The last 10 years are the hottest ever, yet deniers are still in denial

Summary: Despite three years of La Nina, 2022 was the sixth hottest year on record. The last decade was the hottest decade on record.

As you all know by now, we're causing the world to heat up. We've not got to a stage where we've stabilised the global temperature. In fact, we seem to be nowhere near stabilisation. Yet strangely there are still a few global warming deniers floating about. These deniers are arguing once again that an ice age is coming, or it's started cooling, or global warming has stopped, or "CO2 warming is a hoax" or some such nonsense. It's prompted me to write another article about how global temperature has been changing.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for 2022 was 0.89 °C. This is 0.13°C below the hottest year so far. The hottest was 2020 at 1.02°C above the 1951 to 1980 average.

No hiatus (or vacation) from denial - Anthony Watts and Ryan Maue misrepresent a new scientific paper

It looks as if Anthony hasn't yet left on his promised vacation his fans have paid for. Today he copied and pasted an article from, of all places, the Daily Caller (archived here, latest here). Now the Daily Caller is not regarded as a reputable source of scientific information. It's a right wing website from the USA, apparently widely read, particularly by Republicans seeking a daily outrage fix of sensationalised sentiment. (It's owned by a guy called Tucker Carlson, who replaced Bill O'Reilly at Fox. I gather there's not much to distinguish the opinions of the two.)

The shock and awe at WUWT is over a new paper by a team of scientific heavy-weights, led by the world-renowned climate scientist, Dr. Benjamin D. Santer. The paper, published in Nature Geoscience, reports an exploration of the reasons for any differences between modeled and observed temperatures in the upper air (the troposphere). The authors examined data for the satellite era, January 1979 to December 2016, which is when there were more reliable temperature observations of the upper air.

[Note: the paper itself is about troposphere temperatures. The charts I've added are surface temperatures, in part because I'm still short of time, plus I don't have model data for the troposphere to hand (Fig 3).]

101 conspiracy theories about troposphere temperature: the RSS love affair is over

Over at WUWT there have been three articles about the lower troposphere temperatures. The first (archived here) was a Guest Post by Werner Brozek and Nick Stokes, Edited by Just The Facts with the title: "Long Satellite Pauses Ending (Now Includes January Data)".  The second article was about the February data for UAH (archived here, latest here). It had the wistful wishful title: "Global Temperature Report: Warmest Ever February 2016 driven by El Niño". The third article is the real doozy (archived here). It's by Anthony Watts so could well have some awful blunders in it. He's called his article: "The ‘Karlization’ of global temperature continues – this time RSS makes a massive upwards adjustment."

This article is a few hours late, and I'm not satisfied that I've got everything right because this is a subject on which I am feeling distinctly out of depth. Science deniers will try to tell you that there are little thermometers on satellites sending raw data to Earth and miraculously drawing temperature charts - or something like that. That's a pile of hogwash. The real story is much more complicated. Satellites come and go. Instruments change. Orbits decay. Temperature isn't measured directly, it's estimated from measurements from microwave sounding instruments (MSUs). What's reported is the result of complex calculations after adjustments and conversion to temperature. What we get are temperature trends in very thick layers in the atmosphere (kilometers thick, looking upwards into space), not the temperature of a particular spot or distinct level in the sky. Then there is "diurnal drift" - which is largely what the new paper by Carl Mears and Frank J. Wentz is all about.

Warning: this article is rather long. It explains the new RSS paper in more detail than I did in the previous article.

The mid-troposphere has been warming faster than you thought

A new version of the RSS dataset has been announced in a paper in the AMS Journal of Climate. The paper, by Carl Mears and Frank J. Wentz, was published before the new version has appeared. This is in contrast to UAH, where the paper hasn't yet appeared but version 6.0 beta came out in April last year, and is now at beta 5.

The paper is about middle troposphere measurements, not lower troposphere which is what is usually discussed here. However, it's about the same instruments that are used to estimate lower troposphere temperatures: Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) channel 2, and the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) channel 5.

It's not just climate scientists who agree we are causing global warming, yet deniers are eternally wishful

Anthony Watts has discovered a new survey that shows that it's not just climate scientists who know that the earth is getting hotter and humans are causing it.  The paper was authored by a team of scientist from the USA: J Stuart Carlton, Rebecca Perry-Hill, Matthew Huber and Linda S Prokopy. The results suggest almost all biophysical research scientists accept climate science, not just climate researchers. Yes, that includes physicists and chemists and astronomers and biologists and geologists and more. The authors said that "scientists across disciplines nearly unanimously believe in anthropogenic climate change, are highly certain that climate change is happening, and find climate science to be trustworthy and credible."

(Note: almost all the charts were plotted by me, based on information in the paper or the appendix. And this is my take on the research.)

Researchers in and out of climate science agree that temperatures have risen and we've caused it

Almost all researchers in the biophysical sciences that is. 93.6% of respondents agreed that temperatures have risen when compared with pre-1800's levels. Of these, 98.2% agreed that 'human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures'.

The chart below gives an indication of how many respondents had at least some knowledge about their world's climate:

Denier Weirdness: A mock delegation from the Heartland Institute and a fake enquiry from the GWPF

The GWPF and the Heartland Institute are struggling to find a way to undermine The 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC to be held in Paris later this year. (The GWPF is the main climate science denier lobby group in the UK, and the Heartland Institute is part of a network of denier lobby groups in the USA.)

The Mock Delegation from the Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute claimed it was sending a delegation to the Vatican to persuade the Pope to become a climate science denier. Turns out they were just sending a bunch of deniers to hold a meeting in the Columbus Hotel in Rome, from which the "delegates" could get a view of St. Peter's Basilica, if they got a room with a view, but without any guarantee of a session with Pope Francis. There was no indication they'd tried to get an audience with the Pope - private or public.

The Heartland Institute website didn't even say who it was sending. When I clicked on the link for details, all I got was this "page not found".

The Fake Enquiry by the GWPF

The denier lobby group in the UK has taken a different tack to try to undermine the Paris talks. It has decided to set up a review into temperature records. It doesn't want to "believe" that ice is melting, that oceans are warming, that surface temperatures are going up and that climate change is happening. It also knows precious little about surface temperature, going by the terms of its review. And it doesn't care to, going by the people it has appointed to run its investigation.

Coincidentally at the same time another group has announced a review of the methods to remove non-climatic changes from temperature data, by the Task Team on Homogenization (TT-HOM) of the Commission for Climatology (CCl) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). That review is headed by Dr Victor Venema. The terms of reference and membership are listed further down.

Compare the terms of reference of the GWPF review with that of the Task Team on Homogenization. The former is nothing but a political stunt by a denier lobby group, to try to get people to doubt that climate change is happening. The latter is aimed at improving the global temperature records.

Denier weirdness: defending the indefensible Murry Salby at WUWT

In this article I'm going to show how silly Murry Salby's "hypotheses" are (as archived here).  There's a lot of "wrong" with Salby's efforts but two things stand out the most in my view:

• Murry Salby is a greenhouse effect denier and
• Murry Salby thinks billions of tonnes of carbon can disappear off the face of the earth by magic.

Following on from my last article, Anthony Watts has posted a few diagrams of Murry Salby's, provided not by Murry but by Christopher Monckton.  I don't know who wrote the text.  I'll take the opportunity Anthony Watts and Christopher Monckton have provided to do what HotWhopper does - demolish disinformation.

This will be a dull article, I'm afraid.  Murry Salby's slide series ranks with this "stupid" list I compiled some months back.  It's mind-numbingly stupid - not earning the "stupid and funny" ranking of "OMG it's insects".

A few points at the outset.  In the WUWT article, there is no provenance provided for any of the diagrams. No sources are cited.  The information might just as well have come from St Joseph's Kindergarten as from a reputable scientific source.  Where I've been able to do so I've added information from reliable sources.  Where the Murry drawing looks to be meaningless I've said so.

(The material is so sloppy that I'm surprised Murry Salby managed to get as far as he did in academia.  However these drawings were provided by Christopher Monckton to Anthony Watts, neither of whom have any links to academia.  It may be that Murry Salby himself would have provided data sources - but he seems to have disappeared.)

Ratio of 13C to 12C is dropping as expected  

Slide One on the right is from Murry Salby and purports to show 13C as a proportion of 12C in the atmosphere, from 1845 to 1990. The chart on the left is from data at CDIAC / Scripps data for Mauna Loa from 1981 to 2008, showing the 13C:12C ratio is dropping. (As always, click the image for a larger view.)

Data Source: CDIAC/Scripps CO2 Program (left) Salby/Unknown/WUWT (right)

As Murry says, 13C is declining as a proportion of 12C.  This is as it should be as more fossil fuel carbon enters the atmosphere. Since this is as expected I've not bothered to try to find data going back in time - which possibly comes from ice core data.  True to form Murry doesn't give any clue to his data sources - ever.

As you'll see later, even though Murry shows this evidence supporting the fact that it's mainly burning of fossil fuels that's caused atmospheric CO2 to rise, he brushes it and all the other evidence aside, and says it "could be" something else - without giving a hint of what that "something else" could possibly be.

Explanation of trend from CDIAC:

The 13C isotope is stable and heavier than the normal form of carbon (12C), and plants tend to selectively assimilate the lighter isotopes during the photosynthetic process. This results in the following features of the 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere:

1. a seasonal cycle occurs with the heavier isotope at relatively high concentrations during the summer, as plants selectively remove the lighter isotope from the atmosphere, and
2. a general decrease with time, as more fossil carbon (which originally was plant material, and consequently biased toward the lighter isotope) is injected into the atmosphere from the combustion of fossil fuels.

Additionally, about 95% of fossil-fuel carbon emissions are from the Northern Hemisphere, and there is a 6-12 month time lag before this material is transported by the atmosphere to the various stations in the Southern Hemisphere. The seasonal cycle reverses and its amplitude decreases in the Southern Hemisphere, where the seasons are opposite those in the Northern Hemisphere and there is much less land area to support a terrestrial biosphere.

Explanation of trend from Murray Salby / Monckton / WUWT

There is about one molecule of 13C in every 100 molecules of CO2, the great majority being 12C. As CO2 concentration increases, the fraction of 13C in the atmosphere decreases – the alleged smoking gun, fingerprint or signature of anthropogenic emission: for the CO2 added by anthropogenic emissions is leaner in 13C than the atmosphere.

However, anthropogenic CO2 emissions of order 5 Gte yr–1 are two orders of magnitude smaller than natural sources and sinks of order 150 5 Gte yr–1. If some of the natural sources are also leaner in [13]CO2 than the atmosphere, as many are, all bets are off. The decline in atmospheric [13]CO2 may not be of anthropogenic origin after all. In truth, only one component in the CO2 budget is known with any certainty: human emission.

(Note: two of the CO2's in the second WUWT para are probably meant to be 13CO2 - I've amended the text accordingly.)

Conclusion - Murry Salby is denying chemistry

Murry Salby is already trying to argue that there "might be" some hidden unexplained sources of CO2 that have the isotopic signature identical to plants and fossil fuels.  Either that or he is already rejecting the chemistry that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide in this equation:

hydrocarbon + oxygen ---> CO2 + H2O

He does not offer any explanation of what this hidden unknown source might be.  The only explanation he gives for why whatever unknown it may be is suddenly behaving so differently to how it behaved in the past, is that the temperature has gone up!  Nor is he offering any explanation of what happened to the CO2 released when fossil fuels are burnt if the extra 12C is coming from another source.

This is very basic stuff that Murry is denying.  It's not rocket science.  All the evidence points to the fact that adding CO2 from burning long-buried fossil fuels is leading to an accumulation of CO2 in the air and carbon on the surface (in the oceans and biomass).

Seasonal impact on atmospheric CO2

Murry Salby makes much of the fact that there is a seasonal influence on the levels of atmospheric CO2. What he neglects to do is explain it.

As stated in the excerpt from CDIAC above, in summer plants grow and use up CO2.  There is a lot more land and a lot more plants in the northern hemisphere so the effect is much more marked there.  This is expected behaviour and is trivial knowledge even for a scientist who is unfamiliar with biology as Murry Salby seems to be.

The animation below shows this seasonal influence very elegantly.  If you skip to toward the end, it also shows how atmospheric CO2 is higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years - and maybe higher than at any time in the past 15 million years.

Sources of CO2

Murry Salby shows the slide below.  He gives no inkling as to the source or what exactly it is meant to represent, other than the scale at the bottom and saying "CO2 is emitted and absorbed at the surface. In the atmosphere it is inert. It is thus well mixed, but recent observations have shown small variations in concentration, greatest in the unindustrial tropics. "

Source: Unknown except for WUWT

Not good enough Murry! The above could be a chart of anything at all.  It might be a summer time chart or a winter time chart.  It could be taken when there were major fires burning in Africa (like in 2004).  It could be of CO2 at the surface or in the mid-troposphere (unlikely). Or it could be a chart of something else altogether.

Thing is, the amount of emissions from coal, for example, can be measured and monitored.  There is a wide array of organisations monitoring and reporting energy use and fossil fuel combustion and vegetation, as well as monitoring CO2 in the atmosphere itself.  Murry Salby would know this but decides that he prefers his shonky un-named, un-sourced drawings and vague waving of his hands.

For example, below is a map showing CO2 concentration from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)

The global mean concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2011 was the highest on record [Sou: at the time]. Annual mean concentrations in 2011 were particularly high in parts of Europe, parts of East Asia and in the eastern USA

Source: JMA

JMA includes in the chart fluxes from fossil fuel use, fluxes from the ocean and fluxes from vegetation.  It describes the chart as:

The CO2 distribution maps shown below are made from model calculations using an inversion method based on data reported to the WDCGG (World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases) operated by JMA.

For some neat animations of how CO2 travels around the world in various heights in the troposphere, the AIRS website has some movies.

The following video from the Vulcan Project shows CO2 emissions in the United States.

Murry Salby has a mission to deny that humans are causing harm by digging up and burning carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years.  What does he think?  Does he really and truly think that putting billions of tonnes of added carbon into circulation year after year after year won't have any consequences?

Murry moves from "we don't know" to "I know but won't say"

Murry takes a giant leap after waving his arms and muttering "we don't know this" and "we don't know that" about things that many people do know.  He takes a giant leap and claims that all the rise in CO2 is caused by "naturally caused component" - which he claims is "derived solely from temperature and soil moisture changes".

Thing is, he jumps right over what has caused temperatures to rise so quickly or what has caused his supposed "soil moisture changes".  He ignores these things.  He unhitches the horse and puts the cart right up front.  But the cart won't be going anywhere all on its lonesome.  It needs the horse to pull it.

Here's one example of one of the silliest drawings I've come across in a pile of silly drawings at WUWT:

Source: Salby/Unknown/WUWT

Accompanied by one of the silliest bits of text that I've read:

The circulation-dependent naturally-caused component in atmospheric CO2 concentration (blue above), derived solely from temperature and soil moisture changes, coincides with the total CO2 concentration (green). 

"Circulation-dependent naturally-caused component" - what is that?  And "derived solely from temperature and soil moisture changes"?  Logic fail!

Let's see now.  We've added more than twice as much CO2 to the air than is needed to explain the rise in atmospheric CO2 that Murry shows in his chart - which, by the way, is pretty old, isn't it.

About 55% of emissions are being absorbed by the oceans (30%) and plants (25%) and he wants to argue something other than fossil fuel burning is emitting billions of tonnes of CO2 each year by attributing the rise to "a naturally-caused component"!

Murry has already shown that by measuring 13C:12C ratios, all the extra CO2 in the air came from plant sources.  And it's not as if the number of plants on earth have decreased hugely and sent all their carbon into the air.  On the contrary, plants are absorbing more CO2 not less.  (Whatever happened to "CO2 is plant food"?)

And where does Murry think that all the carbon disappeared to from burning billions of tonnes of sequestered ancient plant material?  Into space?  Did the lizard men squirrel it away on their space ships and transport it to Mars?  No.  I'm sure Sarcastic Rover would have told us if they'd done that.

More meaningless shonky drawings

Murry finishes off with some equally silly fake drawings.  For example this one, in which he seems to think that global surface temperature should follow the trend of atmospheric CO2 precisely.  And to think that he used to be a scientist.  And a scientist who was supposed to specialise in climate.  How the mighty have fallen.

Source: Salby/Unknown/WUWT

How many things can you see wrong with this chart?

1. There are no data sources.  The data could come from inside Murry's head for all we know.
2. What native emission? It talks about "CO2 from Native Emission (Temperature Induced)" - but there is nothing on earth that is a net emitter of CO2 in such quantities except for us digging up and burning long buried hydrocarbon.  The two biggest carbon reservoirs on earth, oceans and plants, are absorbing much more than they are emitting. They are absorbing just over half of the carbon from human activities.  
3. Meaningless scales. It plots CO2 and temperature in a meaningless fashion.  All you have to do is change the scale on the left and it will change the look of the entire chart.

Murry's two biggest "wrongs" out of many

If I had to pick one giant flaw in Murry's nonsense I'd find it hard to choose between the following two:

• Denying the science of the greenhouse effect: His topsy turvy "temperature-induced" claim - he doesn't attempt to explain what has caused earth to warm up.  He hasn't mentioned the greenhouse effect.  He glosses over the fact that it's the increase in greenhouse gases that have "induced" the temperature.  He's putting the cart before the horse.

• Disappearing fossil fuel carbon by magic: His feeble attempt to avoid the fact that burning fossil fuels have added hugely to the carbon in the short term carbon cycle.  We've shifted carbon that's been lying dormant underground, sequestered by the long term carbon cycle, and moved it into the air and the oceans and the biosphere.  He points to the irrefutable evidence that the carbon in the air is from plant sources, consistent with the burning of fossil fuels - and then rejects the evidence for no reason at all.

In the WUWT comments it's been pointed out that Murry fails with ice cores, too.  I didn't bother looking into that aspect but they are probably right.  He's failed everything else.

From the WUWT comments

A smattering of comments from WUWT - for your entertainment (archived here).

Greg Goodman says something sensible (for a change):

November 23, 2013 at 5:55 am
I really wonder when Salby is going to publish something (even just an internet article) where we can properly asses what he’s got to say.

C. Monkton’s snapshots of Salby’s presentation … it’s all getting rather farcical.

CodeTech says, somewhat weirdly:

November 23, 2013 at 5:57 am
So, just for my own summary, what we are seeing is:

1. A clear reduction in the CO2 rise during a known cooler time (early 90s)
2. A clear increase in the CO2 rise during a known warmer time (1998)
3. A reduction in the percentage of “human fingerprint” CO2 of 13C

So the logical conclusion is that something other than human input is the cause of the increase of atmospheric CO2 levels, and that something is affected by temperature.

Surely this is GOOD news to the alarmists!

johnmarshall says he doesn't believe anything that has even a whiff of science.  And anyway "it's not CO2":

November 23, 2013 at 6:07 am
Who cares? CO2 does NOT drive temperature/climate. There is no empirical data demonstrating that CO2 drives climate, climate models do but model output is not proof of anything only the ability of the programmer. Present model runs do NOT agree with reality so all FAIL.

gopal panicker says "it's the rain":

November 23, 2013 at 6:40 am
‘CO2 is absorbed and emitted at the surface’…what about rain ?…CO2 is fairly soluble in water…with the tiny volume of a cloud droplet…and the very high ratio of surface to volume..all raindrops should be saturated with CO2…IMHO this should be the main mechanism for removal of CO2 from the atmosphere…and the reason why CO2 has not risen as fast as emissions…assuming all the other processes remain the same

James V asks for help because he's going to be outed as a denier and says (excerpt):

November 23, 2013 at 8:18 am
So someone please help a layman out here because my sister wants to out me as a denier at the thanksgiving table. 

Appropriately named kingdube decides to have it both ways and says it's not just rising temperatures that cause CO2 to rise, falling temperatures will cause CO2 to go up sharply too (excerpt):

November 23, 2013 at 1:49 pm
I expect it reasonable to predict that as the Earth cools, atmospheric CO2 will spike sharply from natural causes. (Of course the alarmists will then argue, when this occurs, that poor Mother Nature can no longer choke-down the anthropogenic emission – she has had her fill from us. But that will be a misinterpretation of this natural process.) Further explanation below:

Andres Valencia bows and scrapes to the lord and wrongly says temperature drives rising CO2 and "it's all a big plot by the nefarious IPCC":

November 23, 2013 at 4:20 pm
Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton. Very good article.
You write that “the CO2 concentration response to the time-integral of temperature very closely tracks the measured changes in CO2 concentration, suggesting the possibility that the former may cause the latter.”. Well, yes!

The IPCC got it backwards because they were looking to corroborate a hypothesis and forgetting to try and find ways to falsify it. The corroboration proved to be weak and elusive, the falsification, much stronger, was at hand but unseen. Confirmation bias or malice?

Paul Schauble quotes Jquip who says "it's not fossil fuels it's animals eating corn" or is it ethanol?:

November 23, 2013 at 5:09 pm

Jquip says
>the only manner in which I can attempt to justify the 13C depletion is IFF this can be reflected in >animal preferences for C4/CAM plants as a food source: Corn, sugar cane, etc.

Could corn used to make ethanol for motor fuels make a difference?

Edim says the temperature (bi?)cycle will pump all the CO2 out of the air until it disappears completely:

November 23, 2013 at 5:39 pm
The seasonal global temperature cycle is driving the annual change in CO2. It acts as a pump, which flow is temperature dependent. The airborne fraction will decrease further with the cooling and at some point it will reach zero, in spite of the record human emissions.

Anthony Watts' protest about Cowtan, Way and the Arctic

Anthony Watts has found something new to protest (archived here).  It's an interesting paper by Kevin Cowtan and Robert G Way published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.

The Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet

The paper has been described and discussed in various places.  What the researchers did was take a novel approach to work out recent temperature changes in parts of the world where there are gaps in the data.  Here is a report from ScienceDaily.com:

An interdisciplinary team of researchers say they have found 'missing heat' in the climate system, casting doubt on suggestions that global warming has slowed or stopped over the past decade.

Observational data on which climate records are based cover only 84 per cent of the planet -- with Polar regions and parts of Africa largely excluded.

Now Dr Kevin Cowtan, a computational scientist at the University of York, and Robert Way, a cryosphere specialist and PhD student at the University of Ottawa, have reconstructed the 'missing' global temperatures using a combination of observations from satellites and surface data from weather stations and ships on the peripheries of the unsampled regions.

The new research published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society shows that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet. Previous studies by the UK Met Office based on the HadCRUT4 dataset, which only covers about five-sixths of the globe, suggest that global warming has slowed substantially since 1997. The new research suggests, however, that the addition of the 'missing' data indicates that the rate of warming since 1997 has been two and a half times greater than shown in the Met Office studies. Evidence for the rapid warming of the Arctic includes observations from high latitude weather stations, radiosonde and satellite observations of temperatures in the lower atmosphere and reanalysis of historical data.

A member of the Department of Chemistry at York, Dr Cowtan, whose speciality is crystallography, carried out the research in his spare time. This is his first climate paper.

He says: "There's a perception that global warming has stopped but, in fact, our data suggests otherwise. But the reality is that 16 years is too short a period to draw a reliable conclusion. We find only weak evidence of any change in the rate of global warming."

Robert Way adds: "Changes in Arctic sea ice and glaciers over the past decade clearly support the results of our study. By producing a truly global temperature record, we aim to better understand the drivers of recent climate change."

More about the research

There are some very readable discussions about the paper at:

• realclimate.org by Stefan Rahmstorf
• skepticalscience.com by the authors, Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way, with Dana Nuccitelli
• Variable Variability by Victor Venema - with lots more links
• Arctic Sea Ice Blog by Neven

The authors used a statistical technique known as kriging to interpolate data from neighbouring sites that have temperature observations to determine the temperature in between.  Here is how Wikipedia describes kriging:

The basic idea of kriging is to predict the value of a function at a given point by computing a weighted average of the known values of the function in the neighborhood of the point. The method is mathematically closely related to regression analysis. Both theories derive a best linear unbiased estimator, based on assumptions on covariances, make use of Gauss-Markov theorem to prove independence of the estimate and error, and make use of very similar formulae. They are nevertheless, useful in different frameworks: kriging is made for estimation of a single realization of a random field, while regression models are based on multiple observations of a multivariate dataset.

Kriging was also used by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team. What was novel about this research was that the authors also used a hybrid method, combining satellite data and surface data.  They found by testing that the hybrid method gave the most accurate results over land and sea ice, whereas kriging was best over open oceans.

It's all a bit too much for Anthony Watts and his band of fake skeptics

Anthony would discount any reasonable discussion of the paper as being too sciency.  He managed to find a denier slant proffered by Judith Curry (archived here). And he did find some words of his own to help get his crew fired up (archived here):

Breathless interpreters of Cowtan & Way claim that by doing the same with satellite data instead of tortured surface data, Voilà “the pause” disappears.

It looks as if Anthony didn't read the paper or any discussion of it.  If he had, he would have seen that the authors used both satellite and surface data.  I guess he didn't watch the video he posted, either.  Here it is:

Judith Curry shows her ignorance - and she has researched the Arctic

Over at Judith Curry's blog (archived here), Kevin Cowtan, one of the authors, explains, rather nicely and politely, that (my hyperlinks):

Dear Dr Curry
Thank you for you comments. We indeed hope that one of the results of our paper will be to stimulate a vigorous discussion in this area.

With respect to kriging across land ocean boundaries, we note that this is a problem in the paper. Can I draw your attention to our update memo [Sou: I think Kevin is referring to this] in which we test separate reconstruction of the land and ocean data before blending, which is in our view a better approach. To do this properly would require access to the HadCRUT4 land ensemble which is not currently distributed, but with the CRUTEM4 data (which lacks some corrections) the results of blending pre- or post-reconstruction is almost indistinguishable, even under different ice-coverage assumptions. (There is no reason why this must be the case, it is a result of the distribution of the unobserved regions). Dynamically changing ice is more difficult, and you can’t do it with anomalies as you don’t know what kind of bias you introduce when changing a cell from land to ocean, so we’ll have to leave that problem to the BEST team.

Most interesting is the issue of the UAH data over Antarctica. We’ve recently been looking at this with respect to both Vostok, and the Bromwich 2012 Byrd reconstruction. Byrd particularly interesting – it sits on a cell boundary and is remarkably well modelled by the cell to the north in the hybrid reconstruction. The cell to the south models the year-to-year variations, but not the long term trend. We’ve made some preliminary analysis of what is going on based on differencing North-South transects in the UAH data. Some regions show no significant changes, whereas others show large changes in either direction around 2000. I hope to write this up as another update, and maybe Dr Christie will be able to shed more light on the issue, although I’m afraid everything takes a long time when you’re doing it in your spare time.

So it may be that kriging is a better approach for Antartica, especially with remediated data from some of the isolated stations – Byrd is critical here, and I want to do some detailed comparisons with BEST too. Against that, the holdout tests actually favour the hybrid approach for most of the existing station locations, including the SP.

Having said all of that, the difference between the hybrid and kriging reconstructions of Antarctica is only really significant around 1998, so it doesn’t greatly affect our conclusions. And the Arctic is sufficiently small that the two reconstructions are very similar. Most of the Arctic coverage bias also arises in the NH winter, when the Rigor result is most relevant.

If I may appeal to your own expertise, there would seem to be a parallel between our results and those of Cohen et al 2012 (doi:10.1088/1748-9326/7/1/014007). Do you think there is a plausible connection? November 13, 2013 at 4:23 pm 

Robert Way added some comments of his own in response to Judith Curry's complaints (my bold, with Judith Curry's comments in italics ).

First, Kriging. Kriging across land/ocean/sea ice boundaries makes no physical sense. While the paper cites Rigor et al. (2000) that shows ‘some’ correlation in winter between land and sea ice temps at up to 1000 km, I would expect no correlation in other seasons.

Response [1] Actually in the paper we show through rigorous cross-validation tests (see Table 1; Table 2; Figure 3) that kriging is an effective approach for estimating temperatures, even across boundaries. However the hybrid approach performs better than any other method at reconstructing high latitude temperatures (see Figure 3 – cross validation) even at distances of 1650 km). In the case of sea ice this hypothesis has been tested (see Figure 4) where it is shown that kriging from land regions outperforms kriging from ocean cells.

Second, UAH satellite analyses. Not useful at high latitudes in the presence of temperature inversions and not useful over sea ice (which has a very complex spatially varying microwave emission signature). Hopefully John Christy will chime in on this.

Response [2] As indicated in the response to the 1st comment – we have tested the methodology adopted in this study against both held-out observations and against grounded/floating buoys in the Arctic ocean, often located on sea ice. The results of our study indicate that the performance of the hybrid method is reasonable over ice (Figure 4; Figure S5).

We also provide an attempt at showing the impacts of changing sea ice conditions on the reconstruction. Although not available in the supplemental information we have also tested the method in Antarctic against the reconciled Byrd station located in one of the most icebound, isolated places on the planet. The results of this test show very reasonable performance with the hybrid method.

Third, re reanalyses in the Arctic. See Fig 1 from this paper [Sou: the paper Judith cites is one of hers published in 2002], which gives you a sense of the magnitude of grid point errors for one point over an annual cycle. Some potential utility here, but reanalyses are not useful for trends owing to temporal inhomogeneities in the datasets that are assimilated.

Response [3] Since the paper in question was published there have been significant advances in reanalysis methods. In particular, 4-D methods such as those employed by ERA-Interim have shown to be much more reliable in the Arctic and Antarctic. There are a series of papers by James Screen at Exeter which delves into many of these issues and examines the performance of reanalysis products in both the Arctic and Antarctic. I would suggest that Dr. Curry take a bit of time to have a look at the results of some of these studies. That being said the paper does not use reanalysis to infill temperatures, nor do we use it with the kriging, reanalysis is simply presented as an additional source of evidence in additional to satellites, radiosondes and isolated weather stations which show that the Arctic is rapidly warming. Physical evidence is also available in the form of sea ice reduction and glacier changes as well as melt records from high Arctic ice caps. There is a wealth of literature supporting the conclusions that the Arctic is warming rapidly and this relationship (Arctic Amplification) is clear in the paleorecords.  November 13, 2013 at 4:31 pm

Judith, having mispelt Robert's family name throughout (Wray instead of Way) posts a reply immediately under Robert's but for some reason decides to call him James and then, for no reason at all, says she doesn't believe him.  (Yeah, I went 'huh?' too).  Judith also said she doesn't know of any reanalysis studies done by James Screen despite her having done some recent research on the general topic.

James, thanks for stopping by and engaging here. I agree that there is evidence of warming in the Arctic, however, I remain unconvinced that your methods are verified in any meaningful way for surface temperatures of open water and sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. I see no reference to papers by James Screen in your paper, I don’t know what papers you are referring to. I have recently done a comprehensive literature survey regarding in situ surface temperature and surface flux measurements in the Arctic Ocean (for a grant proposal). I have not seen any recent studies evaluating reanalyses using these data sets. November 13, 2013 at 6:56 pm

So much for Judith's research skills! I would have said that a ten second Google Scholar search would have saved Judith Curry a certain amount of embarrassment, except that she has never shown any sign of being embarrassed by her bloopers.

From the WUWT comments

I'll leave interested readers to do any further reading with the links I've provided above.  Let's just see what the various members of the WUWT brigade have to say (archived here).

Judge starts the ball rolling and maybe got up Anthony's nose a bit by pointing out that he mimicked Judith Curry's mis-spelling of Robert Way's name (which Anthony later corrected) and says:

November 14, 2013 at 9:32 am
Way not Wray – “Robert G. Way”

omnologos points out that it can't be warming everywhere.  Someone is probably wrong.  Thing is, I don't think the Cowtan and Way necessarily claims to account for all the difference between the models and the other global temperature data sets, but I could be wrong:

November 14, 2013 at 9:35 am
Just like Kloor has shown it’s ridiculous now for alarmists to do their regular ambulance chasing at every hurricane or drought, likewise scientists should stop claiming to have found the missing heat in the most convenient of places, namely where nobody can get much reasonable data from (it was the depths of the ocean, not it’s the most remote of the North Pole).

There are also many other problems with this pausebuster. Have the scientists involved deliberately misled the IPCC by telling nobody about what was incoming two months later? If they are right, isn’t Dear Kev wrong about the oceans?

If they are right, then people claiming that there was a pause (based on non-infilled data)were right, and Dana and SkS wrong in dismissing the pause.

Also if the North Pole puts the trend back to expected values, this means the recent warming is becoming more and more northern-polar than global.

Furthermore this would be yet another AGW miracle, with values magically going back to be exactly as expected.
Etc etc.

Kev-in-Uk says he can't stomach science:

November 14, 2013 at 9:36 am
Here we go again – more data from the ‘middle of nowhere’, literally! I dunno whether I can stomach to watch the method video. Someone tell me if it makes sense, and if I can use the same methodology to magic money into my bank account, as there is none there at present!

Paul Homewood, recently of super-typhoon infamy, hasn't bothered reading anything about the paper but agrees that it's been getting very warm in the Arctic lately.  He says:

November 14, 2013 at 9:42 am
Even GISS figures with their 1200km smoothing (right or wrong) show the same pause as the other sets, so they cannot argue the poles are being ignored.
Indeed, take out the poles from the GISS dataset, and I would imagine you would end up with a cooling trend.

tWISTERdATA says:

November 14, 2013 at 9:44 am
Lots of sciency talk. Lets just simplify: “We made stuff up.”

Then tWISTERdATA posting again, this time as tornadomark, decided he could improve on his previous comment and says:

November 14, 2013 at 9:45 am
Lots of Sciencey talk. Here’s the bottom line: “We made stuff up to support the cause.”

Salvatore Del Prete makes believe he knows something about science and says:

November 14, 2013 at 9:48 am
Filling in data is worse then doing nothing.

Eliza says she doesn't know why WUWT bothers with sciency stuff (maybe it should stick to paranoid conspiracy theories) and says:

November 14, 2013 at 10:15 am
I dont’ know why such drivel (The paper) even gets mentioned here.

Ian W just knows all those scientists are wrong and so is the Royal Society of Meteorology and all the reviewers.  He lets everyone know why all the scientists are wrong.  A change in temperature tells you nothing, he cries, and proceeds to build a heated strawman (excerpt):

November 14, 2013 at 1:05 pm
Water does not scatter the infrared it absorbs it. Thus it raises the heat content of the air without raising its temperature. That is the enthalpy of the air (its heat capacity) increases as the humidity increases.

Mosher and all the other non-engineers are averaging temperature are thus averaging the wrong metric. They should be measuring heat content in kilojoules per kilogram. After all isn’t the ‘global warming hypothesis’ about trapping heat – you can’t trap temperature Steven can you?
So as davidmhoffer says it requires almost no heat at all to raise the temperature of a volume of dry arctic air at minus 30C by one degree, but a large amount of energy is required to raise the temperature of a similar volume of 90% humidity equatorial Pacific air by one degree because the humid air enthalpy is so much higher. Yet you ‘highly trained climate scientists’ average the temperature of these volumes of air to measure heat???

For that reason alone the Cowtan and Way should have been thrown out at peer review.

Gunga Din lightens the mood and says:

November 14, 2013 at 1:13 pm
So………….the missing heat is hiding in the cold?

 Steven Mosher and Nick Stokes chime in with some science stuff, much to the disgust of the WUWT-ers.  For example, Nick Stokes writes:

November 14, 2013 at 1:32 pm

“At first glance, this seems an admirable and reasonable goal, but one should always be wary of trying to create data where there is none, something we learned about in Steig et al’s discredited paper on the supposed Antarctic warming.”

Steig’s paper was not discredited, and particularly not his method of fitting satellite-derived EOFs to station data to infill. His critics Ryan et al used the same method. They used more EOFs, which gave an improvement.

Whenever you calculate a space average from sampled data, there is an implied assumption that the samples are representative of data in between. That’s not just climate science, it’s for any continuum analysis. The average is justified by interpolation. Any form of rational interpolation is better than leaving areas out.

Even a couple of fake sceptics concede the point Nick Stokes made. Mark Bofill says:

November 14, 2013 at 1:45 pm
I’m often critical of Nick but I’ve got to say I think he’s got a point here. I haven’t read the paper (with my limited grasp of the science it wouldn’t make all that much difference if I did) but from what I’ve gathered so far from the discussions about it I’m thinking this paper is probably pretty solid. Perfect? No, but it’s probably a step in the right direction.

Louis doesn't understand how scientific knowledge grows and says:

November 14, 2013 at 2:02 pm
If climate scientists accept this paper, won’t they be admitting that they have been calculating the average global temperature wrong all this time? If they could make such a big mistake in how they estimated polar temperatures, doesn’t that open the door to the possibility of other major mistakes in their methodology? Do they really want to admit that the science isn’t so settled after all?

The paranoid arrive a bit late to the WUWT playground.  Dolphinhead says:

November 14, 2013 at 2:05 pm
I’m guessing this is another of those papers that will be used by politicians as if it was written on tablets of stone and will be quoted as the reason why we must continue to de-industrialise the West.

Philip Peake is sad that the scientists don't take heed of all the fake experts at WUWT and says:

November 14, 2013 at 2:12 pm
The sad thing here appears to be using data which is not understood.
The even sadder thing, is that a (supposedly) respected journal and its expert reviewers didn’t catch that.

Janice Moore gets up a head of steam and as one of seven posts in a row, all of them meaningless, shouts (excerpt):

November 14, 2013 at 7:23 pm:
...This stupid paper (given that it reveals ANY truth) does at least indicate that the IPCC models which projected Arctic cooling are even WORSE than we already knew that they were ……….which isn’t saying much …………………. which makes this paper just a piece of junk.  As someone above aptly said: THEY ARE JUST MAKING IT UP AS THEY GO. Pitiful.

That about covers it, unless you're a glutton for punishment and want to read more WUWT comments - archived here.

---

Kevin Cowtan and Robert G. Way (2013), Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/qj.2297

Werner Brozek at WUWT claims that "at least" means "at most"!

Update: See below - I've added a video for Werner Brozek, as I promised in the comments, to help him learn the difference between science and policy and maybe pick up some critical thinking tips.

I read this at Anthony Watts' science-denying blog, WUWT, this evening.  Werner Brozek wrote (archived here):

...204 months is equal to 17 years. In the “Separating signal and noise in atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale” Benjamin Santer et al. stated that:

“Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.”

I am sure that I will be corrected if I am wrong, but in plain English, my interpretation of this statement is as follows:

“There is a lot of noise in the climate system and it is quite possible that the noise can mask the effects of man-made carbon dioxide for a period of time. However if the slope is zero for 17 years, then we cannot blame noise any more but we have to face the facts that we humans do not affect the climate to any great extent.”

Is that reasonably accurate interpretation?

No, it's not a reasonably accurate interpretation

What do you think?   Is that a reasonably accurate interpretation?  It would appear to the disinterested reader that Werner has re-interpreted what was written.  In particular he has:

• ignored the two words "at least"
• committed a logical fallacy.

To my mind the first oversight is sufficient to show that Werner is wrong.  Still, I'll present his logical fallacy, which is related to his ignoring the two important words.  It is as follows:

• Santer stated that "to identify human effects at least 17 years of data is required"
• Werner turned this around and basically said "to identify human effects at most 17 years of data is required", which is wrong.

I've written about this before here when Christoper Monckton tried it on.  If you want to know what Santer et al meant, the best way to find out is to go to the paper itself.  In the text you will read how the longer the time period the more the signal emerges from the noise.  They show that multi-decadal records are needed (at least 17 years).  For example, as follows:

• Our estimated signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios for global-scale TLT changes were less than 1.0 on the 10-year timescale (Figure 6c). On the 32-year timescale, however, S/N exceeded 3.9 in all three observational TLT data sets. The latter result shows that natural internal variability, as simulated by current climate models, is a highly unlikely explanation for the observed lower tropospheric warming over the satellite era (Figure 6d). Comparisons between simulated and observed low-frequency TLT variability suggest that our estimates of S/N ratios on 5–20 year timescales are conservative (Figures 9 and 10). The strong timescale dependence of S/N ratios arises primarily because of the large decrease in noise amplitude as the period used for trend fitting increases (Figure 6b).

• The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

Compare 17 years with 34 years of RSS data

The animation below probably says it all.  I've plotted RSS data of the lower troposphere (70S to 82.5N) because that's what Werner Brozek used. The only difference is that Werner plotted monthly data from 1 November 1996 to 31 October 2013 (monthly data is noisier), whereas I've plotted annual data.  The chart shows:

• the first 17 years of the RSS record, 1979 to 1996
• the second (most recent) 17 years, 1996 to 2013 - minus what hasn't happened yet this year and
• the entire 34 year period, 1979 to 2013 (with the current year to date).

Data Source: RSS

Note the R² values.  For the two shorter periods the trend line has not much meaning.  For the longer period of 34 years, the trend is more solid:

• 1979 to 1996 has a steeper slope than the most recent 17 year period (0.07°C/decade), but R² = 0.0893
• 1996 to 2013 is the least steep slope (0.02°C/decade) and R² = 0.0108
• 1979 to 2013 has the steepest slope of all (0.12°C/decade) and R² = 0.4701

For comparison, here is GISTemp global surface temperature anomaly with the trend line plotted from 1971 to 2012:

Data Source: NASA

I have a feeling that Werner Brozek won't be celebrating for too many more months (click the climate models tab here).

From the WUWT comments

Here's a sample (I nearly forgot! - How could I?) - archived here.


ConfusedPhoton says:

November 4, 2013 at 6:55 am
The goal posts will be moved soon and we will see that we need 25-30 years of non warming.
It is a bit like the timing of the end of the world madmen, everytime we reach it some excuse is used and a new date is given.
Do not make the mistake that Climate ” Science” has anything to do with real science!

JimH says he's prepared to wait a bit longer:

November 4, 2013 at 7:02 am
Personally I’m waiting (hopefully) for the 20 year mark. Because then the 1980-2000 (roughly speaking) rise will be no longer than the 2000-2020 level/cooling period. I don’t think AGW will survive that. We’re nearly three quarters of the way there, as the years tick by the warmists will be getting more and more worried. I think post 2015 the cracks will really begin to show as more rats leave the sinking ship.

oppti says - (you'll enjoy this comment!):

November 4, 2013 at 7:15 am
Ric Werme 7:00
Ok so what is the RSS reading for the period 1944-1978?
Climate has long time periodicity, something CO2 has not changed completely!

Alan the Brit says:

November 4, 2013 at 7:39 am
As people have already noted, the goalpost shifting will soon begin, with warmists ready with a veritable bank of excuses as to why the Earth hasn’t warmed or indeed started to cool!!!! Under no circumstances could they be wrong!

highflight56433 says:

November 4, 2013 at 8:09 am
My contention has been that if we dilute the atmosphere’s water vapor with CO2, it will have a cooling effect. There is more correlation to this per the inter-glacial periods.
Also, temperature readings at airports are for the purposes of aircraft performance, not climate monitoring. My contention (lots of contentions) is not to use any airport weather station data. They are heat islands.
Another contention is the sun drives our climate followed by “other stuff.”

Addendum

Richard Milne on critical thinking - separating climate science and politics / opinion / policy.

i

How Roy Spencer and John Christy trick Anthony Watts and his deniers once again

Today Roy Spencer put up a chart from John Christy on his blog (archived here) and wrote:

...over the period of the satellite record (1979-2012), both the surface and satellite observations produce linear temperature trends which are below 87 of the 90 climate models used in the comparison.

Let's just do a quick fact check.   First of all, he's wrong.  Even in his wonky chart (scroll down the page to see it) it's only their own satellite record that's "below" "over the period of the satellite record".  The surface temperatures don't drop below the bulk of the models until the tail end of the observations, from around 2008 onwards.  So I looked more closely at his chart and what I noticed was:

• the different series of observations and models unusually all started at almost the same point and
• UAH diverged a lot from the surface temperatures.

Now that's odd, I thought. I've previously compared UAH and GISTemp and noted how similar they are over time.  So how is it that they diverge so much in Roy's rendering?

Then I saw a question by Steven Mosher.  He asked:

October 14, 2013 at 4:02 PMHi Roy,
whats the Y axis? departure from 1979-83 normal?

Sure enough, Roy's Y axis had the label: "Departure from 1979-83 average (deg C)"

Now why would John Christy use such a short period of time as a baseline?  The normal period used is 30 years.  Four years is a very short period for a baseline.  So I ran up a couple of charts and you can see the difference for yourself.

This first one  shows UAH (lower troposphere) has higher and lower extremes than the surface temperature but they track each other fairly closely.  This is using a 30 year baseline from 1981-2010.  Take note of the fact that 1983, John's start year, lies above the trend. (Click to enlarge.)

This next chart is using John Christy's four year baseline 1979-1983.  If you compare the top and next chart below you'll see why UAH diverges so much.  The first three years of UAH are quite a bit above the surface temperature.  They come together more from 1982 onwards.  Using a four year baseline from 1979-83 shifts UAH down lower compared to the surface record. (Click to enlarge.)

Neat trick of Roy and John Christy?  What do you think.  Should we use that trick whenever we want to argue how different the satellite record of the lower troposphere is from the average global temperature of the land and sea surface?

I haven't plotted the model runs that Roy and John did, but I do have some questions for them.  I'll show their chart first, then ask the questions. (Click to enlarge.)

I have four three questions:

• Why did John Christy use a four year baseline period instead of a 30 year baseline as is usual?
• How did John Christy get all the CMIP5 models to start at exactly the same zero degree anomaly point?
• Why did they start at 1983 instead of 1979, which is when UAH started and when their baseline period started?  Oh, that's because they used five year running means - see next point.
• Why did they use running five year means instead of average annual?

Now let's see how the models are reported in the IPCC report. (Click to enlarge.)

From TFE.3, Figure 1: IPCC WG1 Technical Summary (page TS-96)

I must say that John Christy messed up his model runs, comparing John's chart to the IPCC chart above. Unlike in John's chart, there is no point at which the models all converge in the IPCC chart.  As well as that, while the observations are at the low end of the models right now, that wasn't the case back in the 1980s and 90s.  John Christy's chart shows UAH diverging from the get go way back in 1983.

Later addition: --o--The fact that 1983 lies above the trend line (see top chart above) probably means that John's model runs, which start at zero in 1983, are too high.  It's the same problem as discussed elsewhere when people were looking at an early draft of the IPCC report.--o--

Shall we just assume that John Christy and Roy Spencer are having a little fun at the expense of Anthony Watts and other science deniers?  Anthony Watts reposted Roy's article at WUWT and he didn't have any notice to indicate he knew it was a joke.  In fact Anthony seems to think Roy is serious.  He writes:

Reality wins, it seems. Dr Roy Spencer writes:

Well, Anthony it's not reality.  It's just a more mischief from John Christy and Roy Spencer.  It gives Wondering Willis' a chance for payback if he cares to take it.

From the WUWT comments

This article has brought out the lowest common denominator of denier at WUWT.  There is almost no-one querying the chart or making a useful comment.  It's just chanting of "all the models are wrong", "scientists don't know nuffin'" and "it's not CO2".  And Anthony boasts about his website?  Seriously?  Click for archived WUWT version with comments.


JustAnotherPoster says something rather garbled.  In between his "all the models are wrong" chant, something went wrong between the keyboard and brain?

October 14, 2013 at 2:15 pm
As RJB would state. The really clever work now would be to bin all the model that are failures and investigate why the two at the bottom have matched reality and what they have assumed compared with the failed ones.

That’s the Potential published paper work What have the model winners assumed that the model failures haven’t

magicjava asks a good question:

October 14, 2013 at 3:42 pm
Just a quick question. Why are temperatures given as a 5 year mean? Why not plot the actual temperature?

Jimbo is not at all sceptical of John Christy's chart and says:

October 14, 2013 at 3:43 pm
There are 3 words that Warmists hate to see in the same paragraph. These 3 words can cause intolerable mental conflict.
*Projections, *observations, *comparisons.

At one of the IPCC insiders’ meetings they knew full well that there was a problem. Some bright spark must have suggested that they simple pluck a new confidence number out of thin air otherwise they would be doomed (and shamed). Desperate times call for desperate measures. Just look at the graph. You won’t see this kind of behavior in any other science.

shenanigans24 sees what he wants to see and doesn't question anything either:

October 14, 2013 at 4:02 pm
I would say 100% are wrong. The fact that 2 or 3 haven’t overshot the temperature doesn’t make them right. They aren’t following the observed temperature. It’s clear that none of them simulate the actual climate.

richardscourtney says:

October 14, 2013 at 4:21 pm
Friends:
Some here seem to think rejection of the models which are clearly wrong would leave models which are right or have some property which provides forecasting skill and, therefore, merits investigation. Not so. To understand why this idea is an error google for Texas Sharp Shooter fallacy.

Models which have failed to correctly forecast are observed to be inadequate at forecasting. Those two (or three?) which remain are not known to be able to forecast the future from now. One or more of them may be able to do that but it cannot be known if this is true.
Richard

John Franco hasn't yet woken up to the fact that deniers can change their tune on a whim.  He's looking for some denialist consistency and can't find any at WUWT.  He says:

October 14, 2013 at 4:47 pm
I’m still confused why we care about HADCRUT. I thought WUWT demonstrated that half the “warming” came from bad ground stations and other fudge factors. I also thought another article on WUWT demonstrated that that HADCRUT takes advantage of some bad mathmatics to suppress temperatures early than 1960, especially the high temps of the 1940s.

Unlike most deniers who say it's all too complex, Latitude reckons climate is very simple and says:

October 14, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Richard, I see it as simply not willing to admit that CO2 isn’t as powerful as they want it to be….
covering it up and justifying it with “aerosols” etc….
That way they can still blame it all on CO2

Matt Ridley loses the plot, falls back on "CO2 is plant food"

I've been watching WUWT waiting for an article on the amazing and appalling one in a hundred year flood in Colorado.  But despite claiming to be an ex-tele weather announcer, and despite living close by in California, Anthony isn't interested in such things.

Instead, joining the list of crank articles on WUWT, Anthony favours a Matt Ridley "CO2 is plant food" bit of idiocy (archived here).  Here is a video from Peter Sinclair that hits that old denier meme on the head:

A spate of silly articles on WUWT - but what's new?

As usual there is a spate of silly articles coming out in advance of the new IPCC report later this month.  Anthony Watts is putting up all sorts of nonsense and it's hard to tell which is worse.

First - Tim "slayer" Ball can't read a simple chart

Yesterday he had Tim Ball, who denies the greenhouse effect, claiming it's been cooling for the past seventeen years (archived here). If Tim was interested in facts, he'd be saying that the average global surface temperature hasn't gone up in two years - not since the record high in 2010.  Instead he tries to bluff and bluster about 17 years.  Here's a chart showing 1995 (2012 minus 17) and 1996 (2013 minus 17) that demonstrates how woefully wrong is serial disinformer and greenhouse effect denier, Tim Ball.

Data source: NASA

Next it's Matt "CO2 is plant food" Ridley

Now the latest spin on WUWT is from Matt Ridley, who has gone completely nuts claiming that global warming will be "good".  All this would be laughable, if it weren't so sad.  What is it that addles people's brains to the extent that they can't accept reality?

Anthony thinks he has "BREAKING: IPCC AR5 report to dial back climate sensitivity" (archived here).  Whether that is true or not (see Justin Gillis NYT article), the article itself shows that Ridley has lost the plot completely. Matt tries to claim: (there is a) very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.

Good grief.  Remember, that's coming from a self-labelled "rational optimist".  Irrational is more like it.  Ridley makes a ludicrous appeal to an "authority" that he pulled out of thin air - unnamed "experts":

Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. 

Matt has a habit of making up stuff.  His "most experts" probably include deniers like Anthony Watts.  No rational person thinks that "less than two degrees" will result in "no net economic or ecological damage".  Governments picked 2 degrees to aim for as a cap because they figured that we might just survive that - albeit at great cost to the economy and the environment.

Matt's "most experts" are not climate scientists, that's for sure.  Not only is his claim about "most experts" not true, but at present we are on track to well exceed a doubling of carbon emissions this century which, even with the most conservative estimates of sensitivity, means that we are heading for very serious climate change with dire consequences.  If Matt Ridley and Anthony Watts and other science deniers have their way, we won't be worried about what damage a doubling of CO2 will bring, we'll be facing damage that a trebling or quadrupling of CO2 will bring - or worse.

I had to go to the Wall Street Journal (archived here) to read the rest of his silliness.  For example:

Warming of up to 1.2 degrees Celsius over the next 70 years (0.8 degrees have already occurred), most of which is predicted to happen in cold areas in winter and at night, would extend the range of farming further north, improve crop yields, slightly increase rainfall (especially in arid areas), enhance forest growth and cut winter deaths (which far exceed summer deaths in most places). Increased carbon dioxide levels also have caused and will continue to cause an increase in the growth rates of crops and the greening of the Earth—because plants grow faster and need less water when carbon dioxide concentrations are higher.

"Extend the range of farming further north" - does he seriously imagine that farming is going to suddenly sprout up on the Greenland ice sheet?  I wonder if he thinks that the sun will stay up for longer as the world warms?  And what about all the farming south that will go under?

"Improve crop yields?" - what about the reduction in crop yields as marginal areas extend further, as places like south western USA and south western Australia become even drier and hotter?

"Slightly increase rainfall in arid areas"? Not so.  Dry areas are generally expected to become drier and wet areas wetter.  Rainfall intensity will continue to increase.  Downpours aren't good for topsoil.

As for his silly "CO2 is plant food" argument - if everything else is equal, C3 plants (wheat etc) do respond to an increase in CO2.  But if there's no water or too much water it won't help the crop.  And it doesn't matter how much extra CO2 there is when it's too hot and dry.

Then Matt goes into full-on - "people in low lying coastal areas can go hang":

Up to two degrees of warming, these benefits will generally outweigh the harmful effects, such as more extreme weather or rising sea levels, which even the IPCC concedes will be only about 1 to 3 feet during this period.

Matt Ridley dismisses the sea level rise as "only 1 to 3 feet over this period".  "Only"? I'm almost lost for words with that one.  That means he cares little about places like Miami, much of which would be seriously damaged with a one foot rise in sea level.  Just look at the damage that Sandy wrought with a much smaller rise in sea level.  From Jeff Goodell at Rolling Stone:

With just three feet of sea-level rise, more than a third of southern Florida will vanish; at six feet, more than half will be gone; if the seas rise 12 feet, South Florida will be little more than an isolated archipelago surrounded by abandoned buildings and crumbling overpasses. And the waters won't just come in from the east – because the region is so flat, rising seas will come in nearly as fast from the west too, through the Everglades.

Not that Matt Ridley cares, he lives in England.  So what will happen to his little island after he's departed it? Here is one estimate - with a rise of one metre, the risk that the Thames Barrier is breached goes to one in ten years.  Bye bye London:

"With 50cm of sea level rise we would expect that level of protection to go down from 1 in 1,000 years to about 1 in 100 years, so under that scenario in every year there would be a 1 per cent chance of flooding. If you have a metre rise you go down from 1 in 1,000 years to 1 in 10 years," Professor Vaughan said.

We can expect more ludicrous articles like this one over the next few weeks as the people who don't want to mitigate harmful global warming deny the latest IPCC report of the science.

And to think that Anthony Watts complains about being lumped in with all the other deniers.  If he doesn't want people to think he rejects climate science, he will need at the very least to stop posting any and all contributions from "guest denialist authors" like Matt Ridley, perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale, Tim Ball, Christopher Monckton, Steve "mad, mad, mad" Goreham, David "funny sunny" Archibald and others.  And he'd have to stop making silly claims like he did yesterday, with his "it's natural" and other denier memes.

From the WUWT comments

As usual the fake "skeptics" at WUWT regulars aren't the least bit sceptical.  Here is a sample of the reaction:

Lanny says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:23 am
So basically the whole “Global warming thing” has been a tempest in a teapot.

Steve Jones is an uber conspiracy nutter who says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:39 am
They are putting an awful lot of effort into calculating these temp rises v. probability and none of it is via the scientific method. Their concern is to keep their gravy train rolling whilst distancing themselves from the more ridiculous projections that real world data is falsifying right now.
Let’s hope the IPCC falls off this tight-rope and soon.

JustMEinT Musings thinks global warming is one big joke and says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:41 am
so does this mean that Dr. Train Driver/engineer will be out of a job now :-)

Birdieshooter is completely ignorant of climate science and says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:42 am
Since earlier projections of increases in extreme weather,ie, hurricanes and tornadoes etc, have not come to pass, I wonder how they will address that aspect.

ConTrari is another deluded conspiracy nutter who says:

September 14, 2013 at 12:54 am
The basic question for IPCC in a world that is cooling not only in temperature but also in attitudes towards them, is how to preserve their status and funding. So they must backpaddle a bit, to avoid the danger of being called activist alarmists. It is, however, a razorthin edge to walk along, with the abyss of oblivion and insignificance on the other side of the knife’s edge.
They may adopt the practical view that in order to keep themselves clothed, warm and well-fed, the vision of a boiling globe and a starving humanity must be pushed a bit into the background.

Anthony Watts doesn't want to be thought of as a "denier" - ha! He and his blog are a joke!