued more or less to this day.

This variation in ocean temperature, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), may be a crucial piece of the hiatus puzzle. The cycle reverses every 15–30 years, and in its positive phase, the oscillation favours El Niño, which tends to warm the atmosphere (see ‘The fickle ocean’). After a couple of decades of releasing heat from the eastern and central Pacific, the region cools and enters the negative phase of the PDO. This state tends towards La Niña, which brings cool waters up from the depths along the Equator and tends to cool the planet. Researchers identified the PDO pattern in 1997, but have only recently begun to understand how it fits in with broader ocean-circulation patterns and how it may help to explain the hiatus.

One important finding came in 2011, when a team of researchers at NCAR led by Gerald Meehl reported that inserting a PDO pattern into global climate models causes decade-scale breaks in global warming3. Ocean-temperature data from the recent hiatus reveal why: in a subsequent study, the NCAR researchers showed that more heat moved into the deep ocean after 1998, which helped to prevent the atmosphere from warming6. In a third paper, the group used computer models to document the flip side of the process: when the PDO switches to its positive phase, it heats up the surface ocean and atmosphere, helping to drive decades of rapid warming7.

A key breakthrough came last year from Shang-Ping Xie and Yu Kosaka at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The duo took a different tack, by programming a model with actual sea surface temperatures from recent decades in the eastern equatorial Pacific, and then seeing what happened to the rest of the globe8. Their model not only recreated the hiatus in global temperatures, but also reproduced some of the seasonal and regional climate trends that have marked the hiatus, including warming in many areas and cooler northern winters.

...That was investigated by Trenberth and John Fasullo, also at NCAR, who brought in winds and ocean data to explain how the pattern emerges4. Their study documents how tropical trade winds associated with La Niña conditions help to drive warm water westward and, ultimately, deep into the ocean, while promoting the upwelling of cool waters along the eastern equatorial region. In extreme cases, such as the La Niña of 1998, this may be able to push the ocean into a cool phase of the PDO. An analysis of historical data buttressed these conclusions, showing that the cool phase of the PDO coincided with a few decades of cooler temperatures after the Second World War (see ‘The Pacific’s global reach’), and that the warm phase lined up with the sharp spike seen in global temperatures between 1976 and 1998 (ref. 4).

The article goes on to discuss the work of Mark Cane, who proposes that global warming may lead to extended La Ninas.  Other scientists' work suggests that global warming may lead to more El Ninos. Time (and more research) will tell.

Now you'll be wondering why Anthony Watts mentioned the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.  So am I.  It isn't mentioned in the Nature article although it is mentioned in Trenberth and Fasullo (2013).  Maybe Anthony actually read a scientific paper (not likely).

From the WUWT comments

There aren't any stand out comments, so I'll award the comment of the day to Anthony Watts himself for his opening comments about Kevin Trenberth, who was arguably very influential in shaping the understanding of what we know today as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Most WUWT readers will be in for a big shock when the next El Nino arrives.


DirkH doesn't have a clue about climate models and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:10 am
“The simplest explanation for both the hiatus and the discrepancy in the models is natural variability.”

No, that’s nonsense. The simplest explanation is that the theory is falsified, and that the models are wrong. In fact, EVERYTHING points at the models being wrong, false and useless. Not ONE thing points to the models being right, correct, or useful. There are simply no such reports. We should see thousands of triumphant papers confirming again and again that the models got this right and that right after many years of painstaking development, but we NEVER see any such report.

That’s like celebrating the 100,000th Lancaster bomber built and shipped over the Atlantic while not one of them ever made it through the Kammhuber line.

johnmarshall is a "scientists don't no nuffin'" denier and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:12 am
Trenberth getting a reality hit?
One of his problems is a complete misunderstanding of latent heat which is where much heat has been used for in cooling at the surface and has stupid graphic in AR4 which uses a flat earth with 24/7 sunlight and no idea from where radiated energy comes from.

Chris Marlowe says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:29 am
The smartest of these guys will be looking for an exit strategy and will eventually look the other way if anyone suggests they were once on the bandwagon beating the drum.

Stephen Richards is a conspiracy nutter and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:36 am
What I don’t want is for these guys to remain in place when this whole scam is exposed. Like Erlich they will just keep coming back with another scare for money scheme.

M Courtney struggles to understand climate and energy accumulation and says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:46 am
Not sure that this report does fully recognise the impact of natural cycles.
It seems to think that the cooling phase of the PDO exactly balances the warming from Greenhouse gases over several decades when the emissions have varied.

That raises two questions:
1 How come the balancing is so precise – are our emissions coupled to the PDO or is their effect swamped by the PDO?

2 If the PDO can match the magnitude of AGW on th ecool sided, can it match the magnitude of AGW on the warm side? If so, how do we know any of the 20thC warming was manmade?

Ivor Ward misunderstands what's written and thinks that Kevin Trenberth agrees with Bob Tisdale that there are leprechauns burning coal fires in the oceans and says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:02 am
So essentially he is saying that Bob Tisdale is right and he was wrong. Why does Trenberth not just say that and get it over with?

Jim Cripwell is about right (except when it comes to Australia's PM Tony Abbott) when he says (excerpt):

January 16, 2014 at 5:12 am
Unfortunately, what is written on WUWT carries little weight with our politicians and the MSM. 

graphicconception also mistakenly thinks that Kevin Trenberth attributes global warming to leprechauns like Bob Tisdale does, and says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:24 am
The temperature graph is a kind of integration of the PDO Index graph.
(You need to add 0.6 to the Index, cumulate and then scale. Where do I collect my Nobel Prize?)

So as Bob Tisdale has been saying, if I understand it correctly, PDO variations are not just oscillations about a mean. They leave a resultant change.

evanmjones knows nothing about science either.  I bet he thinks a fake sceptic invented the PDO when he says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:29 am
Yeah, they finally discovered the PDO. Sort of like a professional secretary discovering the Shift key. Bloody amateurs.
Now they need to “discover” that their panic was due to a positive PDO and, consequently, their “projections” were at least twice too high. Then maybe they can learn the rest of the alphabet . . .

I can't say I agree with clivebest when he says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:56 am
The graphic above shows that we have only just entered a new 30 year long cool period of the PDO. This means that there will be no further warming until ~2030. Warming may well then resume after 2030, but whichever way you look at it, climate sensitivity looks to be about one half of current IPCC estimates. How is the IPCC going to keep the egg off its face for the next 15 years ?

Source: NOAA

Conspiracy nutter Timothy spawned an idiot in David Ball, who says:

January 16, 2014 at 6:13 am
“Now, after having wasted at least 30 years of public money and time due to our false ideology, we return you to your regularly scheduled viewing,…..”
Idiots.

Resourceguy says:

January 16, 2014 at 6:26 am
At some point the deadenders will attack the wavering warmists and excommunicate them from the treasure hunt known as carbon tax revenue. The only question is whether it will be a peaceful process or a North Korean-style purge.

Clay Marley is mistaken if he thinks Bob Tisdale invented the "sloshing" ENSO.  Unlike Bob, who thinks the oceans will keep warming forever, Clay  is hopeful that Earth's temperatures will one day return to "normal".  He says "it has to end...":

January 16, 2014 at 6:38 am
First I’d heard the term “sloshing” is in Tisdale’s posts and book. It isn’t intended to be a scientifiky term. That Trentberth uses it probably means at least that he is reading Tisdale, which would be a good thing. But he is hoping/praying for another strong El Niño that would start the warming again.

Tisdale is saying that a strong El Niño will cause a rapid SST rise over much of the earth. After the event, SST’s cool slowly. If the El Niño events come frequently enough there isn’t enough time between them to cool completely. Thus we see a stairstep warming with slight cooling between events. This is what has been happening since around 1918.

It has to end though. We can’t keep getting strong El Niños until the oceans boil. So there must be some process that slows and weakens the El Niños and allows the rest-of-world to get back to lower temps.

Richard M says that Dr Trenberth "don't know nuffin'" about oceans and could learn a thing or two from Perennially Puzzled Bob.  This one is runner-up comment of the day - after Anthony's opening comment:

January 16, 2014 at 7:15 am
Trenberth doesn’t realize that El Niño events might not quite work the same during a -PDO. As Tisdale has demonstrated it is the after effects of the El Niño during a +PDO that have a lot to do with the step up warming that occurs even after the following La Niña. I have a feeling that the changes in circulation in a -PDO will eliminate that effect (didn’t see it during the 2009-2010 El Niño). That is probably why the global temperature falls during a -PDO.

I wonder how many copies of Tisdale’s books will find their way to NCAR? Or, should I say …. have found their way?

These WUWT-ers aren't just scientifically illiterate. They are deluded.  Here's another one from  Economic Geologist who says:

January 16, 2014 at 7:42 am
I think Trenberth is reading Tisdale, but will never give him credit. The AGW crowd will slowly morph their scientific positions as their predictions continue to fail, and no-one will be held accountable for all the money wasted on useless, misguided research. And no-one in the skeptic camp will be acknowledged for having seen the weaknesses in the climate community’s science. There’s no justice in this world.

Oh - that's more than enough. I can't be bothered reading the rest. You can read more here if you want to.

Maurice Newman: A Self-Portrait of an Utter Nutter Science Denier

Warning to newcomers to climate science

I owe readers a warning. I don't normally highlight people who comment here because I like to encourage discussion.  However there are a number of somewhat complex issues that have been touched on in the comments below that could confuse someone who isn't familiar with science in general (and geology and climate science in particular).  In the comments below there is a lot of nonsense being posted by Greig, who rejects the greenhouse effect among other things.  He claims to understand science but he doesn't know the first thing about geology or climate. His comments are unadulterated pseudo-science at best.  Just as Maurice Newman did a self-portrait of himself as a science denier, Greig has done the same.

Sou Friday 17 January, 2014 9:00 pm AEDST

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Australia's Maurice Newman comes across as a first order climate disinformer.  He's a plain vanilla climate science denier of the WUWT kind.  An embarrassment to the nation.  A shameful product of the right wing establishment.

Maurice Newman has held high profile positions in Australia.  Until recently he chaired the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.  Tony Abbott has just elevated him to chair the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council.  You'd think that our PM could find a less nutty person to lead that group.  (I hope that Tony Abbott gets turfed soon - and you never know.  A week is a long time in politics.  As each week passes our political leaders do worse and worse.)

Today the Climate Council announced a report that shows how heat waves are getting longer, lasting longer and getting hotter. As an almost complete contrast, yesterday, Maurice Newman followed up his previous climate science denial with more - and just as silly.  In effect it's his own self-portrait of himself as an utter nutter science denier.  Here are some excerpts from yesterday's Australian.

GIVEN the low-grade attacks on me following my piece "Crowds go cold on climate cost" (The Australian, Dec 31) readers of Fairfax publications and The Guardian may be shocked to hear I believe in climate change. I also accept carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The trouble is, I cannot reconcile the claims of dangerous human CO2 emissions with the observed record.

Maurice is probably referring to articles like these ones by Graham Readfearn in the Guardian and by climate scientist David Karoly in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Maurice is saying he's a lukewarmer denier and "accepts" that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.  He's one of the "it's not bad" science deniers.  He doesn't accept science but he doesn't want to be seen as an utter nutter.  However read on - he is just another nutter and this little protest doesn't change that fact.

Maurice "I'm not a climate scientist" Newman says he knows better than climate scientists

Then he makes excuses saying he's not a climate scientist - as if that wasn't bloody obvious!

I admit it. I am not a climate scientist. 

Well, these climate scientists are climate scientists, Maurice.  You should listen to them.

Maurice "not a climate scientist" continues:

That said, I have closely followed this debate for more than two decades, having been seasoned originally by the global cooling certainty of the 1970s.

What debate, Maurice?  There is no debate about the fundamentals of climate science and greenhouse warming.  You are just making that up

Maurice - your ideology is showing

Oh, so he's not a climate science but he says the IPCC is "dominated by politics not science".  I bet you he hasn't ever read an IPCC report.

The climate consensus of the 70s, like the period since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988, was dominated by politics, not science. I was reminded of how deeply political awareness has infected today's academies when I received an apology from a respected climate scientist who corrected his own public cheap shot at me. He said, "I attempt to be politically even-handed ... I try to steer a middle course as a scientist."

Is Maurice Newman an evolution denier too, I wonder?

Despite saying that science is about evidence, Maurice quotes evolution denier Roy Spencer and disregards the other 99.99999% of climate science.

Really? Surely science is not about neutrality? It is about evidence and conclusions which fall where they will. So when an internationally acclaimed climatologist like Roy Spencer from the University of Alabama at Huntsville dispassionately analyses climate models covering 33 years and concludes that both the surface and satellite observations produce linear temperature trends that are below 87 of the 90 models used in the comparison, he does not politically neutralise his findings. They are empirical fact.

Maurice Newman doesn't check facts 1

Maurice Newman wouldn't know empirical fact if he fell over it.  Just see what I mean:

They eventually become political because the models he demonstrates to be seriously flawed are the bedrock on which the IPCC's global warming case is built. As Spencer said recently, "The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence of low climate sensitivity for many years ... The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new thing ... just one that is becoming more glaring over time."

Now if Maurice Newman had cared about fact, he would have checked this claim.  Let's look at this supposed discrepancy - without error bars:

In recent years up to 2005 the models could scarcely be closer to observations.  You wouldn't think so if you accepted Maurice Newman's disinformation.  The question is, why does Maurice Newman take the word of a known contrarian who disregards a lot of climate science because of his pseudo-religious beliefs?

Maurice Newman doesn't check facts 2

Wait a minute, Maurice has found another contrarian to quote.  Again he discounts virtually the entirety of climate science to quote from someone who's left the field of climate science.  Someone who was unable to "prove" his hypothesis about clouds counteracting global warming. (His Iris Hypothesis).

Spencer is joined by celebrated Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen, who says: "I think that the latest (AR5) IPCC report has truly sunk to a level of hilarious incoherence. They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase." He is "willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now". Any takers?

Any takers on that bet?  Well, first of all, Lindzen claims he was misquoted.  And it looks as if he is still being misquoted nine years later by Maurice Newman.  If Maurice Newman won't bother to check a quote from one of his contrarians, what does that say about his ability to tell the truth when it comes to anything else?

For the record, Lindzen's challenge (that he denies making) was made/not made in 2004.  In the nine years since then, every year bar one (2008) has been hotter than 2004.  I bet Lindzen is glad that no-one took him up on it in the end - there's still eleven years to go - but just the same....

Maurice Newman falls back on old denier memes

Maurice Newman is full of denier memes. (I wonder what nickname he uses when he comments at WUWT.) Take this next bit for example:

The lengthening pause in global warming is influencing the political climate. The language has changed from the specific "global warming" to the more general "climate change" and now to the astrological "extreme weather events" where "I told you so" can be almost universally applied.

Maurice doesn't even know what the letters "IPCC" stand for!  And he has the gall to pontificate on climate science.

Maurice Newman Climate Disinformer

Maurice continues with some straight out disinformation by omission, writing.

For example, we are to believe the recent cold spell in the US and the heat wave in Australia are both examples of global warming. Yet 2013 was one of the "least extreme" weather years in US history.

It was the "least extreme" weather in US history?  What does Maurice base that on?  Not on drought records, that's for sure. Nor on flood records. And why doesn't he mention the fact that 2013 was the hottest year on record for Australia? Or that 2012 was the hottest year on record for continental USA?

Who's to blame for the lack of political will?

And then Maurice Newman has the cheek to write about "political will", saying:

Political will is also flagging. The Copenhagen summit was almost five years ago, yet there is still no global, legally binding international agreement on emission reduction targets. Only talk.

If it wasn't for loudmouth deniers like Maurice Newman, Tony Abbott and others, then political will might have done the right thing.

Shoddy Maurice Newman is unravelling

Maurice Newman is a fine one to talk about shoddy.  He writes this - note his reference to Donna Laframboise.  I mean Donna "in the dustbin" Laframboise for goodness sake!:

What we now see is the unravelling of years of shoddy science and sloppy journalism. If it wasn't for independent Murdoch newspapers around the world, the mainstream media would be almost completely captured by the IPCC establishment. That is certainly true in Australia. For six or seven years we were bullied into accepting that the IPCC's assessment reports were the climate science bible. Its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, told us the IPCC relied solely on peer-reviewed literature. Then Murdoch papers alerted us to scientific scandals and Donna Laframboise, in her book The Delinquent Teenager, astonished us with her extraordinary revelation that of 18,000 references in the IPCC's AR4 report, one-third were not peer reviewed. Some were Greenpeace press releases, others student papers and working papers from a conference. In some chapters, the majority of references were not peer reviewed. Many lead authors were inexperienced, or linked to advocate groups like WWF and Greenpeace. Why are we not surprised?

Maurice Newman's UN Conspiracy Theory

If you were starting to think Maurice Newman is just another nutter you'd be right.  Read this bit, where he talks about the UN and a "cartel".  Oh, he mightn't be quite as obvious about it all as Tim Ball (here and here) - but all the ingredients are there, simmering away under Maurice's tin foil hat.

The IPCC was bound to be captured by the green movement. After all, it is a political body. It is not a panel of scientists but a panel of governments driven by the UN. Its sole purpose is to assess the risks of human-induced climate change. It has spawned industries. One is scientists determined to find an anthropogenic cause. Another is climate remediation. And, naturally, an industry to redistribute taxes to sustain it all. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, this cartel will deny all contrary evidence. Its very survival depends on it. But the tide is turning and Mother Nature has signalled her intention not to co-operate.

Maurice and his childish attacks

Finally, Maurice does a bit of concern trolling - complaining about "childish personal attacks".

In the meantime, childish personal attacks on those who point out flaws in IPCC reasoning and advice only increase scepticism. They are no substitute for empirical evidence and are well into diminishing returns. The party's over.

This is after he's labelled all the world's climate scientists (except for Roy Spencer and Richard Lindzen) as being political not scientific, of doing shoddy science and of bullying.  Well, whoopy doo, Maurice.  You are the one spreading disinformation.  You are the one who is denying climate science and promulgating disinformation. You've got to expect "personal attacks" and people questioning your motives.