Scott Adams puff piece on disputing climate science torn apart by Victor Venema

Scott Adams is very perceptive of the human condition in his Dilbert cartoons. He is not as perceptive when it comes to things that matter a lot. (From my reading of his tweets recently, he fell for conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and for the lies of Donald Trump, for example.) Today he's come out as a wilful science denier - or as good as.

I would love to do an analysis of Scott Adams' new article for fake sceptics, but I have more pressing matters to attend to right at this moment. In the comments to his article I did ask him to elucidate one point he made. I wrote:

Scott, I appreciate you want to hedge your bets, that you aren't able to learn about climate science despite all the information available to the general public, and that your preferred position is that climate science is a hoax but you aren't game enough to say it out loud.

You say: "In my experience, and based on my training, it is normal and routine for the “majority of experts” to be completely wrong about important stuff."

Can you list three examples? I am keen to see examples that are comparable. That is, where 98% of the thousands of scientific experts on the subject have for decades been finding one result (made up of multiple results pointing to the same conclusion) based on theory and observation, and it turned out to be completely wrong. Not merely opinion on some minor matter, I'm talking about situations where the same theories have been shown to be consistent with observations every time in one context, but for some reason not in a different context.

If as you say this is "normal and routine", just three examples that are comparable to showing 200 years of an entire large scientific field are completely off track, should be a breeze for you. That is, unless this was just a throwaway comment of the type that fake sceptics make to support their authoritarian inclinations.

What is interesting is that he refers to his "experience and training" as support for his claim, but provides not a jot of evidence for that claim. At the same time, he dismisses as largely irrelevant the "experience and training" based on years of observations and analysis of climate scientists over the past 200 years.

While I don't have time right now to write a detailed analysis, Victor Venema did manage to make the time. So go read what he's written - and dwell on it. Especially if, like Scott, you have an unhealthy rather than a healthy, scepticism of specialist advice.

WUWT shows that 99.9% of recent papers don't dispute mainstream climate science

Scientists will be surprised to find their papers featured on a list that claims they are science deniers. They won't be surprised to find that the list is being circulated by disinformer Anthony Watts and a rabid denier, Pierre Gosselin (archived here and here and here).

Pierre is the same person who, eight years ago in 2008, predicted that by 2020 the surface temperature would have dropped by 2.5 °C. That prediction isn't looking too hot right now. It would have to drop by 2.83 °C from 2015.

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature (blue) and Pierre Gosselin's 2008 prediction (red). Data sources: GISS NASA and WUWT

Pierre is as woeful at understanding science papers as he is at predicting global surface temperature.

Roy Spencer isn't always wrong ...

Roy Spencer is often wrong, at times deceitful and sometimes right. This time he is more right than wrong. He occasionally comes out with some home truths about climate science, which annoys some deniers no end.  They prefer to think he's always on their "side".

In the past Roy's written about the greenhouse effect, which was a magnet for "slayers". This time he's expanded his list and written:

Top Ten Skeptical Arguments that Don’t Hold Water

Anthony Watts has reposted Roy's article at WUWT (archived here). This is Anthony pretending to be "serious" about climate science. (Pity his credibility has been shot a thousand times and more, with all the rubbish he promotes.)

Here's the list - I'll just post the headers and you can fill in the blanks yourself - or check here for the details, because some of the headers are a bit ambiguous or misleading.

1. There is no greenhouse effect. 
2. The greenhouse effect violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. 
3. CO2 can’t cause warming because CO2 emits IR as fast as it absorbs. 
4. CO2 cools, not warms, the atmosphere. 
5. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere has no effect because the CO2 absorption bands are already 100% opaque. 
6. Lower atmospheric warmth is due to the lapse rate/adiabatic compression. 
7. Warming causes CO2 to rise, not the other way around 
8. The IPCC models are for a flat earth
9. There is no such thing as a global average temperature 
10. The earth isn’t a black body. 

From the WUWT comments

Fake sceptics were busy jockeying to position themselves as "real" sceptics, but most of them are just faking it. Others are happy to be seen as plain ordinary science deniers of varying kinds.  Here is a sample:

Gerard Harbison says:

May 1, 2014 at 6:05 am
Actually, I think it’s a very useful post, and I have no substantial disagreement with any of it.

PaulH is one of many who says:

May 1, 2014 at 6:11 am
Re. #9, I have no problem with the idea of calculating a global average temperature. My question is, what is the “correct” average (target) temperature, and who decides?

If he waits a bit he'll find quite a few people who'll decide when it's too hot for comfort, or too hot to grow the food they used to grow, or so hot the ice has melted and their home town is a new Atlantis.

Thomas Hogg and a few other commenters ask the impossible:

May 1, 2014 at 6:17 am
Could Dr Spencer complement this valuable article with its analogue
ie Ten Skeptical Arguments that do hold water?

Update: Roy Spencer hasn't delivered the impossible. He's tried but his effort is pathetic and fails the "hold water" test.


ferdberple comes out with his notion he's written before - that all that extra CO2 is pressing on the walls and ceiling and floor of the sky and stopping water from evaporating!

May 1, 2014 at 6:28 am
What effect does adding CO2 to the atmosphere have on water vapor? All things being equal, doesn’t increasing the partial pressure of CO2 by necessity make it harder for water to evaporate, reducing atmospheric moisture and thus reducing the GHG effect of water in the atmosphere?

Isn’t the reduction in atmospheric moisture consistent with long term observations? As CO2 is increasing, isn’t atmospheric H2O is decreasing? Otherwise, wouldn’t atmospheric pressure need to increase as per partial pressure law? Wouldn’t the increase in atmospheric pressure itself lead to warming?

Juergen MIchele says Roy Spencer is wrong - CO2 cools the planet:

May 1, 2014 at 6:28 am
Looking at your point 4. :
CO2 in the upper atmosphere blocks outgoing radiation from the earth surface.
But the incoming radiation from the sun in the relevant frequency range is hundredfold compared to the back radiation from earth.

As a consequence more CO2 cools!

Tom Stone says he's learnt something today:

May 1, 2014 at 6:32 am
Thank you Dr. Spencer. Until today, I was a proponent of fallacy #7. Science is at its best when it challenges itself with observational evidence.

And in the blink of an eye Tom Stone is relieved that thanks to the fake sceptics at WUWT he's unlearnt it again. Tom Stone says:

May 1, 2014 at 6:34 am
Some of the more recent posts indicate that I was not so wrong. Even better.

Mike M has come up with a doozy of an argument that proves categorically that all the scientists don't know nuffin', including Roy Spencer, and says he can't get a "palpable" answer. (Reminds me of the palatable leftists):

May 1, 2014 at 6:40 am 
Bob B says: May 1, 2014 at 6:31 am “Roy, I think your #7 is a strawman argument. I have seen it stated by skeptics that the temperature leads the rise in CO2 in the Vostok ice core records and not the other way around. I believe the data does indeed show that.”

Yes and I use that all the time while emphasizing the alarmist claim that “CO2 took over to push temperature even higher”. So if CO2 pushed it higher then how in the world did it manage to come back while CO2 remained higher? No one seems to give a palpable answer to that question outside of “natural variability”. So then I’ve got them – if “natural variability” was solely responsible for bringing temperature down when CO2 was at or near its highest concentration – WHY should I believe that “natural variability” could not have been solely responsible for the rise of temperature when CO2 was at a lower concentration ?

JimS comes up with a number 11 and says:

May 1, 2014 at 6:55 am
Another bad skeptic argument is stating that just one volcanoe eruption can spew out more CO2 than all the CO2 that mankind has ever produced throughout industrial history. This is simply NOT true and I see it being used much too much.

AlecM says (excerpt):

May 1, 2014 at 6:58 am
My Dear Roy, you are still so wrong despite my efforts to educate you!

And proceeds to do nothing of the sort - in a very long comment. His Dear Roy has heard all the "slayers'" nonsense before.


Julien talks about "cinetic" energy and wind and says he thinks that atmospheric physicists might have neglected convection:

May 1, 2014 at 7:13 am
Thanks for this good article, although there isn’t any surprise there. Sometimes I’ve doubted point #8, but now I think it’s ok. There are still some obscure areas:

- About point #2, when a photon hits a CO2 molecule, it can be as well transformed into cinetic energy (same as heat at the atomic level), and therefore it can generate convection (and therefore winds). Globaly it concludes that energy is either transformed into heat or wind, but that doesn’t really change anything.

The real argument behind the fact that climate models might break the second law of thermodynamics is because the climate models may neglect convection.

David A doesn't like it when people use the word "stupid" and says Roy Spencer shouldn't have explained why the fake sceptics' arguments were wrong, instead he should have explained why the fake sceptics' arguments were wrong - or something:

May 1, 2014 at 7:15 am
There is more then one straw man in Dr. Spencer’s overall OK post. Basically the CAGW enthusiast all agree, so it is natural that skeptics fall into every other possible camp. This means it will be natural for skeptic’s to have disparate views. It would have been best to call those considering a different view wrong because… The use of the word stupid is antagonizing and counter productive.

mpainter points out that a lot of WUWT-ers are having trouble with No. 7 (Warming causes CO2 to rise, not the other way around), and says:

May 1, 2014 at 7:22 am
Roy,
It looks like you are getting clobbered on #7. Better prop that one up a bit, if you can. My personal understanding is that warmer SST emits higher CO2. Am I wrong?
mpainter

He's got a point. Thing is, if we weren't adding so much CO2 to the air and something else was causing global warming, then warmer oceans would release more CO2 than they absorb. Thing is, the oceans are absorbing more CO2 than they release at the moment, even though they are warming, because the partial pressure of CO2 is rising so quickly.


Resourceguy doesn't read much at WUWT, despite what he says. The comments above his in the very same thread show just how wrong he is:

May 1, 2014 at 7:23 am
I see this as confirmation of my addiction to WUWT as a source for climate science information because I don’t recognize any of these items on the list and I certainly am not aware of “proliferation” of them anywhere. Does the author have some agenda here. More information on where the “proliferation” is coming from would be more insightful than the list itself. I suppose if all blogs were counted equally you could come up with a list like this and call it proliferation.

John Boles says:

May 1, 2014 at 7:40 am
I agree with the article, but still, there are plenty of skeptical arguments that DO hold water.

Unfortunately he didn't list even one of the "plenty".


Dung says that Dr Spencer is wrong to rely on science (excerpt):

May 1, 2014 at 7:47 am
Daft response number 1 ^.^
Mr Spencer makes a mistake common to many on both sides of this argument, he assumes that current scientific theories (i.e. theories emanating from qualified scientists) are correct.

John Whitman pulls Roy up on his manners and says he could be more like Richard Lindzen who is polite to the ludicrously stupid:

May 1, 2014 at 7:50 am
Roy Spencer, I think your positions do debunk those skeptical positions, but was your use of the unprofessional ‘stupid’ and ‘ludicrous’ words necessary? Oh, yes, I see they were because your goal was to get 1,000+ nasty comments. You could have just used professional scientific words like; contrary to observation,, incorrect, unsupported, etc.

My esteem for you is lowered somewhat today. Personally, Lindzen’s approach of never taunting and always low key polite behavior serves science incomparably better than your approach with this article’s unbecoming unprofessionalism.
John

Roy Spencer makes no excuses but offers a reason and says:

May 1, 2014 at 7:55 am
…actually, the way Dick handles this is to avoid engaging people. My downfall is engaging them, repeatedly, hoping they can at least understand what they are talking about before trying to debunk it. This leads to frustration, and then to bad manners.

It's a trifecta with "Al Gore is Fat"! And is Anthony Watts owning up to science fakery?

Talk about old times, Anthony Watts is going for the trifecta at his denier blog, wattsupwiththat. He might even make the quadrella.  Here's what he'd done in the past day or so:

1. Climategate resurrection: I've already mentioned his resurrection of a stolen email from "climategate" - dated January 2005, more than nine years ago.
2. Greenland greening? I've just written about that one too. It got a mostly hostile response because, of course, one of the denier memes is that Greenland used to be so much greener.
3. Al Gore is fat: not quite but almost.

All that's needed to win the quadrella would be an "ice age cometh" article by someone like David "funny sunny" Archibald.

Might as well tell you about how wrong Al Gore is, according to Anthony Watts.  Apparently Mr Gore went to Hawaii where he "dupes 9000 people" and "insults the rest" - or at least that's what Anthony Watts says. (Archived here.)

How Al Gore is a Hypocrite!

First up, Mr Gore was hypocritical because he didn't insist on turning off the stage lights and microphone when he spoke to 9,000 people in  Honolulu’s Stan Sheriff Center. Not only that, but he allowed the use of a image of himself speaking to be projected onto a large screen, which would have used up more electricity. 

Anthony said he even let the organisers turn on air-conditioning!  There's a photo of the stadium below, set up for sports. 

Source: Wikipedia Credit: ElChibo808

Anthony would say Mr Gore was a hypocrite for not swimming to Hawaii and talking to a crowd from a mountain top or at the beach.  In the daytime. Eating salad (to avoid using fuel) and cupping his hands and drinking water from a stream, so as to avoid using any utensils that might have been manufactured using energy.  Oh and he probably should have been starkers, too. It takes energy to make clothes.

Who's duping who?

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's see how Al Gore duped 9,000 people.  Anthony copied bits from an article at Honolulu Civil Beat.  I'll copy some of it here:

The “barriers” to doing something about climate change are business and political interests that profit off of fossil fuels — “dirty energy that causes dirty weather.” 

Then Anthony wrote:

What. A. Liar.

Both the IPCC and Nature say there is no link between climate change aka global warming and severe weather, and so it follows about Gore’s “dirty energy” claim.

Anthony's second statement is wrong. In the IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers, for example, it states that "it is likely that human influence has more than doubled the probability of occurrence of some observed heat waves in some locations" and has a similar finding for heavy precipitation.

Maybe Anthony has decided to reject the greenhouse effect after all, and this is a tentative step he's taking before "coming out" and rejecting the link between global warming and fossil fuel burning.

So as it turns out, Al Gore isn't lying.  He's using strong imagery for emphasis with his "dirty energy causes dirty weather".  But he's spot on.  Heat waves are the pits.  So are floods. So is drought. All of these will be exacerbated by global warming - in some areas more than others.

Anthony takes offence on behalf of polluters who promote fake science

Now for the bit where Al Gore supposedly insults the rest.  This part of the write-up that Anthony copied might be what he's referring to:

He compared fake science from polluters stating that humans are not to blame for the climate to tobacco companies that used to hire actors to play doctors who denied cigarettes were dangerous. 

“That’s immoral, unethical and despicable,” he said of both.

Now it's not that likely that Anthony Watts approves of tobacco companies hiring actors to play doctors to deny that cigarettes are dangerous.  He has often indicated that he's very sensitive to discussion of tobacco for personal reasons. So that leaves him deciding to take offence at any suggestion that there's something wrong with fake science coming from polluters.  Maybe in Anthony's book that's a noble undertaking.

The only other bit that might have got Anthony upset was this quote, about "game-changers":

The first is the growing realization from even climate-change deniers that something seems to be strange with the weather. 

Perhaps Anthony is insulted because he can't find anything strange about the weather and as a diligent denier he should. Or shouldn't. Or something.

Whatever it was that upset Anthony, I reckon he must be either owning up to the fact that he's a climate science denier or else he's owning up to fake science and claiming to be a polluter.

There is one more clue, right at the bottom of the article.  Anthony wrote:

So while Mr. Gore calls climate skeptics (which seems to be the majority of the population these days) ‘Immoral, Unethical and Despicable’ ... 

But look again at what Al Gore said was ‘Immoral, Unethical and Despicable’.  It wasn't sceptics. It wasn't fake sceptics. It was "fake science from polluters" and actors playing doctors and denying cigarettes are dangerous.

So that brings us back to my first supposition.  Anthony must be owning up to producing fake science and being a polluter.  I bet you're glad to have that settled.

From the WUWT comments

There wasn't much usual stuff about mansions and oil in the comments. In the main, WUWT-ers came across as being disinterested, bored even. Just making comments for the sake of it. No passion. I get the sense their hearts aren't in it. "Al Gore is fat" has run its course with the denialati.  It was also the lowest common denominator of WUWT-ers.  (Yes, there's a definite hierarchy of commenter at WUWT. Different people comment on different types of articles.)

Latimer Alder was a smarty pants like me and says:

April 18, 2014 at 12:11 am
No doubt Al just walked across the Pacific to get there form his seaside home on the mainland.
He’d have been a hypocrite if he resorted to fossil-fuel powered aeroplane or boat.
;-)

David L says:

April 18, 2014 at 1:24 am
Why does anyone at all listen to this idiot anymore????

Christopher Hanley says:

April 18, 2014 at 1:28 am
“The first is the growing realization from even climate-change deniers that something seems to be strange with the weather …”

Has it been raining frogs and toads in Hawaii recently?

DirkH, one of the resident conspiracy theorists, says:

April 18, 2014 at 2:27 am
They didn’t pay to listen to his drivel; they paid to stay or move up in the crony hierarchy of the Obama regime. 

Another WUWT conspiracy theorist, Santa Baby, says:

April 18, 2014 at 1:40 am
Al Gore, Gro and several others helped set up the UNEP/UNFCCC/IPCC scheme. The real Agenda is international Marxism trough a climate treaty and UNEP Global Government.
Maybee he is hoping to become the first undemocratic elected President of Earth? 

Fake outrage from fake sceptics at WUWT about faking debate on the BBC

In a dramatic about face, is Anthony Watts now saying that he welcomes comments and articles from the "sky dragon slayers" on his blog and will give them equal space with all the other pseudo-scientists at WUWT?

Previously he had banned Doug Cotton and John O'Sullivan because:

These folks mean well, but they’ve latched onto an idea that just doesn’t work. Some of the main players, such as Doug Cotton and John O’Sullivan have gotten so entrenched and angry that they have made persona non gratas of themselves here and at some other blogs.

“If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

Like Dr. Spencer,  if and when they are able to provide a simple working model of the atmospheric energy balance that matches their theory with observations, I’ll be happy to take another look at the idea here.

And of course, Anthony is perfectly entitled to ban anyone he likes from his blog.  The above is an exception.  He still promotes other slayers, like the uber-conspiracy theorist Tim Ball. Mostly he bans people who promote mainstream science - using one frivolous excuse or other.

Of course, Anthony might be now saying that he'll be more balanced and only publish three pseudo-science blog articles for every ninety-seven articles by proper scientists.

What he's complaining about (archived here) is apparently a report in the Daily Mail.  Reportedly a BBC editor has pointed out that it's false balance to put a climate science denier on a program about climate science.  Which it is.  Apparently the BBC has decided to stop promoting fake sceptics on the same program as scientists.  Anthony is up in arms and wrote:

These antics where climate alarmists rig the news program so they don’t have to appear in a one-on-one situation where an uncomfortable question might be asked, is in my opinion, the ultimate act of cowardice and intellectual dishonesty.

It's nothing to do with "uncomfortable questions" or "rigging programs".  It's to do with whether the BBC wants to give deniers and disinformers a voice as if their utter nuttery is somehow on par with rational views of rational people, or their quackery is on par with proper science.

Following Anthony Watts logic, he would argue that evolution deniers should be debating biologists on the BBC.  And flat-earthers should be debating geologists on the BBC.  And BBC health segments ought to provide equal time to the views of homeopaths, anti-vaxxers and crystal-healers as is given to medical professionals.

Not that it's any business of Anthony Watts what happens on the BBC.  Anthony doesn't contribute anything to the BBC.  He probably doesn't ever listen to the BBC or watch the BBC.  It's not Fox, after all, is it.


I've no time to filter out the choicest WUWT comments - you can imagine them or read them in the archive here.

Almost everything we know about fake sceptics like "Joanne Nova" is spot on...

While WUWT is trying to get warm (posting articles about ice at the moment), I popped over to see what "Joanne Nova" was doing on her blog.  I found this:

Almost everything the media tells you about skeptics is wrong: they’re engineers and hard scientists. They like physics too.

...96% of respondents said that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing with 79% attributing the increase to man-made sources. 81% agreed that global temperatures had increased over the 20th century and 81% also agreed that CO2 is a warming gas. But only 2% believed that increases in CO2 would cause catastrophic global warming....

Now that's not necessarily a survey of "skeptics" (ie fake sceptics or science deniers).  In fact going by the first three lots of responses, there were something like 20% of responses from flat out deniers, with around 4% being completely deluded deniers.  (I've previously written about the survey itself, here.)

"Jo" had 210 comments to her article.  Since she seemed to be arguing that fake sceptics accept the science in regard to climate change, I decided to check the comments to see how many of the people commenting on her blog accepted the science.

This is how many of Jo Nova's respondents, writing 210 comments, agreed that atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing and attribute the increase to man-made sources and that global temperatures had increased over the 20th century 81% and that CO2 is a warming gas.

One.

One - I can't even be sure about that.  That one person did explain in detail the evidence for 'CO2 is increasing from "man-made" sources'.  That's probably not a completely fair reflection though.  There was one other person commenting who didn't actually come right out and say that he accepted the science.  However, going by the reaction of other people to his comments, he does accept science.

For the rest, it's pretty obvious that Jo Nova's readers are the 20% who reject global warming including some who don't even accept that atmospheric CO2 is increasing.  The talk consisted mostly of comments full of words like "scam, BS, and bottom feeding" and "CAGW" and "falsify[ing] records" and "nobody has a clue" and "tampering" and "climategate" and "evil mongrels" and "warmists" and "Al Gore" and "outrageous propaganda" and even "Those of us who accept that CO2s net effect is to cool the atmosphere are treated like lepers, even by the ‘mainstream’ sceptics."  Oh, and the people who owned up to their quals mostly said they were engineers.  (I make that observation, knowing it is a generalisation having a basis in the numbers and offer my apologies to intelligent, educated engineers.)

Only a couple of people seemed to have read the article Jo posted, one writing mournfully:

So four out of five have bought in to the simplistic warmist arguments. 

And another bemoaning the fact that the fake sceptics who answered Mike Haseler's survey must in reality be non-genuine fake sceptics, writing:

Therefore it seems to me unlikely that all these highly qualified people have looked at the published evidence and formed their own opinions on the basis of the evidence.

Jo Nova is a genuine fake sceptic

Enough said on that score.  You might be interested to read what Jo Nova said, two articles after her claim that "Almost everything the media tells you about skeptics is wrong".  She was writing about a new article in Nature Climate Change (open access), which demonstrates that "observational data show a continued increase of hot extremes over land".

It's getting hotter

Here's a summary from ScienceDaily.com:

While there are claims that there has been a hiatus in global average temperatures, no such hiatus has occurred at the extreme end of the temperature spectrum. New research shows extremely hot temperatures over land have dramatically and unequivocally increased in number and area despite claims that the rise in global average temperatures has slowed over the past 10 to 20 years.

Jo Nova falls back on the dumb denier meme: "the models and theory are wrong"  - but it's Jo Nova who's wrong

Jo doesn't believe it.  She's a genuine fake sceptic, not like all those non-genuine fake sceptics who responded to Mike Haseler's survey.  Jo found six points to protest the observations, calling it "strained nonsense", and then added another protest at the end. The main text is Jo Nova's with my comments in italics:

If the world was warming, they wouldn’t bother with this strained nonsense, would they? They are talking about 15 year trends in air over land, in summer, on the hottest 10% of days.

1. Seneviratne et al acknowledge the pause in global temperatures. Therefore the models, and the theory is wrong. Every other incidental trend in smaller markers is a deckchair on the Clitanic. [Sou: What a load of rot. Jo's still riding the denier's escalator.]
2. There is no causal connection with CO2. The greenhouse effect is supposed to be full time. It’s not like there are days when it doesn’t work. CO2 is either making the global average warmer as predicted or… it isn’t and their models are useless. [Sou: For all her denier talk, Jo is claiming there is either unnatural or natural variation, there can't be both. Dumb as!  Hasn't she heard of ENSO, or solar variation, or volcanos?]
3. The paper admits the summer extremes are warming over land, but not the warm winter extremes. So the greenhouse effect switches off in winter? That will be news. Wait, they also find there is a cooling effect in the mid-high latitudes of the northern hemisphere during the boreal winter? Isn’t that pretty close to when and where peak CO2 levels occur? I guess that’s only 10ppm of extra CO2, but this is not “parts of a jigsaw” coming together — it’s cherry picking. [Sou: This is a misrepresentation of the paper, of science as well as a misrepresentation of "peak CO2 levels", which don't differ by 10 ppm NH summer to NH winter and are highest in May, at the start of the boreal summer, not in the boreal winter.] 

Data Source: CO2Now.org

4. Extreme heat doesn’t necessarily mean hot. Looks like some of these extreme warm days occurred in places like Russia, Alaska and Greenland. As far as I can tell, they define “hottest extreme days” as being the hottest 10% of all days in a grid cell from 1979-2010. The average July temperature in Nuuk, Greenland is 10C (50F)  so the top 10% of “extreme hot weather” there is not so scary. [Sou: Jo, come back when the ice melts on Greenland and seas rise by seven metres and let us know how "scary" it is!]
5. Are they serious? A 15 year noisy trend in 30 year dataset is irrelevant. The graphs start in 1979 (when satellites start) but that’s also near the start of the last long warming cycle. For all we know it is connected to the natural upswing in the 60 year PDO cycle. Indeed, if surface cooling of the ocean is reducing global averages now (the explanation Seneviratne offers for the lack of global warming), obviously surface warming of the ocean could have been doing the opposite before. Without longer records this is meaningless, mindless PR headline hunting with no scientific significance. [Sou: Oh, so RSS data from 2002 or whenever is the ants pants and disproves global warming, but careful measurements of heat extremes over 30 years have "no scientific significance"? Pull the other one!]
6. Just because something is statistically significant doesn’t mean it is meaningful. Since it warmed for the first 20 years of the dataset and then paused at the warmer level, it’s hardly surprising that someone can still “discover” some short trends that are rising. [Sou: ha ha ha.  This is too weak to comment on except to ask why non-significant data since 2005 are worth thinking about but statistically significant trends from 1979 that are consistent with AGW are not?]

Are the UNSW scientists trying to learn something about the world, or are they trying to generate headlines with the words “extreme hot temperatures”? Judge them by their press releases….

I'd say the UNSW are trying to learn something about the world, wouldn't you?  It's the Jo Nova's of the world who want to hide the data.

---

Sonia I. Seneviratne, Markus G. Donat, Brigitte Mueller, Lisa V. Alexander. No pause in the increase of hot temperature extremes. Nature Climate Change, 2014; 4 (3): 161 DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2145

The ozone hole and the scientific illiterati @wattsupwiththat

This article has been prompted by a copy and paste of a press release at WUWT, and the reaction to it. The NASA press release is about how the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is not yet showing any signs of recovery. Since the 1990s it has stopped growing but there is not yet any sign of recovery.  AFAIK, this is not unexpected, given the long-lived nature of CFCs.  The research is useful in that it explores the situation in much more detail than has been done before now. (Anthony Watts didn't link to the actual press release as usual.  I don't know why he doesn't.  However he did link to the Ozone Hole Watch website of NASA, which is really good.)

Click here for the archived WUWT article.

The ozone hole should shrink measurably after the mid 2030s

The article is about research by Susan Strahan and Natalya Kramarova (reported at the AGU Fall Meeting), uncovering the complexity of the ozone hole over Antarctica.  Wind in the upper atmosphere is moving the ozone around.  From the NASA press release:

This work shows that the severity of the ozone hole as measured by the classic total column measurements does not reveal the significant year-to-year variations in the two factors that control ozone: the winds that bring ozone to the Antarctic and the chemical loss due to chlorine.

Until chlorine levels in the lower stratosphere decline below the early 1990s level – expected sometime after 2015 but likely by 2030 – temperature and winds will continue to dictate the variable area of the hole in any given year. Not until after the mid 2030s will the decline stratospheric chlorine be the primary factor in the decline of ozone hole area.

"We are still in the period where small changes in chlorine do not affect the area of the ozone hole, which is why it's too soon to say the ozone hole is recovering," Strahan said. "We're going into a period of large variability and there will be bumps in the road before we can identify a clear recovery."

Full recovery by 2070

Based on the slide presentation from Anne Douglass, Natalya Kramarova and Susan Strahan, after around 2035 the ozone holes should be smaller than they are today, although in the intervening years there will be some holes that are smaller than others.  By around 2070 there should be full recovery.

Ozone hole science - a simple view

Jeff Masters at Wunderground has a good summary of the history of the science and response to finding the hole in the ozone layer. He also describes the tactics used by "ozone hole deniers".

Way back in the 1970s, scientists warned that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) could cause serious harm to the ozone layer.  The hole was first observed in 1985 and prompted immediate attention, resulting in the Montreal Protocol which came into force in 1989.

Most ozone (around 90%) is in the stratosphere.  It acts as a UV shield.  There are oxygen reactions in the stratosphere that absorb UV and require O3 to do so.  Until we began to add CFCs to the air, ozone was constantly being formed and destroyed with these reactions in balance:

O2 --UV radiation---> 2O

O + O2 ------> O3

O3 ----UV radiation ---> O2 + O

CFCs in the stratosphere have their chlorine atoms split off, which then react with ozone, producing O2 and reducing the amount of ozone.  This upsets the balance.  With less ozone more UV gets through to the surface.

There is a simple explanation of the reactions on the Bureau of Meteorology website here - with diagrams and an animation.

The thing is, CFCs are very long-lived and they aren't water soluble, so they don't get washed out when it rains.  If you're wondering how they get into the stratosphere, this article in Scientific American explains it in simple terms.  The CFCs we put into the air before the Montreal Protocol are still having an impact.  While we won't start seeing a real impact for a couple more decades and will have to wait for another 60 years for full recovery, if we hadn't acted when we did, we'd all be in deep trouble.

The ozone hole and climate

The ozone hole doesn't just cause damaging UV radiation to get to the surface, as David Karoly explains, it's also affecting the wind winds in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica and thereby affecting southern currents.  It therefore has an indirect impact on climate.  Where I live in south eastern Australia, the climate is being affected by CO2 warming as well as by shifts in climate zones as a result of the ozone hole over Antarctica.  It is making much of Antarctica colder than it would otherwise be but warming the Antarctic Peninsula.  It's also probably a contributing factor to sea ice around Antarctica.  (Does this mean that the land ice in Antarctica will melt faster when the ozone hole mends? I don't know the answer to that.)

Here's a diagram from the article by David Karoly.

The climate system is complex, meaning that the ozone hole does indirectly alter the surface temperature and climate of the Earth.

Source: The Conversation

Credit: WMO/UNEP Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2010

From the WUWT comments, with a preamble

Climate science deniers reject climate science relating to human emissions of carbon dioxide. They have a tendency to reject any science that finds that human activity is having an impact.

Today at WUWT, many science deniers are rejecting the well-established science explaining the hole in the ozone layer.

This highlights the "reasoning" of science deniers.  For many of them I imagine that when they face any problem, not just a huge problem faced by all of humanity, their first reaction is: "it wasn't my fault".  The first reaction of a mature person, by contrast, would be "Let's fix it" or "What can I do to help fix it".

That's why I view science deniers as being basically self-centred, immature, instant gratification-seeking sooks.  I don't see different views about climate science as primarily an ideological divide. I think the divide is one of character and maturity. Personal maturity is a bigger indicator of a reaction to problems than education, intelligence or ideology.  I don't know if there have been studies that show this.  It might even be that emotional maturity is not correlated with acceptance that there is a problem. It could be that it is correlated with the reaction to the problem, regardless of whether the problem is accepted as real or not.

Whatever - science deniers at WUWT are a distinctly immature lot in this regard as you can see from the comments below. Interestingly, the illiterates at WUWT don't deny the holes in the ozone layer, they just deny what's caused them.  A bit like how many (most?) of them don't deny that CO2 has increased hugely, they just deny the greenhouse effect or the extent of it.

Doug Proctor says "scientists don't know nuffin'":

December 11, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Or CFCs were not the primary driver of the OBSERVED ozone hole: meaning that even without CFCs, there would still be a significantly large hole in the ozone layer. CFCs could make an ozone hole worse, but no-CFCs won’t make the hole completely collapse.

Like CO2 and the thermal regulation of the planet, the assumption is that CFCs control the size of the Antarctic ozone hole. Why? Because “we” don’t have any other idea about what might cause large variations in its size.

The obsessive drive for a Unique Solution is everywhere politicians, scientists and laymen want or need simple solutions easily and cheaply put in-place.

el gordo says "it's a conspiracy":

December 11, 2013 at 3:35 pm
There was a multinational that did very well out of this scam, but its name eludes me.

scarletmacaw combines the two and says "scientists don't know nuffin'" and "it's a conspiracy":

December 11, 2013 at 3:41 pm
Chlorine in the atmosphere has natural sources. The ocean releases far more chlorine into the atmosphere than CFCs. It was always about control, never about science.

Brian H makes an irrelevant and meaningless comment and says:

December 11, 2013 at 3:43 pm
All based on another failed presumption of attribution.

Jimbo, like a lot of WUWT-ers asks (excerpt):

December 11, 2013 at 4:02 pm
Is it just possible that the Ozone hole has always been there?

So does Quinn who says (excerpt):

December 11, 2013 at 4:21 pm
The first satellites that specifically went looking for ozone depletion found the hole, but for all we know the hole has been there for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years or longer. As far as I know, there is no conclusive data indicating that the hole was not there prior to the widespread use of CFC’s. 

Answer: No.  It's not possible that the ozone hole has always been there, regardless of how little Jimbo and Quinn know.


William Mason is ignorant of the fact that the hole has stopped growing as a result of our actions, and that CFCs are long-lived and that the hole is acting on the time frame expected and says:

December 11, 2013 at 4:30 pm
If you suspect that something is causing a problem and you apply the fix for that but somehow it doesn’t cause a recovery would you at some point conclude that you were mistaken about the cause in the first place? Why do they stick to their original theories so adamantly? I think it’s time to reevaluate.

There is more of the same at WUWT - boring, boring same old scientific ilterati nonsense as you'll find on global warming topics at WUWT. (Archived here.)

Medieval Anthony Watts reveals a disinformation "trick" in Five Easy Steps plus assumptions

Updated: see below for Bernard J's chart, which puts medieval climate in perspective with that projected for this century and the global surface temperatures of past eons.

---

Deniers at WUWT have gone back to regurgitating old worn out denier memes.

I've frequently come across deniers saying silly stuff like "warmists deny the MWP".   What they mean is that "warmists" are aware it was real but not global.

Why do some fake sceptics hang onto their MWP meme and why are they so hung up on "MWP denial". Why are they are so convinced, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that the medieval warm period was whatever they variously think it was.  How do they know anything at all about it if not for science?  A lot of them seem to get their "science" from Nordic myths and legends.

Deniers and their sources of disinformation rarely if ever quote the science of that period.  Instead they quote snippets from stolen emails that they've spent hours digging through to find quotes they can twist and misuse.  If that fails they revert to statements made by climate disinformers at US Senate Committee hearings.

Anthony Watts reveals a tactic of climate disinformers

In a rare moment of openness about the disinformation tactics of the "leading darks" in the disinformation business, Anthony explains to the world one tactic used by disinformers.  He did it in a comment he elevated to an article (archived here) that he called:

The truth about ‘We have to get rid of the medieval warm period’

Six basic assumptions made by disinformers about fake sceptics

First, some basic assumptions about the denialati that are made by the disinformers:

1. Most people who reject science never read scientific literature.
2. Most people who reject science never do any fact checking at all.
3. Most people who spread what the disinformers write are fake sceptics or are themselves disinformers. 
4. Fake sceptics refer to themselves as "skeptics" but never do any fact checking, particularly of things they want to believe.
5. Most fake sceptics will "believe" what disinformers say, even when they make contradictory statements.
6. Most people who believe disinformers reject climate science.

The basic assumptions made by disinformers like Anthony Watts and others are quite reasonable, from what I read from fake sceptics.  They don't hold in all cases but in sufficient numbers of cases to make the disinformation tactics work (with fake sceptics). They are a reasonable set of assumptions for people engaged in disinformation campaigns (eg Anthony Watts) to work from.

A Disinformation "Trick" in Five Easy Steps

Today Anthony Watts explains one of the disinformers' magic tricks.  It's quite simple.  Here are the steps.

1. Pick a private email stolen from a scientific research unit
2. Pluck part of a sentence from the email
3. Write something quite different and say it's a "paraphrase" of that plucked clause
4. Repeat the false paraphrase a few times on your blog and claim "so and so scientist said this"
5. Voilà - you now have a denier meme that will be broadcast forever and a day by the denialati all around the world!

Anthony Watts describes the "trick" in detail

Anthony Watts describes the trick in more detail, using a stolen email and his own false paraphrase.  He makes an article out of an inline comment to a comment by Robert.  Here is the comment  (archived here):

Robert says:

December 8, 2013 at 9:50 am
The quote is a fabrication. Jonathan Overpeck’s exact words are:

“I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature.”

Christopher Monckton, like Andrew Montford before him, alters the text to instead read:

“We have to abolish the medieval warm period.”

Here is Anthony Watts inline reply to Robert (my bold italics):

REPLY: I checked for a citation, and the quote you state is correct:
http://di2.nu/foia/1105670738.txt

From: Jonathan Overpeck
To: Keith Briffa , t.osborn@uea.ac.uk
Subject: the new “warm period myths” box
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:45:38 -0700
Cc: Eystein Jansen , Valerie Masson-Delmotte

Hi Keith and Tim – since you’re off the 6.2.2 hook until Eystein hangs you back up on it, you have more time to focus on that new Box. In reading Valerie’s Holocene section, I get the sense that I’m not the only one who would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature. The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.

So, pls DO try hard to follow up on my advice provided in previous email. No need to go into details on any but the MWP, but good to mention the others in the same dismissive effort.

“Holocene Thermal Maximum” is another one that should only be used with care, and with the explicit knowledge that it was a time-transgressive event totally
unlike the recent global warming.

Thanks for doing this on – if you have a cool figure idea, include it.
Best, peck
–
Jonathan T. Overpeck
Director, Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
Professor, Department of Geosciences
Professor, Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Mail and Fedex Address:
Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
715 N. Park Ave. 2nd Floor
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

As to this being a fabrication, no, it’s a summation or a paraphrase of a long quote, something that happens a lot in history. Monckton and Montford aren’t specifically at fault in this, as the summed up quote has been around for a long, long time and it appears to have originated with Dr. David Deming’s statement to the Senate.

The conversion to a paraphrase maintains the meaning. “Mortal blow” certainly equates to “get rid of” (as it is often said) or “abolish” as you state it, and “we” equates to “I’m not the only one”.

The most important point is that Overpeck thinks it should be gotten rid of so that people that don’t agree with his view can’t use it.

And that, is the real travesty. – Anthony

Yes, you read that correctly.  Anthony Watts tries to claim that: “We have to abolish the medieval warm period.” means the same as "would like to deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths in the literature."

Johnathon Overpeck quite reasonably wants to hit on the head misuse of "supposed warm period terms and myths".   Anthony Watts claims that is the same thing as "abolishing the medieval warm period". Note also the context in the email for the "mortal blow to the misuse" sentence: "The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish." That they do!

Anthony isn't the only one.  He also quotes the disinformer Steve McIntyre as morphing " deal a mortal blow to the misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths" into "“deal a mortal blow” to the MWP".  Click here for an archived copy of Steve McIntyre's article here.  Steve writes:

To a third party, it’s hard to understand why someone who wants to “deal a mortal blow” to the “myth” of the MWP would take exception to being labeled as someone who wanted to “get rid of” MWP. The objective in each case seems pretty much the same.

The only way you could argue that the objective of "dealing a mortal blow to the misuse" seems pretty much the same" as "getting rid of the MWP" is if you are a disinformer wanting to spread disinformation.
.
What surprises me is how Anthony Watts is so open about the process behind the dishonest tactics he and other disinformers use.  It's like seeing a magician reveal his tricks.  One can hear the disinformers saying among themselves, trying to justify their lies to each other and themselves:

"Well, it's almost the same thing, isn't it? No?  Okay then it's not quite but it's nearly the same thing. No?  Okay it's nothing like the same thing, but if we say it's the same thing, that's all we need to do. Our readers will process it as meaning exactly the same thing.  And even though it means nothing like the same thing, with the mob that read what we write, they'll believe us when we argue it means the same thing."

David Deming started the meme back in 2006

It turns out that the 2005 email from Jonathon Overpeck wasn't the original source of the meme after all. According to Steve McIntyre, the denier myth began before the CRU emails were stolen.  He attributes it to a climate disinformer called David Deming in a statement to the US Senate Committee back in 2006.  (I read his statement.  Full of misdirection and half truths.  Isn't it illegal to make dishonest statements to the US government?)   You might recall me writing about how David Deming defended the nonsense put out by Denier Don Easterbrook, with his silly claims and misleading charts.

In his statement, climate disinformer David Deming said that he got an email "around the time" his paper was published in Science, which was back in 1995. His statement reads in part:

I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."

That statement of Deming's has never been verified to my knowledge.  The "major researcher" has not been publicly identified nor has the email been unearthed as far as I know.  And over time science has taken great strides in working out what climates around the world were like going back 2000 years or so - particularly through the work of the PAGES 2k network.  (I'll bet a lot of the scientists working on PAGES 2k have never even heard of David Deming or Steve McIntyre or Anthony Watts or Christopher Monckton!)

How fake sceptics misuse the medieval warm anomaly

I've written about the medieval warm anomaly before. Fake sceptics misuse it in the following fashion, complete with logical fallacies.

1. Disinformers and fake sceptics try to argue it was a globally synchronous event. It wasn't. 
2. They then try to argue that because it was a globally synchronous event (which it wasn't), the current warming isn't "unusual". It is. 
3. They then feel they can argue that because the medieval warm anomaly happened without a concurrent rise in CO2, then the current warming isn't because of CO2. But it is!

What science tells us about the medieval warm anomaly

I reckon most fake sceptics wouldn't know that scientists like Michael Mann have papers and book chapters on the subject. Here's an excerpt from my article for fake sceptics (who don't follow links, but then they don't read HotWhopper either - so this is really to save the time of Hotwhopper readers :)):

-------------

Here are a couple of charts of temperature reconstructions, which span the medieval period. The first on is from Mann et al (2008) which shows the warmer period in the Northern Hemisphere during Medieval times. It wasn't as warm as now, however.

Figure 3. Composite NH temperature reconstructions & published NH reconstructions from Mann ME et al (2008) Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 105, No. 36, pp. 13252-13257, September 9, 2008. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105

At the request of Phil Clarke in the comments, here is a chart from Mann et al 2009, showing the likely global surface temperature anomalies from the 1961-1990 mean during the medieval warm anomaly. You can see where it was warm and where it was cold.  However, as urged further down in the section on the Little Ice Age, I recommend you read the paper before trying to interpret the chart.

Source: Mann et al (2009)

------------------

My original article also shows a chart of Marcott et al, with the Holocene Optimum.

Addendum

The article discussed above derived from a statement by Christopher Monckton in a previous and equally silly WUWT article, in which he wrote (archived here):

However, in 1995 Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, an IPCC scientist, wrote an email to Dr. David Deming to say, “We have to abolish the medieval warm period.”

You can see there the disinformation tactic in action with a bit of a dog-leg to the David Deming statement.  No 1995 email from Jonathon Overpeck has ever been produced.  Whether he wrote that phrase or if anyone did, the context is not provided.  Deniers want to twist it into "scientists are re-writing the facts".  Instead what happens is that "scientists are researching the facts".

What is clear from the science is that there never was a period of global warming in medieval times that is anything like the global warming we are seeing now.  In medieval times there was regional warming and regional cooling. The way the deniers and disinformers like Christopher Monckton portray a medieval warm period is nonsense!   As Jonathon Overpeck did write very accurately:

The sceptics and uninformed love to cite these periods as natural analogs for current warming too – pure rubbish.

Update

Bernard J left a comment in another thread to say that he has prepared a chart based on this Wikipedia chart.  He has added in the likely rise in surface temperature if we choose to follow the RCP8.5 pathway.  Here it is - click on the chart to see the larger version:

Credit: Bernard J and Robert Rohde
Source: as listed in Wikipedia and IPCC AR5

Note that the time scale is not an arithmetic progression.  On a geological time scale, the temperature jump we could be choosing for ourselves this coming century would be viewed as a vertical line.

The above chart puts the much-fêted medieval climate anomaly into perspective, as well as the entire Holocene.  It also shows the unknown territory we are facing, especially if we choose not to rein in carbon emissions.

From the WUWT comments

You'll see that the "basic assumptions" don't hold in all cases. Even some of the fake sceptics aren't buying Anthony's line, now that he's revealed the magic disinformation trick.  However, they hold often enough to make this disinformation "trick" work quite well.  Here is a smorgasbord of comments (from the archived article here).

jeff says says he doesn't agree with Anthony's stance, but Anthony Watts digs in his heels and tries to claim that scientists "disappeared it in literature" (sic), implying that scientists have falsifed facts - utter nonsense:

December 8, 2013 at 10:41 am
seriously? i’m on your side and think many of them are crooks, but he SPECIFICALLY SAYS get ride of the “MISUSE” , not the actual MWP. learn to read

REPLY: I view it differently, as do many others, but I’ll edit for clarity. It is about the disappearing it in literature – Anthony

Michael in Sydney weakly sticks up for Anthony and says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:54 am
One mans use is another’s misuse – what exactly is the context of the misuse he complains about? The fact that he uses the term ‘ supposed’ suggests he doesn’t believe there were historical warm periods even on a regional level.

Paul just knows that "they" mean something other than what "they" said and says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:54 am
to jeff:
But any use of the MWP would be a misuse in their opinion.

GaryM finds a way to turn what was written into something completely different to suit the denier meme and  urges people to "learn to read" in the way fake sceptics are supposed to read.  In other words through a thick lens coated with confirmation bias.  He says:

December 8, 2013 at 10:56 am
Seriously? The “misuse” he is referring to is any “use” of the term.
“misuse of supposed warm period terms and myths”

He wants the MWP to disappear because he claims it doesn’t exist, hence “supposed warm periods”. To him the MWP is a “myth”, so ANY use of the term is a misuse.
learn to read – with comprehension.

Rod Chilton read something in a book somewhere and says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:15 am
I cannot believe these guys!!!!!. They will do almost anything to make sure the spin continues as to man as cause for the recent warming. There is some very interesting material presented in a book I read recently, that indicates within the Medieval Warm Period the Chinese actually sailed around Greenland. You cannot to my knowledge to that today…

Steven Mosher says something that upsets Anthony so he censors it:

December 8, 2013 at 11:16 am
[snip - Mosh, you are welcome to resubmit this comment sans the childish name calling - Anthony]

Jquip tells us what Steven Mosher wrote that so upset Anthony and then adds his own lie by implication and says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:30 am
Mosher: “That claim needs to
1. Verified Or
2. retracted.”

Indeed, if climate science held itself to the same standard we’d be rid of this pestilence at once.

Paul Matthews says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:36 am
Careful. There’s no link between the Deming quote and that CG email.

Monckton of Brenchley says it's okay to extend and expand an unverified claim made by another climate disinformer and turn it into a false denier meme that "the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present". Christopher Monckton says:

December 8, 2013 at 11:58 am
I am most grateful to Anthony and others here for verifying the word-for-word quotation from Dr. Deming that I used. I took certain steps to verify the quote some years ago. It is genuine. It dates from 1995. In 1998/9 Nature printed the Mann/Bradley/Hughes hockey stick and the IPCC picked it up in 2001. That nonsensical graph has represented the “official” position ever since, even though hundreds of papers in the reviewed literature, using measurement rather than modeling, provide evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present.

John Greenfraud is a conspiracy theorist who thinks climate science is a socialist plot and says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:06 pm
A distinction without a difference, the meaning of the ‘quote’ from these so-called climate scientists is clear. Whether it gets hot, cold, or stays the same, their solution is always the identical, socialism masquerading as environmentalism. Kick these dishonest hacks, and their lackeys, out of the national policy decision loop. Go down with the ship climate comrades, we’ll be laughing at you all the way down, just take some temperature readings when you reach bottom, so we can pull you back up and start laughing at you again. You’ve earned it.

Felix says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Watts writes: “As to this being a fabrication (as Robert claims), no, it’s a summation or a paraphrase of a long quote, something that happens a lot in history.”

When someone puts quotation marks around a paraphrase they have created a fabrication. In this case the “summation” alters the meaning as other have noted. The key word “misuse” of ignored in the “summary”. Some here may think the paraphrase is what Overpeck really meant in his heart, and they may or may not be right, but the shortened paraphrase does not have the same literal meaning of the actual quote. Fabrications happen a lot in history, that does not make then true.

John piccirilli either doesn't know when the medieval period was or he is not aware that the Medieval warm anomaly was not global or he's not familiar with Mann temperature reconstructions (see charts above) and says:

December 8, 2013 at 12:52 pm
Tell me felix..where on mann’s hockey stick [graph] does he show
The mwp? The meaning is clear by what peck says and by the actions
Of ipcc.

The bulk of the rest of the comments are from fake sceptics wanting to hang onto their myths about the medieval climate anomaly, for varying reasons of their own, but in the main for the reasons I described above.  If you have some time you're prepared to waste, you  can read more comments archived here.

The sound of ice doesn't register at WUWT

Anthony Watts, who runs a popular pseudo-science blog known as WUWT, doesn't want to believe that ice melts as the world warms up.  On more than one occasion Anthony's loudly proclaimed that seas won't rise any faster than they have been.  He seems to think that ice doesn't melt in the heat.

Icy Bay Alaska
Credit: US National Park Service

Sound has its own story to tell

Today Anthony Watts is trying to turn up the heat even more, with an article about "emotifying" melting ice.  Anthony picked up one word from a press release and blew it out of all proportion.  (The WUWT article is archived here.) The word was in this sentence:

While the symphony of melting ice might not carry the same emotional wallop as images, sound still has its own, sometimes very loud, story to tell. 

Anthony got hung up on the word "emotional" and downplayed the "story to tell".

Today's serving for his readers to wail and gnash their teeth over is work by Erin Pettit of the Glaciers Group at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  She wanted to see if the sounds made by ice could be used to monitor ice melting.  She sent some ice down to acoustic experts in Texas and they recorded video and audio of the ice melting and matched the sounds to the bubbles escaping.

Noisy glacial fjords

From Science Daily:

“If you were underneath the water in a complete downpour, with the rain pounding the water, that’s one of the loudest natural ocean sounds out there,” she said. “In glacial fjords we record that level of sound almost continually.”

While Pettit suspected the din was caused by melting ice, she couldn’t confirm that hypothesis without a more controlled experiment. So she enlisted the help of Kevin Lee and Preston Wilson, acoustics experts from the University of Texas. Pettit sent the Texas researchers chunks of glacier, which they mounted in a tank of chilled water. Lee and Wilson recorded video and audio of the ice as it melted and were able to match sounds on the recording to the escape of bubbles from the ice.

“Most of the sound comes from the bubbles oscillating when they’re ejected,” Lee said. “A bubble when it is released from a nozzle or any orifice will naturally oscillate at a frequency that’s inversely proportional to the radius of the bubble,” he said, meaning the smaller the bubble, the higher the pitch. The researchers recorded sounds in the 1 – 3 kilohertz range, which is right in the middle of the frequencies humans hear.

The abstract of the paper concludes that passive acoustic measurements can be used to monitor melting of marine glaciers.

Acoustic events and diurnal cycle in Icy Bay, Alaska

While I wasn't able to access this latest paper, I did find an earlier paper (2012) by Erin Pettit, Jeffrey Nystuen and Shad O'Neel in the journal Oceanography.  In this paper they discuss acoustics of ice melt.  Here is Figure 1 from that paper, which shows sound pressure and changes (including diurnal patterns) in a tidewater glacial fjord.  As always, click to enlarge it:

In this earlier paper, the authors made three points about the potential this work has in regard to glaciology and oceanography (my paras):

The character of these sounds and their temporal and spatial variations provide constraints on three glacier-ice-ocean processes that previously proved difficult to quantify.

• First, from small subaerial splashes to the largest full-thickness events, iceberg calving generates acoustic energy. Quantitative resolution of this process is important because calving can affect upstream dynamics, trigger disintegration of a floating ice shelf, or induce acceleration of grounded ice, contributing to sea level rise. 

• Second, acoustic observations may be useful for quantifying the submarine melt rate of ice at the terminus of a glacier or in a sub-ice-shelf cavity, which is a critical boundary condition for modeling both ice flow and ocean water circulation.

• Finally, acoustic measurements have potential to resolve variability in freshwater discharge from the subglacial hydrological system, a process that to date has completely evaded direct, quantitative measurement. Observations of sediment-laden upwelling plumes at calving margins qualitatively confirm that rivers, similar to those emanating from land-terminating glaciers, exist underneath marine-terminating glaciers. The discharge from these subglacial rivers has a diurnal cycle with occasional floods due to drainage of upstream supraglacial or subglacial lakes (Fountain and Walder, 1998).

Acoustic monitoring in the Antarctic

The paper also states that acoustics are now being used in Antarctica in the Larsen A Embayment, saying how it makes it easier to study glacier ice melts:

As this article went to press, RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer was deploying the first hydrophone in the Larsen A Embayment (results expected in mid-2013), leveraging the efficient sound transmissions of water to study a challenging process from an easier vantage point.

Ice is alive! Erin Pettit on Antarctic ice shelves

Here is a National Geographic video with Erin Pettit, talking about Antarctic ice.  Do watch it.  It's a brilliant presentation.  It includes the sounds of ice calving and what a whale hears.  (There could hardly be a bigger contrast between science and the ignorant WUWT articles and comments as copied below.)

Girls on Ice

Erin Pettit seems like a wonderful role model for young girls.  She established a program for girls in high school - Girls on Ice.

Each year two teams of 9 teenage girls and 3 instructors spend 11 days exploring and learning about mountain glaciers and the alpine landscape through scientific field studies with professional glaciologists, ecologists, artists, and mountaineers. One team explores Mount Baker, an ice-covered volcano in the North Cascades of Washington State. The other team sleeps under the midnight sun exploring an Alaskan glacier.

From the WUWT comments

After all that wonderful science I hesitate to refer to the dark, dismal world of anti-science disinformation and denial. I'll not be deterred though.  If only one person can see the contrast between people who disdain science and real science done by real scientists in remote and dangerous parts of the world.  If just one person changes their mind and can see just how wretched are WUWT and its silly fans, then it will be worth it.

The comments at WUWT generally complied with Anthony Watts' intentions.  Most of them haven't bothered to read the article properly or try to understand the research. They are like Pavlov's dogs, responding automatically to WUWT stimuli.

Many of them were arguing how silly all those scientists are to use sound to monitor changes in ice. Others are from Anthony's Scientific Illiterati club who agitate for ignorance and the cessation of all scientific research.  The majority are of the "scientists don't know nuffin' and WUWT armchair pseudo-scientists know-it-all" variety. (Archived here.)


Eyal Porat is an obedient little WUWT-er and utters meaningless and irrelevant denierisms:

December 1, 2013 at 11:50 am
Going from pathetic to utter silliness.
The face of (post)modern science.

Pamela Gray, who has on (very) rare occasions emitted tiny sparks suggesting a well-hidden intelligence, doesn't spark at all this time when she says:

December 1, 2013 at 12:11 pm
I can imagine the next Christmas album filled with Arctic woe against a backdrop of whale songs. So which teary doe-eyed actress will they harness this time to gather our collective grief into the sound of money?

Bob Greene thinks he is being clever and says:

December 1, 2013 at 12:51 pm
The sizzle of melting glaciers? Ice sizzles when it melts? My artillery ears aren’t good enough any more to hear that. There is a before and after picture show of Alaskan glaciers circulating on Facebook. All the glaciers are gone in the after pictures. So, I suppose by around 2005-2006 (date of afters) all the glaciers in Alaska must have melted.

Noah Zark is confused by ice and says:

December 1, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Huh? When I was in Alaska’s Glacier Bay a while back, the Park Rangers aboard the ship explained that the glacier ice was blue because the air had been squeezed from it.
So is this ice from the unsqueezed upper portions of the ice?
Like Bullwinkle, “I’m so confuuuuuuuzed!”

hunter seems to think that scientists who spend money doing research are breaking the law:

December 1, 2013 at 1:08 pm
This is a nice example of how a $ billion per day is being spent on climate.
The rent seeking will not stop until the hypesters are brought to account.

Skeptik adds one-liner to the illiterati sing-a-long and says:

December 1, 2013 at 1:16 pm
How bloody desperate can they get.

alexwade is an illiterati who extols ignorance and deplores scientific research.  Alexwade says:

December 1, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Why stop at sizzling glaciers? Why not go ahead with exploding glaciers. Followed, of course, by the mandatory “it is worse than we thought” pronouncement and “more money is required” statement.

Gerry, England is an "ice age comether" but at least he seems to understand a bit of what the scientists are doing and says:

December 1, 2013 at 1:39 pm
Recording the sound of rapid arctic ice regrowth and of record antarctic ice growth will be really useful too, surely?

james griffin is of the "scientists don't know nuffin'" variety and says:

December 1, 2013 at 2:13 pm
One suspects they have never checked the daily sea ice graphs….around the same average as 79-08.

This is for james griffin:

Data source: Polar Research Group, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Louis says "those scientists don't know what they are doing":

December 1, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Does water also make sounds when it freezes? If so, is there a way to measure which sound predominates during the course of the year? Only recording the sound of ice when it melts is like only recording the temperature when it goes up.

tty says "scientists don't know nuffin'" and "don't they know that ice makes noise". Well, tty, that's precisely what they are measuring!  As for "having to hang around in the cold" - it was when she was kayaking in the frigid waters in the far north that Erin Pettit came up with the idea of using sound to monitor changes in the ice.  How does tty think they are going to monitor the sounds if they don't do it where the ice is?  By telepathy? (tty needs to watch that National Geographic video.)

December 1, 2013 at 2:46 pm
Oh my god, what idiots. This is about the silliest ”scientific discovery” I have ever heard of. Everyone who has ever been near a glacier calving in water is familiar with this sound. By the way it’s not so much a “fizzing” as an endless series of little pops. The gas bubbles in glacier ice are under considerable pressure and burst as the ice melts.

Incidentally this has nothing to do with the sounds that moving sea ice and lake ice makes. That is a quite remarkable variety of booming, groaning and roaring sounds. Sometimes they can be rather beautiful and they certainly have a lot more “emotional wallop” than the popping of glacier ice which is about as exciting as listening to a newly opened soda bottle. However You have to hang around in the cold until they happen to record them so they are probably less popular “research objects”.

Bill Illis says there's "nothing to worry about" (extract):

December 1, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Why are people so upset about some melting glaciers. What exactly lives on glaciers. Nothing.

Gerry Dorrian says "it's not science".  And he gets hold of the wrong end of the stick with his "emotify".  The press release said it "might not carry the same emotional wallop as images", not that it does.

December 1, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Making one sound that is similar to another isn’t science, it’s what special effects technicians do for a living. I can understand why they want to “emotify” the issue, though: strong emotional content engages the limbic system to the expense of the executive frontal cortex – ie histrionics turns off thinking.

Katherine hasn't bothered to figure out what the scientists are doing, and blithely echoes the "scientists don't know nuffin'" meme:

December 1, 2013 at 3:25 pm
They didn’t know ice pops and crackles?! I hear it every time I put an ice cube in a hot drink. Talk about stating the obvious in research.

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Lee, K. M., P. S. Wilson, and E. C. Pettit. "Underwater sound radiated by bubbles released by melting glacier ice." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134, no. 5 (2013): 4172-4172. doi: 10.1121/1.4831292

Pettit, Erin C., Jeffrey A. Nystuen, and Shad O'Neel. "Listening to Glaciers: Passive Hydroacoustics Near Marine-Terminating Glaciers." Oceanography 25 (2012). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2012.81