Icy climate fakery from Philip Lloyd in Cape Town, @wattsupwiththat

This time I'm going to keep it short so you can get back to watching the nasty shenanigans of Donald Trump, who seems very keen to start another war. Some chap called Philip Lloyd has written an article for Anthony Watts about temperature trends in Cape Town (archived here). (Anthony must have written the headline because he changed Cape Town to Capetown.)

Never mind about that. The article is by Philip Lloyd, who's been denying science for a long time. He's another engineer. Not the decent sort of engineer. He's the type you'll see in droves at climate conspiracy blogs like WUWT and Judith Curry's place. I've written about his particular brand of denial, e.g. in 2013 and 2015.

Philip was wanting to distract deniers from the hottest year on record by claiming that the historical temperature of Cape Town was fraudulent or something. Temperature data expert, Nick Stokes disabused him of that notion e.g. here and here. (Yes, I'm joking. Nick Stokes disabused any reasonable reader of that notion. However, deniers are not reasonable, and there's no sign that Philip Lloyd was the slightest bit interested in researching the subject.)

La Niña or no, nada?

Now that El Niño has shut down, people are wondering if a La Niña will develop this year. Anthony Watts has been egging it on. Way back in March, before the El Niño had finished, he was predicting a La Niña. Today he's quoting a report from NOAA from a couple of weeks ago (9 June), in which the prediction was 75% in favour of La Niña:

Overall, ENSO-neutral conditions are present and La Niña is favored to develop during the Northern Hemisphere summer 2016, with about a 75% chance of La Niña during the fall and winter 2016-17.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been much more conservative, with all its forecasts so far being only 50:50 in favour of La Niña. In its latest ENSO wrap-up yesterday, BoM stated:

Recent observations and climate model forecasts continue to suggest La Niña may develop in the coming months, hence the Bureau’s ENSO Outlook remains at La Niña WATCH level. A La Niña WATCH means there is a 50% likelihood of La Niña developing during the second half of 2016.  If La Niña does develop, climate models suggest it is unlikely to reach levels seen in the most recent event of 2010–12, which was one of the strongest La Niña events on record.

Denier weirdness: Anthony Watts at WUWT predicts major imminent global cooling

Not a lot of time today but I just couldn't pass this one up.

Anthony Watts has gone full-on denier in an article about global surface temperatures (archived here). At the very end of his article he puts up this chart:

Source: WUWT

And he writes:

To my eye, I see a natural sine wave, which I’ve traced below on the same graph in solid grey, with extrapolated segments in dashed grey:

It seems to me that our current “pause” might simply be that we are at the top of that sine wave I see, and that we might actually see some cooling ahead, assuming it isn’t all adjusted away by the next “improvement” from NCDC.

First up, I'd say his eye is out a bit if he thinks it's a natural sine wave. Second up, did you notice his conspiratorial thinking? But lets leave all that aside and assume that the Anthony's "wave" will be repeated. Here's the result:

Oh my! It looks as if Anthony Watts has become a greenhouse effect denier. He speculates that global temperatures will drop by more than 1°C before the end of this century.

Addendum: How Anthony Watts "disappears" the Little Ice Age

Since Anthony bothered to put in some dotted lines for "extrapolated segments", you might like to see how well his hindcast matches up with the instrumental record. I've superimposed HadCRUT4 and "extrapolated" Anthony's wave. It's not looking too hot. Or should I say it is looking too hot. Has Anthony decided to "disappear" half the Little Ice Age? :)

Sources: WUWT and HadCRUT4

(Added by Sou 10:48 pm 27 July 2014)

Now compare Anthony's prediction with IPCC temperature anomaly projections for different cumulative total anthropogenic CO2 emissions. If we're not careful, by 2100 the world will be more than 3 or 4°C hotter than this year and maybe 5°C or more hotter than it was in 1870:

Adapted from source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers

Click "read more" to see what WUWT deniers have to say.

Are US winters cooling or warming? It is all so very confusing at WUWT....

It wasn't that long ago that WUWT-ers were being warned that the world is heading for an ice age.  The "ice age cometh-ers" to varying degrees include:

• David "funny sunny" Archibald
• Tony "central England" Brown
• Ed "ice age cometh" Hoskins
• Denier Don Easterbrook

The one thing you can say about those WUWT contributors is that they are prepared to make a prediction, even though their predictions are laughable.  Most of the people at WUWT just scoff at science but aren't prepared to stick their neck out.  I've yet to see Anthony Watts make any prediction.  Wondering Willis once made a guess that the world is about to get cooler.  Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale, when pinned down, doesn't want to make any predictions.  He's too busy keeping track of bits of the ocean in the hope that some bits haven't warmed as much lately (so that he can put up a chart of a patch of sea and say that global warming isn't happening, or it's not happening in that bit of the globe).

It was freezing cold in the USA this winter, but it's not unusual?

Over the past few months, there have been a myriad of WUWT articles about just how cold it was this winter in the USA.  If there was a WUWT article about the record hot Californian winter, I must have missed it. Which is odd, since that's where Anthony Watts, the blog owner, hails from. Here are just some of the articles about how cold it was in the USA this past winter:

• Over 2000 cold and snow records set in the USA this past week - 13 December 2013
• New record low set in the coldest city in the continental USA – much of the country headed for a deep freeze - 2 January 2014
• USA cold weather records outnumber warm records 6 to 1 - 8 January 2014
• NOAA: US Cold records outnumber warm records 66 to 1 in the last 7 days - 8 March 2014
• Satellite Animation Shows Massive Eastern U.S. Cool Down - 13 March 2014
• Coldest U.S. winter in a century - 26 March 2014
• It’s official – Chicago experienced the coldest four months ever on record - 1 April 2014
• NASA on ‘the big chill’ this winter: ‘In some places temperatures were 40°F colder than average’ - 7 April 2014
• and more in the same vein.

However in an apparent about-face, today the headlines at WUWT are (archived here):

Holdren Is Wrong – Cold Winters Are Not Getting More Common

Paul Homewood, who wrote the article even put up a chart to prove that US winters aren't getting any colder.  In fact looking at the chart, since the 1980s winters in the USA have become a whole lot warmer:

Source: NOAA via WUWT

Paul injects a bit of reality at WUWT and writes:

Clearly, on a national basis, recent winters have not been unusually cold. In the last 10 years, only three winters have been colder than the 1901-2000 mean. Moreover, no winters in recent years have come anywhere near to being as cold as some of the winters in the 1970’s, for instance, or earlier.

Paul goes on to look to see how much of the USA had extreme winters.  Using his method, he confirmed that the 1970s was the last decade notable for cold extremes across the largest portion of contiguous USA.  He wrote that it's clear that much less of the country was affected by cold compared to the twentieth century:

It is abundantly clear that much less of the country has been affected by extreme cold this winter, and indeed other recent ones, when compared with the 20thC. There is also no trend towards cold winters becoming more common.

Then Paul remembers who he's writing for.  So he figures he'd better cover himself for the global warming deniers and say that mild winters aren't "taking over" either, writing:

What is also interesting is that there does not seem to be much of a trend towards milder winters taking over. Only the winter of 2011/12 stands out in this respect, and there have been plenty of similar years previously.

Yet if you look at the first chart he posted (above), it's pretty obvious even to the naked eye that in the last few decades, the average winter time temperature is much warmer than it was in the past. Even looking at his own charts of extremes, he should have recognised that there is a lot more red area than blue area in recent decades.  Here are the two charts Paul put up, showing extremes in minimum and extremes in maximum temperatures for winter, with my animations (click to enlarge):

Adapted from source: WUWT

So is it warming, cooling or doing neither? Anthony's readers must sometimes be scratching their head wondering whether to believe what they read at WUWT or whether to believe what they read at WUWT.

John Holdren and Jennifer Francis' Polar Vortex

John Holdren's statement, which Paul Homewood was countering, was from a video in which he discusses the polar vortex.

Paul quotes the following bits of text.  He doesn't link directly to where he got the quotes.  The first bit of text is from the above video (at 0:32), which Paul doesn't repost, and the second paragraph is taken from a White House web page :

“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues….

We also know that this week’s cold spell is of a type there’s reason to believe may become more frequent in a world that’s getting warmer, on average, because of greenhouse-gas pollution.”

 The video is short, so I'll copy the text here so you can read John Holdren's quote in context:

If you've been hearing that extreme cold spells like the one that we're having in the United States now disprove global warming, don't believe it. The fact is that no single weather episode can either prove or disprove global climate change.

Climate is the pattern of weather that we observe geographically and over the seasons, and it's described in terms of averages, variations, and probabilities. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues. And the reason is this: in the warming world that we're experiencing, the far north, the Arctic, is warming roughly twice as rapidly as the mid-latitudes, such as the United States. That means that the temperature difference between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes is shrinking, and that temperature difference is what drives what is called the circumpolar vortex, which is the great counterclockwise-swirling mass of cold air that hovers over the Arctic. As the temperature difference between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes declines, the polar vortex weakens, and it becomes wavier. The waviness means that there can be increased, larger excursions of cold air southward -- that is, into the mid-latitudes -- and, in the other phase of the wave, increased excursions of relatively warmer mid-latitude air into the far north. 

Computer models tell us that there are many different factors influencing these patterns. And, as in all science, there will be continuing debate about exactly what is happening. But I believe the odds are that we can expect, as a result of global warming, to see more of this pattern of extreme cold in the mid-latitudes and some extreme warm in the far north.

Essentially, what John Holdren is describing is the hypothesis put forward by Jennifer Francis and Stephen Vavrus in a paper in GRL in 2012.  As John Holdren says, "there will be continuing debate about exactly what is happening".  Indeed the Francis hypothesis is the subject of ongoing debate.  Some scientists, such as Kevin Trenberth, disagree quite strongly. Others are more circumspect and are entertaining the idea that the hypothesis has merit.

Coincidentally, there is an article in the current issue of Science about this very topic, titled "Into the Maelstrom" and written by Eli Kintisch.  If you can get hold of a copy it's worth a read (at least I found it very interesting and informative).  Eli Kintisch says that Jennifer Francis has modified part of her hypothesis in the light of a paper by Elizabeth Barnes, backing off from the notion that "a curvier jet stream is leading to more atmospheric "blocking"". Here's an excerpt of the Science article:

The most vociferous critiques, however, have come from researchers who study atmospheric dynamics, or the many mechanisms that jostle and shape air masses. Given the Arctic's relatively puny influence over the planet's atmospheric energy flows, the notion that it can alter the jet stream "is just plain wrong," says dynamicist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. The more likely culprit, he says, is natural variability driven by the tropics, where Earth gets its largest input of solar energy.

Such variability, Trenberth says, could explain the jet stream's giant curvy shape this past January, which brought record chill to the southeastern United States, warm temperatures to Alaska, and made "polar vortex" a household term. At the time, a massive amount of so-called latent heat was accumulating in the tropical Pacific, Trenberth notes, in an incipient El Niño event. Parcels of warm air from the tropics may have forced the jet stream northward in one place, causing it to meander southward farther east. "It may not be that Arctic amplification is causing a wavier jet stream, it may be that a wavier jet stream is causing Arctic amplification," he says.

"I understand that people would be skeptical," Francis says. "It's a new paradigm." But she counsels patience. She notes that evidence of Arctic amplification itself has emerged from the statistical noise only in the last 15 or so years, so it may take time for the changes to the jet stream to become statistically significant. And she believes the modeling experiments that fail to simulate a more meandering jet stream are biased, because they don't include sufficiently robust Arctic amplification.

Such arguments have persuaded some colleagues to at least wait and see. Oceanographer James Overland of NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington, for example, says, "I find the tropical explanation for the recent behavior of the jet stream no less implausible than the Arctic one." And he suspects that, as data accumulate, the dynamicists will come to gain a greater appreciation for the Arctic's role.

Paul Homewood's Strawman

I think it's worth pointing out that Paul Homewood's article is one big strawman.  He is trying to refute something that John Holdren didn't say.

Paul is arguing that because the winters on average or over much of the USA aren't the coldest compared to the entire record of winters then John Holdren is wrong.  But John Holdren was talking about cold spells not average winter temperatures.  He was talking about periods when parts of the USA may experience extremely cold weather.  Also, in my view the winter extremes need to be considered in comparison with a rising global surface temperature.  What this would mean is that cold extremes would be getting warmer over time, as global surface temperatures rise.  Yet there can still be extreme cold across parts of the USA, just not as extreme as the coldest in the instrumental record.  Perhaps in several decades from now, an extreme cold spell will be as warm as a current mild winter in the USA, yet it may still be caused by a "wavy" polar vortex.  (A mild winter may well be as warm as a mild spring or even a mild summer in the future.)

From the WUWT comments

Let's see how the WUWT-ers reacted to Paul arguing that US winters aren't getting colder and writing that "There has been nothing unusual or unprecedented about this winter."  They are all over the place.  Some of them are saying winters are warmer. Others are arguing winters are colder. Many of them seem to think the USA is the whole globe. For example: more soylent green! says:

April 18, 2014 at 12:50 pm
“As global warming continues?” Do you think Holdren means “when (or if) global warming continues” because it ain’t warmed in nearly 2 decades.
A technical question — If global warming causes colder winters, at what point does global warming become global cooling? Or does it all just average out? If it all just averages out, does that mean the earth doesn’t have a fever anymore?

phlogiston is trying to work it all out and says:

April 18, 2014 at 1:38 pm
So let me get this straight:
The scientific adviser to the POTUS
is saying that
global warming
is causing colder winters

TonyG isn't giving up easily and says:

April 18, 2014 at 10:53 am
Over a year ago, I saw a program on NGC that suggested AGW could cause another ice age. I guess cold winters would be much more common with glaciation.

pokerguy is deeply depressed and says:

April 18, 2014 at 11:23 am
There was a time when I believed that people in highly positions….at least in a democracy….could not just make things up without paying a price. Now the scales have fallen from my eyes. You can say anything you want for the most part and get away with it. Holdren has been making ridiculous claims without being exposed as a serial liar in the MSM for a long time. Ditto Obama. I don’t think it was more than a year ago when the President of the U.S. simply made up his own facts about global warming by asserting that the globe was heating up even faster than the experts had predicted….which of course is utterly false. In fact there’s arguably been no warming at all for over 17 years.

Deeply, deeply depressing. 

Magma picks up an inconsistency and says:

April 18, 2014 at 11:39 am
Holdren says “cold spells”. Homewood shows Dec-Feb averages.
There is a difference. 

Richard Day likes question marks and says:

April 18, 2014 at 11:48 am
So extreme cold is the result of global warming?
Is there ANYTHING global warming can’t do?????? 

herkimer isn't the only one who says it's been cooling since 1998 (now that year rings a bell) (excerpt):

April 18, 2014 at 11:58 am
Winters in Contiguous US have been getting cooler for 17 winters or since 1998 , but certainly not for the reasons that Holdren states. This recent decline in US winter temperatures is similar to the cooler US winter cycles of 1895-1920 and again 1954-1979 and is due to ocean cycles. 

Rud Istvan gets everything topsy turvey and says:

April 18, 2014 at 12:20 pm
Holden even recently lied to Congress about previous testimony on US drought by Roger Pielke Jr. When Pielke asked for a retraction and apology, he got a six page White House memo citing one paper. Apparently they cannot read either, because that paper (by Trenberth) also supported the Pielke testimony. Which was simply thatnitmisnot possible to make a connection between drought and climate change, per the IPCC SREX and other papers. It is possible to make regional US connections with PDO and AMO.

Why did Holdren try to trash Pielke’s testimony? Because Obama is using the California problem to pump for his climate agenda. Just when you think they cannot stoop lower, they do.

No, Rud, that's not why John Holdren had a go at Roger Pielke Jr's testimony.  This is.


Rob is seeing warmer winters and says:

April 18, 2014 at 2:48 pm
Winters have gotten much less severe
here along the Gulf Coast since the terrible cold decades of the 1980′s and 1960′s.
Holdren’s “speculation” is NOT Science. Not even close.

HenryP says, I'm not sure what:

April 18, 2014 at 3:19 pm
@DirkH
As we are cooling from the top, the higher latitudes get drier and the lower latitudes get wetter.
That is physics.
Locally, at some places, due to the drier conditions, it can get hotter,
paradoxically
perhaps 

Bart says:

April 18, 2014 at 6:52 pm
Seems I recall that last year’s warmer-than-usual winter was supposed to be the harbinger of things to come.

bushbunny is firmly in the global cooling camp and disagrees with Paul Homewood (but doesn't come right out and say so):

April 18, 2014 at 8:08 pm
Of course the government would announce this nonsense to uphold their beliefs, and not face the fact Northern America and Canada would suffer most from extra cold winters. I hope that you don’t experience any more extra cold winters for your health mainly and productivity. Your government should take measures now not to rely on the global warming scare but global cooling that will prove a lot more expensive in the long run to adapt to. 

---

Eli Kintisch, "Into the Maelstrom", Science 18 April 2014: Vol. 344 no. 6181 pp. 250-253 DOI: 10.1126/science.344.6181.250

Francis, Jennifer A., and Stephen J. Vavrus. "Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid‐latitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 39.6 (2012). doi:10.1029/2012GL051000,

Barnes, Elizabeth A. "Revisiting the evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in midlatitudes." Geophysical Research Letters 40.17 (2013): 4734-4739. doi:10.1002/grl.50880

Paging Norman Page - another "ice age cometh" to WUWT

Norman Page is a doctor.  Not a climate science doctor.  A petroleum geology doctor I believe.

Norman Page tells Dr Pauchari to use Google (early 2008)

In January 2010 Norman Page posted the following email he said he sent to Dr Pauchari, Chair of the IPCC, back in April/May 2008.  He suggested to Dr Pauchari that he "Google" to see what is happening with the climate.  He got a response to a previous email but not the one below.  Archived here - my bold and italics and hyperlinks:

Dr Pachauri
It is a month since my first e-mail and I thought I might draw your attention to a few more articles of interest.It is clear that temperatures correlate much better with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation ( Controlled by solar activity) than with CO2 levels. Google - PDO cooling -and look at Easterbrooks graphs and comments.. Also google - Jason satellite cooling - for a discussion of the current situation.

Google -- ball UN structures - for an anlysis of how the IPCC came to distort the science for political ends. You are obviously in a better position to judge Ball's position than I am ,but what he says looks very plausible to me.

In the meantime Solar Cycle 24 continues to fail to appear making the cooling predictions more and more likely.

I do hope you will soon feel that you can speak out publicly on these matters in the near future to perhaps forestall damaging actioThank you for your careful consideration of my original e - mail.A useful discussion of the IPCC forcing and feedback factors can be found by googling - pielke monckton guest -

Best Regards Norman Page

Norman Page predicts a cooling spell - in January 2009

In January 2009 he wrote (archived here):

The Sun is entering a quiet phase - possibly a Dalton minimum - and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is now in a negative phase. Both of these facts suggest a possible 20 - 30 year cooling spell during which cooler temperatures could produce shorter growing seasons and a serious drop in food crop production.

Twenty four months later 2010 was declared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society to be the equal hottest year on record with 2005.

Norman Page today says the scientists don't know nuffin'

Norman continued on his merry way predicting all sorts of catastrophes, of the cooling kind.  His latest effort is today at WUWT (archived here), and he writes:

In the AR5 Summary for Policymakers the IPCC glossed over  the developing cooling trend in global temperatures and so lost the last vestige of its scientific credibility and any claim to be a source of useful guidance on future climate trends for policymakers. 

What cooling trend, you may ask...

Norman waffles on about models, showing he doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.  He tosses everything he can think of into the mix: cosmic rays, neutrinos, it's the sun, CO2 is too small to have an effect.  If there's a denier meme out there Norman's latched onto it.  At one stage he writes:

The simplest working hypothesis for forecasting future climate is that the change in the temperature trend from warming to cooling in 2003 (Figs 6 and 7) marked both the change in the PDO phase and the peak in the 1000 year cycle.

He wanders around saying that nights are colder than days and winters are colder than summers and making similar profound observations.  He summarises his "findings" a couple of times.  Here's his final summary, ending with a warning that a Little Ice Age may be imminent:

1. Significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2. Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3. Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4. Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 - 0.15
5. Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6. General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7. By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8. The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial - they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and help maintain crop yields .
9. Warning !! There are some signs in the Livingston and Penn Solar data that a sudden drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures could be imminent – with a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.

Norman finishes by writing an out clause:

 If there is not a 0.15 – 0.20. drop in Global SSTs by 2018 -20 I would need to re-evaluate.

Here is that prediction.  It's not the most extreme by a long shot:

Good to see that Anthony Watts isn't neglecting other climate nutters.  He's been relying on stodgy but reliable in denial Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale a bit too much.  Too boring!  WUWT needed livening up and who better but an "ice age cometh" veteran, Dr Norman Page.

From the WUWT comments

Norman attracted quite a few conspiracy nutters (archived here), for example, Txomin says:

October 29, 2013 at 10:06 pm
UN global control over the World and National economies…?

Eve says, mysteriously:

October 29, 2013 at 11:02 pm
What the ICPP an governments have done is to drive everyone from the north to the south. Those that have legs, that is. Leaving for the Bahamas. Will chat with you later about how much cheaper it is to not have to heat your house.

albertalad says he cannot fathom how CO2 can have super powers:

October 29, 2013 at 11:51 pm
You touched on CO2 – as you know nitrogen and oxygen make up fully 99% of the atmospheric gases with all the other trace gases making up the final 0.01%. How in any sane universe can a tiny trace gas like CO2, as the IPCC and other AGW believers claim, so completely control the world’s heat content? That is insane. Illogical. No where near possible – yet they claim such super powers for CO2. Why can’t we defeat this ridiculous concept? Their entire warming fantasy is based on CO2. Everything.

Henry Galt is a regular at WUWT.  He is a conspiracy theorist of the 'climate science is a hoax' variety and says much the same thing each time IIRC:

October 30, 2013 at 12:35 am
Now all we have to do is find some investigative journalists to start the truth ball rolling. Ethical politicians will read about the contortions the IPCC scientists have gone through to produce their robust projections and command some honest judges to duly process the team and their cause.

Oh, and the UN, NGOs, formerly respected academies and societies, government departments, windmill farmers, PV fiefdoms, carbon traders, chief scientists, activist organizations, ecoloonies and uncle Tom Cobbley and all will soon see the error of their ways, awake to the murder and damage being committed worldwide in the name of their beloved environment, fold their tents and bother the rationalists no more.
There is no /sarc tag. There is despair in my soul.
There are a number of oxymorons in my first paragraph and millions of morons in my second.

Jean Parisot is under some illusion (delusion?) or other, maybe thinking that developing countries would all be developed if not for climate science and says:

October 30, 2013 at 12:52 am
The Treasury decision infuriates me. It is one thing for we, the rich and comfortable, to delude ourselves and pursue asinine energy policies. But, for us to deny developing economies the access to the cheap energy that they desperately need, is morally vacant.

Scarface doesn't know the simplest thing about the world and says (my bold italics):

October 30, 2013 at 1:34 am
“g) I noted that CO2 was about 0.0375% of the Atmosphere and thought ,correctly as it turns out, that it was highly unlikely that such a little tail should wag such a big dog.”
Exactly the reason I stopped believing one word of the warnings about Global Warming.
Up to that point I thought that CO2 was about 15% of the air, based on the alarming news! When I started to look things up for myself, I turned into a skeptic and will be one until proven wrong.

RMB says those silly scientists ignore the fact that water can't get hot because of surface tension.  RMB has never dipped his or her toe in a body of water:

October 30, 2013 at 1:35 am
The key to the fact that the models don’t work is dead simple, they ignore surface tension. If you attempt to put heat into water through the surface you will find that the heat is rejected. Radiation penetrates surface tension, physical heat does not. There is no such thing as climate “sensitivity” to co2 because of this simple fact. I would recommend that everybody try getting heat through the surface of water using a heat gun, the complete rejection of the heat tells the story. In short radiation yes, heat no.

Rob gives a conventional WUWT response and says:

October 30, 2013 at 2:19 am
Excellent perspective!

herkimer isn't counting the days but says (excerpt, my emphasis):

October 30, 2013 at 5:43 am
...Now that it has been clearly shown that during the last 16.8 years rising levels of CO2 do not raise global temperatures... 

Greg Roane seeks clarification and asks, very politely:

October 30, 2013 at 5:56 am
Dr. Page, thank you! One small question, for clarity: Conclusion 1 states “…Within that time frame however there could well be some exceptional years with NH temperatures +/- 0.25 degrees colder than that.”
.
Is it possible to be both + and – 0.25 degrees colder? Or do you mean “up to 0.25 degrees colder” instead?
.
Thank you sir.

It snowed in the high Andes therefore global warming is a hoax, sez WUWT

The last few weeks and months Anthony Watts at WUWT has been slipping further and further into the deluded end of the climate blogosphere.  Today he has a guest "essay" (a fancy name for a denial rant) by Argiris Diamantis who writes (see archived version here):

By not reporting (or underreporting) about “cold snaps” the public is being brainwashed into believing that the world is warming, while it in reality is cooling.

In reality the world is cooling?  Pull the other one.

Data Source: NASA

Might be worth doing a count of unfiltered science reports on WUWT compared to the various categories of denial - spanning ad homs of people, delusional prophesies of "ice age cometh" doom,  through to Lysenko conspiracy theories from Richard Lindzen and others, eugenics conspiracy theories and the grandest delusion of them all, that:

"all the world's scientists who work across the many disciplines that have any relationship to climate (agriculture, oceanography, marine science, glaciology, meteorology, geology, paleoclimatology etc etc) and their employers, colleagues, publishers and students are members of a cult so secret that no "sceptic" has been able to penetrate it or disprove the body of mainstream science of the past century or two".

More probably it's not worth doing a count.  I reckon a spot check would show about one unfiltered science story or fewer in every thirty. And that one story is more likely than not to bring out the 8% dismissives protesting "it's all a giant scam", "algore (sic) is fat", and "agw is a religion".

Thing about snow is that, just like rain, when it snows it can snow buckets full because of the extra moisture in the air as a result of global warming.

My sympathies to the people in the Andes in South America whose lives have been disrupted by heavy snow falls this winter.  I assure them that despite what Anthony Watts and Argiris Diamantis would have them believe, the world is not about to enter an ice age.  Quite the reverse.

And for all the moaning about lack of news, I did find quite a number of news items.

Worst snowfall in a decade - from NatureWorldNews

Approximately 250,000 alpacas have died as a result of the worst snowfall Peru has seen in a decade, and the unexpectedly intense blast of winter weather has claimed livestock and human life in other parts of South America as well.

A cold weather front from the Antarctic began to spread across South America earlier this week, with some regions devastated by the snowfall, and others reveling in it. Heavy snow fell upon a large swath of South America, from Peru and Bolivia in the northwest to Paraguay and Brazil in the southeast.

Ice and snow in the high Andes in southern Peru, with reports of 24,000 (not 250,000) llamas, alpaca and sheep "mainly baby animals" - from the Wall St Journal

LIMA, Peru--A cold wave has hit the southern regions of Peru, covering vast areas in snow and ice and leading the government to declare a state of emergency.  The central government has sent aid to the worst-hit areas, most located in high areas of the Andes mountains.

An official with the regional government of Puno, a southern district, said that the snowfall has reached up to about a meter high in some areas, with temperatures well below freezing.

"There have been about 24,000 livestock killed by the cold, mainly baby animals," said Percy Quispe, deputy director of civil defense in Puno. Those animals include alpacas, llamas and sheep.

Officials said the cold has left one person dead in Puno after a snow-covered roof collapsed, and that thousands of homes have been damaged by the snow and strong winds.  The Puno regional government said it has distributed 10,000 blankets and food supplies to the hard-hit district of Carabaya.  Various small towns have been cut off by the harsh weather, reports said.
Government's weather agency Senamhi said Thursday that temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius could be reached in the higher mountain areas.

While extremely bad news for the 250,000 or 24,000 baby animals who died in the cold, and the people who lived in the mountains and were affected by the winter snowfall, the "worst snow in a decade" doesn't quite match up in terms of breaking records to the "hottest summer on record in Australia" or the "hottest year on record in the USA" or 2010 being the wettest and equal hottest year on record globally - not just in one region but over the world as a whole!

Here is the archived WUWT article and comments again.

From the WUWT comments

Jim Steele says:

August 29, 2013 at 10:53 pm
This only proves Joe Romm’s “little known fact” that warmer weather causes more snow. ;-)

Jim Steele says:

August 29, 2013 at 10:56 pm
Peru Heavy Snowfall: Tens of Thousands Stranded, Livestock Killed
http://www.weather.com/news/peru-heavy-snow-20130829

walker808 says:

August 29, 2013 at 11:03 pm
It snowed recently on the island of Sumatra which is on the equator. This is the first time in recorded history that it has ever snowed there! Photos of the event were shown on Indonesia TV.

I suspect walker808 was referring to this reported hailstorm.


Richard111 says:

August 29, 2013 at 11:33 pm
South Africa is still getting low temperatures. It is spring for them.
Last night CCTV showed many townships in the Cape area are badly flooded.

No, Richard111.  If South Africa is like Australia then spring doesn't officially start until the first day of September.  Spring blossoms keep coming out earlier and earlier as the world gets warmer, and that might have confused Richard111.

The Wager Part II

This follows from The Wager.


I do not want HotWhopper readers to miss out, so I've archived this WUWT thread (again).  I've written about this particular article already here, but this is a different topic.  You can consider it a sub-topic, or several sub-topics.  Here is a taste, but there's more in the thread if you're into utter nuttery:


Eli Rabett says to Christopher Monckton of Brenchley:

August 28, 2013 at 2:03 pm

Eli understands that there is some betting action to be had on your earlier claim that “A math geek with a track-record of getting stuff right tells me we are in for 0.5 Cº of global cooling. It could happen in two years, but is very likely by 2020.”. It is for two bets of $1000 each from John Abraham to Lord Monckton. Given your claims here, you must believe that this would be easy money. John has added a codicil that if you wish the bet can be for benefit of a charity chose by either side, but who knows, maybe you need the money?

Eli is looking perhaps for some smaller side bets on the proposition and what the good Lord’s reaction will be.

richardscourtney, the WUWT playground monitor says, in a comment that is unique from him because there is not a single word SHOUTED let alone SHOUTED EXTRA LOUDLY:

August 28, 2013 at 2:11 pm
Troll posing as Eli Rabett:
re your post at August 28, 2013 at 2:03 pm

Please be assured that nobody cares about the “betting action” of an idiot so deluded that he is unaware of his own name or his own person. Similarly, nobody cares about the “betting action” of even lesser men than the troll (yes, it is hard to believe, but they do exist).

So you need not waste space on WUWT with such nonsense again.

Richard

Monckton of Brenchley says - again, that he wants to sue somebody, and pikes on the bet (excerpt):

August 28, 2013 at 5:04 pm
...One Rabett says someone wants to take a bet with me about whether the world will cool by 0.5 K before 2020 is out. However, it was not I but another who forecast that. In an earlier posting I merely reported the forecast, which is one of a growing number that find cooling more likely than warming in the short to medium term. To make any such bet symmetrical, there would be no payout if the temperature fluctuated by less than 0.5 K in either direction by 2020 compared with today. The bedwetters would win if the temperature rose by 0.5 K; the army of light and truth would win if it fell by 0.5 K.

However, the creature seeking cheap publicity by offering the bet has, I discover, been part of an organized (and probably paid) campaign to prevent skeptics such as me from being allowed to speak at various universities around the world to which we are from time to time invited. Evidence is being gathered, since in Scotland tampering with the right of academic freedom in this characteristically furtive way, particularly with the wildly malicious claims the perpetrator and his little chums have apparently been making, would be held to constitute a grave libel.

I had hoped to sue the defalcating nitwit in the U.S for an earlier malicious attempt by him to assert that I take a skeptical line because I am paid to do so (if only …). However, the lawyers whom I consulted, after having a good look at the case, concluded that, though what this inconsequential little creep had said was unquestionably libelous, as well as displaying an exceptionally poor grasp of elementary science and even of arithmetic, I did not have title to sue because, in the US, I am counted at law as a “public figure” and the jerklet is not. If he were a public figure, I could sue him. If I were not a public figure, I could sue him. But, since I am a public figure and he is not, I cannot sue him. Not in the U.S., at any rate. I visited the Court of Session in Edinburgh yesterday …

Eli Rabett says:

August 28, 2013 at 11:32 pm
Now some, not Eli to be sure, thought that it would be most pleasing if the good Monckton of Brenchley made John Abraham put up, but Sadly No.

Instead, as the Bunny proposed but a few days ago, we are treated to an entertaining essay in avoidance. To watch Lord Monckton as his mind works at an astonishingly furious pace, whinging about the ills done to him, the difficulty of confronting his tormentors, and the cruel law which forbid him to pounce upon them, but, of course he could if he really wanted to and they should be more cautious, when shunning a chance to do same, is indeed a show Eli feels privileged to have played a minor part in. 

Such humor is found only in our pale memories except for YouTube. We have Chris.

John Whitman says:

August 29, 2013 at 7:18 am
Christopher Monckton,
Have you considered attending the AGU’s annual fall meeting in San Francisco this December?
John

Eli Rabett says:

August 29, 2013 at 7:48 am
JPeden says: @Monckton But, since I am a public figure and he is not, I cannot sue him. Not in the U.S., at any rate. I visited the Court of Session in Edinburgh yesterday …
“Run Rabett Run” — 1970′s James Cann movie

Yes, more droppings along the bunny trail.

Monckton of Brenchley says he's changed his mind about suing in the space of a few comments and is now going to sue after all.  If I only had a dollar for every time Monckton threatened to sue someone for catching him out in a lie I could buy those nice italian leather shoes:

August 29, 2013 at 8:17 am
To answer a few questions from commenters: yes, the World Federation of Scientists exists (it has existed for half a century); yes, its climate monitoring panel consists of a dozen eminent scientists from all parts of the globe; and yes, the chairman of that panel announced to the closing plenary that global warming is not, in itself, a planetary emergency; and no, the world’s mainstream media will do their utmost not to report that conclusion, because it does not accord with the Party Line.

The troll named “Rabett” is snide about my not taking an asymmetric bet. Well, I’m not going to give the joke figure who offered the bet any publicity: indeed, it would be improper for me to have a bet with him at present, given the likelihood that he will face court action once the trail of evidence is complete. Interesting how the trolls will talk about just about everything except the science, on which events are proving them to have been so spectacularly wrong.

Monckton of Brenchley says:

August 29, 2013 at 12:58 pm
I am not confident of what temperatures will do, because they are stochastic. A fair bet (if I were a betting man, which I am not) would take zero change as the baseline.

What did I say about denier weirdness and cranks and utter nutters?


Here is a link to the archived thread again.

Read more at Rabett Run.

Denier weirdness: a collection of alarmist predictions from WUWT and elsewhere

With the deniers at WUWT complaining about the UK Met Office (which doesn't do too badly), and Benny Peiser from the GWPF getting everyone worked up over a supposed ice age, I figured I'd see how the denier predictions stack up.

A few times a month Anthony Watts gives voice to the ice age alarmists.  They are a weird bunch.  Most deniers are of the type that fear fear but not the ice age alarmists.  They are contrarians. You may have met some of them.  First, here's Benny with some global cooling alarms.

• July 2013: Newsbytes: Sunspot Enigma – Will Inactive Sun Cause Global Cooling?
• July 2013: Newsbytes: Sun’s Bizarre Activity May Trigger Another Little Ice Age (Or Not)
• October 2011: New Climate Scare: Europe May be Facing Return Of ‘Little Ice Age’

As climate scientists will tell you, even a Grand Minimum would hardly make a dent in the global surface temperature these days.  CO2 has the world covered.  Here's a chart from realclimate.org:

Deluded Ed

There is Ed Hoskins, who thinks an ice age is coming because he reckons central England started getting cold thirteen years ago.  Why he thinks there should be an ice age based on the temperature record of central England escapes me.  In any case, he maintains central England "lost all the gains since 1850".  He is very wrong.  Only seven years ago, in 2006, central England had the hottest year in its 353 year record and in 2011 it had its second hottest year in its long record.  Nine of the ten hottest years in central England occurred in the last 23 years and seven occurred from 1995 onwards.  Just look at the chart and compare it to the temperatures of the mid-1800s.  Deluded Ed is deluded.

Data Source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre

David "funny sunny" Archibald

David Archibald is an Australian who makes the wildest claims.  He says that by 2020, Earth will become colder than it has in the entire Holocene.  Colder than the Little Ice Age.  Colder than any time in the past ten thousand years.  He is an extreme alarmist.  Here is his prediction, which he says is based on "on solar maxima of approximately 50 for solar cycles 24 and 25".

Data source: NASA and David Archibald

David is counting sunspots.  Solar cycle 24 was very weak as far as sunspots go, yet the temperature didn't drop.  Instead it kept rising.  2010 is the hottest year on record so far.  For a discussion of solar forcing, sunspots and TSI, there is a good article on skepticalscience.com.

Silly Sal

There is another regular on WUWT who goes by the name Salvatore Del Prete.  I don't think he's posted any articles yet.  He pops up frequently in the comment sections.  He predicts that before seven years is out, Earth will get colder than it has in more than half a century. Not quite as severe a drop as David "funny sunny" Archibald, but it still defies all physics, logic and reason.  Here is his alarmist prediction.

Data source: NASA

Denier Don

Don Easterbrook has been predicting cooling long before WUWT started.  He's way out in his predictions. There may well be earlier ones.  This is from 2001 in comic sans:

And from 2008 at WUWT (click for larger version):

And from 2008 again from here:

Don can't seem to get his story straight from one month to the next.

Blasts from the icy past

I found an old WUWT thread of predictions.  There are a few from some of the current regulars plus some unfamiliar names.

Pierre Gosselin says (extract - click the date to go to the full post):

October 23, 2008 at 2:03 am  -2.5°C by 2020!...My prediction is we’ve started a nasty cold period that will make the 1960s look balmy. We’re about to get caught with our pants down.  And a few molecules of CO2 is not going to change it.

This is what Pierre's prediction looks like:

This one's probably a fake denier, real deniers aren't usually this extreme, though it's hard to tell at WUWT.  SteveSadlov says:

October 24, 2008 at 10:55 am  Cooling continues into the next decade. By 2011, on average, we are back where we were in the early 1800s. The global food crises continues to worsen. The amount of viable ag land in Eurasia, particularly the interior, shrinks dramatically. As happened during the period 350 – 800 AD, this places migration and conquest pressure on the great powers who live there, especially Russia and China. They mount a general offensive, resulting in additional cooling due to the effects of WMDs used to smash Western and pro Western strategic military assets. The new Dark Age begins.

Diatribical Idiot says:

October 22, 2008 at 3:00 pm A thread after my own heart. Folly or not, prediction is what actuaries do. Why should letting a little thing like unpredictability in temperatures stand in the way of making a projection?
My methodology is based on actuarial papers, in looking at temperature as a series of values driven by constantly shifting parameters. Correlation is assumed to be driven by 132 months of historical measures.
There are 6 weighting schemes derived as follows:

See his comment for the rest, if you must.  Here is one of his predictions he linked to.  It does seem far-fetched even for an "ice age cometh"-er but a peep at his blog suggests he's the real thing:

Murry Salby, plus Middleton Recycling memes at WUWT

Murry Salby and his strange ideas

There is nothing much on Anthony Watts' blog, WUWT to write about.  There was some initial swooning over Murry Salby (whose name Anthony got wrong).

According to Pierre Gosselin whose article Anthony Watts quoted: If anyone ever demolished the dubious CO2 AGW science, it’s Salby!  

If that's the best the fake skeptics can come up with then they'll be disappointed.



The presentation drew the usual gaggle of insightful comments such as:

• June 10, 2013 at 9:56 am  Go Murry!
• June 10, 2013 at 10:13 am Couldn’t have put it better myself :-)
• June 10, 2013 at 11:02 am A Man of science without a doubt.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:05 am Strong words of wisdom.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:10 am Great speaker, and impressive finale.
• June 10, 2013 at 11:24 am Brilliant.

I was a bit mystified by this question from Solomon Green.  I wonder what he's getting at here:

June 11, 2013 at 4:54 am ...why do so many commentators equate AGW with human release of CO2? Surely humans can increase temperatures, both locally and globally, without necessarily increasing CO2 levels? ...

Further down in the thread people started finding flaws in Salby's ideas.  I'm not going to waste any more space on Salby.  If you are curious about Salby and his odd notions, there is this article and more on SkepticalScience.com.

David Middleton resurrecting old Time magazine articles

And there was David Middleton, recycling the myth that "they said it was cooling in the 70s".  Which as far as I can gather may be another case of "the USA is the world world, nowhere else exists".

Here's the result of a 2008 study of the scientific literature, demonstrating the building up of the consensus on global warming and the fact that out of 71 scientific papers written between 1965 and 1979, there were only seven that "predicted, implied or provided supporting evidence" for global cooling compared to 44 for warming.

Source: Peterson et al (2008)

An Australian Perspective on Warming and Cooling

I've been looking at old newspaper clippings from Australia and have posted a few showing real concern about the possibility of global warming in the 1940s.  So much so that the first international collaboration of scientific experts was sent to Antarctica in 1949 to see if the warming trend seen in the Arctic was evident down there.

As for articles from Australia in the 1970s, there are a few.  They were a mixed bag.  Here is an excerpt from a much longer article in The Canberra Times on Tuesday 8 May 1973, right in the middle of the so-called cooling scare.  The main article was about the widespread droughts in Africa, India, Central America, Asia and Cyprus.  At the end of the article was some discussion of global temperature and climate.  Here is an excerpt (my bold):

Scientists agree that the droughts and freakish weather over many parts of the world might signal global changes in climate and some experts are even wondering if another ice age is on its way. 

The climatic situation is complicated by the largely unknown effects of man made pollution and there are contradictory theories. 

Heat pollution, as energy is consumed at an increasing rate, is sure to effect the weather to some extent by warming the upper atmosphere. But more dust in the atmosphere could balance this by reflecting the sun's rays back into space. 

Temperature 
Some American researchers have noted that in a five-year period the mean temperature of the atmosphere in the northern hemisphere fell by more than half a degree Celsius, but were careful to say that this was likely to be a short-term fluctuation. 

Some Soviet meteorologists maintain that the climate of Northern Europe, Asia and America will get "markedly warmer" by the year 2000 and link this with the known recession of the polar ice. 

In Australia during the 1970s there was very infrequent speculation in newspaper and magazine articles mentioning the possibility of an ice age but not much.  It looks as if the spate of articles that WUWT-ers remember were probably mostly in the USA.  I don't know about Europe.

Australian newspaper articles on global warming - 1957 and 1972

Of more interest are articles like this one from 1957 on global warming from CO2 emissions associated with industry.  That's a couple of years before Keeling started to measure atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa.  And this one from 1972 on fears about melting of the Arctic sea ice.

Has Anthony Watts Become a Leftist-Warmist?

Has Anthony Watts* done an about face?  Is he now advocating for regulations to cut emissions of waste CO2?

Judge for yourself.  Anthony has put up an article in which he mocks the right wing fear campaign against environmental regulations and the global cooling 'scare', that some newspapers in the USA were engaged in during the 1970s.

1. Anthony Watts mocks anti-regulation rant from the 1970s

Right up the top of the article, Anthony Watts has posted an old clipping from the early 1970s.  The clipping illustrates the extremist right wing 'fear campaign' against the environmental regulations (Eg President Nixon's Clean Air Act), which were introduced back then to control smog and other pollutants that were becoming a huge problem in the industrialised world.  It includes fear-mongering statements like this:

pollution, or the effort to control it, could be fatal to our concept of a free society

and he even highlighted this bit:

"We will be forced to sacrifice democracy by the laws that will protect us from further pollution."

Watts says the article "reads almost like some of the manifestos we get from warmists today", but that was probably a typo.  More accurately, it "reads almost like some of the manifestos we get from right wing shock jocks today".

It's extreme right wingers who are scared stiff of regulation.  These people are mostly deniers (it's the reason many people deny reality), but may include some 'warmists'.

Watts himself has said the reason he backed off from viewing global warming as a threat was because he feared that policies to address the problem might involve a rise in taxation.  (See about 58 seconds into this video interview.)

2. Anthony Watts mocks 'global cooling scare'

In his article, Anthony included a list of US newspapers (courtesy poptech) that speculated about global cooling back in the early 1970s during a couple of long snowy winters in the USA.  Watts is mocking them.

Logical conclusion?

One can only conclude that:

• Anthony Watts now fully accepts the popular press was way out in the 1970s and that, as we know now, the world is warming dangerously.
• Anthony no longer fears regulation designed to reduce CO2 emissions, (agreeing that the environmental regulations of the 1970s weren't 'fatal to our concept of a free society' and definitely preferable to suffering a perpetual asian-style smog).

Will Watts stop posting articles speculating that the world is about to enter an ice age?

Will he now start strongly advocating for regulations to cut CO2 emissions?

(Will he talk to his his dog and ask Kenji what the science says?)

Time will tell.

* Anthony Watts is blogger and a (former?) denialist of global warming.