Eric Worrall is deeply offended by the New York Times *and* wants to trash the world

Climate disinformer Eric Worrall took a short quiz at the New York Times (on WUWT archived here). The quiz was a few simple questions about what decisions Donald Trump should take in regard to oil, gas and protecting the planet Earth and the people who live on it.

Eric chose to tell Donald Trump to trash the planet, and then pretended to be deeply offended when he was told by the New York Times in response to his choices:

You did a very bad job protecting the environment and may have made many of the worst effects of climate change more likely. It could hardly have been worse.

On the upside for President Trump, Republicans in Congress and many of the people who voted for him will support most of your decisions. We guess it’s true what they say about dark clouds (something about silver linings?).

What does he expect? That anyone but his fellow planet wreckers would thank him for more floods, more drought, more heat waves, poorer crops, more wildfires, more skin cancer and faster global warming?

The scientific illiterati rise up at WUWT

Illiterati: Definition from the Urban Dictionary

The opposite of the Illuminati, who take pride in their high level of knowledge and learning. An Illiterati takes pride in the fact that they are ignorant and refuse to learn (adjust their paradigm) often to the severe detriment of those around them.

Sometimes science deniers are quite unabashed about their desire to suppress all knowledge and particularly scientific knowledge and education. Anthony Watts has a "guest essay" by Eric Worrall (archived here), in which he claims that:

• Earth and Space Science is only about climate
• Earth and Space Science is "dogma" and "politically convenient pseudoscience".

Hmm. That sums up WUWT rather well, don't you think?

WUWT trips over p's and H's in the ocean

Here's another teaser on oceans and acidification. I've got another article in train but have been busy, so it won't be up for a while longer. Meanwhile, WUWT has another "claim" article (archived here) about a not so new paper on ocean acidification,  total CO₂ concentration and the degree of CaCO₃ saturation (from June this year).

The paper itself is by a team led by Professor Taro Takahashi and has been published in Marine Chemistry. Anthony copied and pasted the press release but didn't have time to link to the source :) Never mind. It wasn't hard to find. The press release is on the website of the Earth Institute of Columbia University. I don't know why it has just been released. The paper itself has been out for a while. It looks to be a continuation of the work discussed in this paper from 2010, which itself built on work done prior. In fact, as stated in the press release, Taro Takahashi has been doing this research for four decades.

Taro Takahashi has spent more than four decades measuring the changing chemistry of the world’s oceans. Here, aboard the R/V Melville, he celebrates after sampling waters near the bottom of the Japan Trench in 1973. (Lamont-Doherty archives)

In a nutshell, the scientists have published maps of the world's oceans, showing:

... a monthly look at how ocean acidity rises and falls by season and geographic location, along with saturation levels of calcium carbonate minerals used by shell-building organisms. The maps use 2005 as a reference year and draw on four decades of measurements by Lamont-Doherty scientists and others. 

Denier dolts at WUWT with the meme: "It's happened before..."

There are not many denier memes (it takes more than conspiracy ideation and stunted world view for a fertile imagination). One of them is the "it's happened before" meme.

This is a strange one for deniers to adopt for themselves when you think about it. The fact that events may have happened in the past under a given set of circumstances provides rich clues about what we can expect in the future under not dissimilar circumstances.

Today Anthony Watts has copied and pasted a press release about carbon buried under loess in soils in parts of the USA. Anthony wrote:

The next time somebody says wildfires in the USA are “unprecedented” show them this. Buried fossil soils found to be awash in carbon

I'm yet to hear someone say that wildfires in the USA are unprecedented in the sense that they've only been known to occur in recent times. Are they becoming more common?   Though it's likely, that's probably still an open question.  Wildfires have multiple causes and analysis is confounded by changes to fire management as well as all the changes we've made to our environment, particularly these past several decades. Is the risk getting greater with global warming? Indubitably. Especially in fire-prone states as temperatures rise. Where I live we are likely to get more frequent catastrophic fire danger days as time goes on and that is the case these past few years.

Abrupt climate change and the consequences

The paper itself is by Erika Marin-Spiotta and colleagues and has been published in Nature Climate Change. It's about how deep soils contain bands of carbon-heavy layers. These have been attributed to wildfires burning in times past when there was rapid warming. Hence the irony of deniers pointing to the paper as if to say there's nothing to worry about.  These carbon layers were often buried under huge amounts of loess, which is dust that got deposited, largely from ground up rocks etc after deglaciation. From the press release and the abstract, it looks as if there was a time when there were lots of awful dust storms plus massive wildfires all happening around the same time - over centuries or decades rather than over millenia. That wouldn't be something to look forward to at all.

This is from the abstract:

Buried soils contain large reservoirs of organic carbon at depths that are not typically included in regional and global soil carbon inventories1. One such palaeosol, the Brady soil of southwestern Nebraska, USA, is buried under six metres of loess. The Brady soil developed at the land surface on the late-Pleistocene-aged Peoria Loess in a period of warmth and wetness during which dunefields and dust sources across the region were stabilized. Abrupt climate change in the early Holocene led to increased loess deposition that buried the soil. 

Here's an extract from sciencedaily.com about the paper:

"There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring," says Erika Marin-Spiotta, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geography and the lead author of the new study. "It was assumed that there was little carbon in deeper soils. Most studies are done in only the top 30 centimeters. Our study is showing that we are potentially grossly underestimating carbon in soils."

The soil studied by Marin-Spiotta and her colleagues, known as the Brady soil, formed between 15,000 and 13,500 years ago in what is now Nebraska, Kansas and other parts of the Great Plains. It lies up to six-and-a- half meters below the present-day surface and was buried by a vast accumulation of windborne dust known as loess beginning about 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers that covered much of North America began to retreat.

The region where the Brady soil formed was not glaciated, but underwent radical change as the Northern Hemisphere's retreating glaciers sparked an abrupt shift in climate, including changes in vegetation and a regime of wildfire that contributed to carbon sequestration as the soil was rapidly buried by accumulating loess.

...The deeply buried soil studied by Marin-Spiotta, Mason and their colleagues, a one-meter-thick ribbon of dark soil far below the modern surface, is a time capsule of a past environment, the researchers explain. It provides a snapshot of an environment undergoing significant change due to a shifting climate. The retreat of the glaciers signaled a warming world, and likely contributed to a changing environment by setting the stage for an increased regime of wildfire.

"The world was getting warmer during the time the Brady soil formed," says Mason. "Warm-season prairie grasses were increasing and their expansion on the landscape was almost certainly related to rising temperatures."

The retreat of the glaciers also set in motion an era when loess began to cover large swaths of the ancient landscape. Essentially dust, loess deposits can be thick -- more than 50 meters deep in parts of the Midwestern United States and areas of China. It blankets large areas, covering hundreds of square kilometers in meters of sediment.

From the WUWT comments

Despite being primed by Anthony Watts to respond along the lines of "it's happened before", the WUWT-ers weren't all obedient and responded with various different denierisms.

cnxtim doesn't bother with the article at all and simply spouts denier drivel and says:

May 27, 2014 at 3:07 pm
This scientific research is the stuff that is expected of all Universes. And of course there is a cost associated with keeping these institutions open for business. However, the ridiculously excessive funding of CAGW scare mongers has to be stopped before it destroys the very society it is designed to improve.

MJPenny is maybe not aware of just how much carbon is in the biosphere and says:

May 27, 2014 at 3:51 pm
So if the Brady soil formed 13,500 to 15,000 years ago and this sequestered a significnt amount of carbon, what were the atmospheric CO2 concentrations before and after this period? If there was no significant drop in CO2 then the carbon sequestered is insignificant and this study is just for additional CAGW hype. 

Scarface is a denier of the fearful paranoid conspiracy theorising kind and says:

May 27, 2014 at 4:07 pm
Could or couldn’t, that’s the question! Could or will, might or should, may or doesn’t, who knows! Settled science, yet no answers, only questions and suggestions. Meanwhile nothing happens, maybe it’s time to move on to some real problems, like hunger, malaria, childlabour, poverty.
But who am I kidding, this whole scam is about fear and control. Let’s burn the food, let’s ruin the economies, let’s make everybodies life as miserable as possible, while people believe it’s for their own good. What a world.

Philip Bradley decides that the scientists got things topsy turvy and it looks as if he thinks that more fires started all by themselves in the absence of climate change, but at least he's thinking about the complexity of interactions and feedbacks when he says:

May 27, 2014 at 4:15 pm
The retreat of the glaciers signaled a warming world, and likely contributed to a changing environment by setting the stage for an increased regime of wildfire.
“The world was getting warmer during the time the Brady soil formed,” says Mason. “Warm-season prairie grasses were increasing and their expansion on the landscape was almost certainly related to rising temperatures.”

I think the cause and effect were the other way around. Increasing fires (particularly peat fires which can burn for years) deposited black carbon on the glaciers, reducing albedo and triggering net melt. Falling sea levels from ice accumulation dried out coastal swamps sufficiently that fires could take hold. 

Louis decides to extrapolate way beyond what any of the researchers said or implied. He is attempting reductio ad absurdum but instead builds a strawman:

May 27, 2014 at 4:56 pm
Oh no! Fossil organic carbon could be a potential contributor to climate change “as humans increasingly disturb landscapes through a variety of activities…”
—
In other words humans, you must stop all activities that might disturb landscapes – no farming, no mining, no drilling, no new housing developments, and certainly no underground atomic bomb testing. I assume they will want us all to crowd into existing urban areas and leave all other landscapes untouched. But if the countryside is not being farmed, how will the urban areas get food, by eating their dead? Perhaps, that’s also part of the plan. If most of us starve to death, all the better because there will be less stress on mother Gaia.

Gary Pearse is another signed up member of the scientific illiterati, preferring to mock rather than learn and says:

May 27, 2014 at 6:01 pm
So changing climate was a feature of 13 millennia ago. Let’s see, what is the real take home here? Ah yes, wildfires sequester carbon for thousands of years and we get double the bang for the buck because new greenery has to grow using up more carbon. Let ‘er burn baby burn and then grow baby grow. Gee we got to get those Nebraska farmers to stop planting grain down 50 meters. It could disturb the sequestered carbon. 

Joel O'Bryan confuses coal seams from a hundred million years ago or more, with much younger carbon layers from 13,000 or so years ago. and says:

May 27, 2014 at 7:05 pm
Rich sources of carbon deeply buried… who knew?
Tell that to a coal miner, the laughter might temporarily make him forget about the unemployment line Obama wants to put him in.

pyromancer76 is another avowed member of the illiterati and says:

May 27, 2014 at 7:06 pm
Anthony, I don’t know if I want to continue reading. These ridiculous studies that put forth such little science — is it worth it? I don’t know. This is the first time I quit and said to myself this article is not worth my time. Is it worth yours? Of course, I can’t answer that and I know that holding these ridiculous studies (using my/yours/our tax-payer dollars to do so) up to ridicule is probably important…..but…..I’ve had it. I want science, or the hard work to follow a hypothesis, or, I don’t know. I DON’T WANT THIS. I will quit reading. Thanks. Just letting you know.

Let's finish with Anthony Watts himself declaring his membership of the scientific illiterati. I figure he's disappointed that more people didn't toe the line with his "it's happened before" meme and instead branched of in different denier directions. Anthony Watts says:

May 27, 2014 at 7:18 pm
Yes I know, its like reading “science for dolts”. OTOH, if I (and readers like you) don’t point out how absurd some of these things are, who will?

I published this one because it actually showed that large wildfires are not uncommon. In the age of fire suppression, we’ve built a cocoon of inexperience. – Anthony 

I wrote the main article before reading this comment of Anthony's. He has confirmed what I wrote. He was writing it as a denier meme "it's happened before". The bonus is that his comment shows that he is himself a fully paid up member of the scientific illiterati.  It's sometimes hard to know if he's just plain dumb or if he's pandering to the stupid in his readers. From what I've seen over the past year or so it's a bit of both.

---

Erika Marin-Spiotta, Nina T. Chaopricha, Alain F. Plante, Aaron F. Diefendorf, Carsten W. Mueller, A. Stuart Grandy, Joseph A. Mason. "Long-term stabilization of deep soil carbon by fire and burial during early Holocene climate change". Nature Geoscience, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2169

Bushfire weather in Southeast Australia: recent trends and projected climate change impacts. Melbourne, Australia: Bushfire CRC, 2007.

Anthony Watts gets it wrong again, this time with CFCs

Anthony Watts, who runs an anti-science blog known as WUWT, thinks he has found more science to mock.  As usual, whenever he attempts to write an article himself he stuffs it up.  He writes (archived here):

Busted messaging: CFC’s cause warming AND cooling
From the make up your freaking minds department comes this oopsy juxtaposition of alarmist messaging.

In an attempt to explain “the pause”, researchers are now grasping for explanations:

Anthony mucks it up - again!  It's he who can't figure out the science.

Statistical derivation of human influences on global temperature in the twentieth century

Anthony is writing about a new paper in Nature by Francesco Estrada et al that explored factors operating during the twentieth century and their impact on earth's climate.

According to the associated article in Nature News, Estrada13, using a statistical approach rather than a climate model, found that cooling of the surface temperature was associated with reductions in greenhouse gas emissions associated with economic downturns.  They also found that if it weren't for the Montreal Protocol, earth would be warmer still.  However just how much warmer it would be is disputed.  Maybe not as much as the Nature paper suggests.  Probably about 0.1°C.  (I don't have a copy of the paper so I don't know the numbers they've worked out.)  From the Nature News article (my bold italics):

A cooling period between 1940 and 1970 had previously been chalked up to natural variability and the Sun-shielding effect of pollution emitted by European industries, as they recovered after the Second World War. But Estrada and his colleagues found that it folllowed a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions associated with economic downturns, when industries were less active. Significant drops in emissions occurred during the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War....

...For the 1940-70 period, the way the paper shows how economic factors drove emissions down is “very nice,” says Ross Salawitch, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park. “It hits the sweet spot.”

Warming has also eased off since the mid-1990s. Estrada's study links that to the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned the release of CFCs — once used widely in refrigerants, solvents and propellants — to stop ozone depletion, which allowed more warming solar radiation to reach Earth. Temperatures today might have been 0.1 °C warmer had CFC emissions continued unabated, according to a commentary to be published alongside the study.

“Without the Montreal Protocol, we’d be warmer than we are now,” agrees Salawitch. “But I question whether the recent pause in global warming is due to that.” Estrada's study would be stronger had it also considered changes in ocean heat uptake and aerosol cooling, he says.

The headline of the Nature article (not the paper itself) reads: Ozone-hole treaty slowed global warming.  I'm probably picking nits, but I think that headline is misleading.  The sub-headline is better.  It reads: Montreal Protocol helped to curb climate change and so did world wars and the Great Depression.

The take-away message from the abstract is this one:

We conclude that reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are effective in slowing the rate of warming in the short term.

If they are correct, and what I've read elsewhere would seem to indicate they are, then action to cut emissions would slow warming perceptibly.  Maybe even on timescales suited to the political calendar.  No, it won't start to cool down but it won't warm up as quickly as it otherwise would.  It would be good if we cut emissions by shifting to clean energy and didn't wait for another GFC or Depression.  (If we don't do it ourselves then I'll bet that nature itself will force our hand and probably sooner rather than later.)

Where Anthony goes wrong...

Back to Anthony Watts.  What Anthony did was dig out a Science Daily article about a 2010 paper by Korhonen et al.  He picked out a line that said that Antarctica was not as warm as it might have been because of the closing ozone hole.  Closing the hole in the ozone layer led to high speed winds which caused summer-time clouds to form.  These clouds reflected more of the sun and shielded the Antarctic from warming.  This is what Anthony pointed to:

The Antarctic ozone hole was once regarded as one of the biggest environmental threats, but the discovery of a previously undiscovered feedback shows that it has instead helped to shield this region from carbon-induced warming over the past two decades.

Anthony's reasoning is probably fair enough for a science illiterate as far as it goes.  The article does discuss the impact of the ozone hole on constraining warming - if only in southern latitudes (50-65°S is mentioned in the paper itself).  But Anthony's attention span is seriously limited as we shall see later on.

Summer clouds over Antarctica are more reflective because of the ozone hole

Here is what was in Anthony's second paper.  If you are easily confused about feedbacks and forcings, I suggest skipping this next bit.  The paper seems to be a bit inconsistent in the use of these terms, but maybe that's just the way I'm reading it.  The difficulty arises because the paper is discussing two different but connected forcings:-  greenhouse gas forcing (positive) and ozone loss forcing (negative) - which act in concert to affect the polar winds.

First of all, in the abstract of the paper the authors talk of the increase in cloud reflectivity in terms of it "acting against that from greenhouse gas forcing over the same time period, and thus represent(ing) a substantial negative climate feedback".  It's not causing cooling.  It's dampening the greenhouse gas forcing.  However later in the paper it describes the impact in terms of being a positive feedback to the negative forcing from stratospheric ozone loss.  As I understand it the authors are talking about two different things.  One is greenhouse gas forcing.  The other is ozone forcing.  These act together in the Antarctic to alter the circulation of the atmosphere.  So it's all quite complicated.  The discussion section of the paper states (my bold italics):

The calculated changes in SH aerosol represent a potentially important climate feedback in which anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances alter the circulation of the atmosphere [Thompson and Solomon, 2002], which in turn induces greater emissions of sea spray that cause a negative radiative forcing through higher cloud drop concentrations in low level clouds. The annual mean positive forcing from all well mixed greenhouse gases at these latitudes (50 – 65S) is 1Wm² over the two decades studied [Forster et al., 2007]. The only other important forcing at southern high latitudes is stratospheric ozone loss, the annual average of which has been estimated to be approximately 0.5 W m² since the late 1970s [Forster and Shine, 1997]. Thus, during the summer season over high latitude ocean the feedback on low level clouds through wind intensification (0.7 W/m²) together with ozone loss may have cancelled out the positive greenhouse gas forcing since the 1980s....

... The implications for future climate need to be evaluated. If, as recently suggested [Son et al., 2008], ozone depletion is the primary cause of wind speed increases, then this cloud forcing acts as a positive feedback on the ozone induced cooling. It more than doubles the negative radiative forcing from stratospheric ozone loss and suggests that future ozone recovery would cause a positive radiative forcing.

Back to Anthony again.  Strangely enough, Anthony seemed to have missed the headline to that article, which was:

Ozone Hole Healing Could Cause Further Climate Warming

Yes.  That's right.  In his zeal to find something wrong with the science, Anthony skipped over the headline saying that as the ozone hole heals, Antarctica will warm.  He ignored the thrust of the article and instead he went straight to one of the paragraphs in the text.  He also seems to have missed reading the rest of that article, in which was written:

"If, as seems likely, these winds die down, rising CO2 emissions could then cause the warming of the southern hemisphere to accelerate, which would have an impact on future climate predictions," he added.

As I wrote in the feedback/forcing section above, the Science Daily article goes on to explain that the high speed winds whip up sea spray and tiny salt particles, which eventually form part of the clouds, making them more reflective.  As the ozone layer recovers that particular feedback mechanism could slow or even reverse, leading to accelerated warming in Antarctica.  This means that any dampening of warming by CFCs effect on the ozone hole and cloud formation would disappear.  However CFCs remaining in the atmosphere will still have their greenhouse gas properties and add to global warming, albeit not hugely (provided we don't increase them).

CFCs and global warming

Of course the Nature article wasn't referring to clouds over southern oceans.  It was referring to the global effect of the reduction of CFCs in the atmosphere following the Montreal Protocol.

CFCs do contribute to global warming, but nothing like what CO2 contributes.  The AR5 WG1 IPCC report states on page TS-19, for example (my bold and italics):

Atmospheric N2O has increased by 6% since AR4 causing a RF of 0.17 [0.15 to 0.19] W m–2. N2O concentrations continue to rise while those of CFC-12, the third largest WMGHG (well-mixed greenhouse gas) contributor to RF for several decades, are decreasing due to phase-out of emissions of this chemical under the Montreal Protocol. N2O is now likely the third largest WMGHG contributor to RF. The RF from halocarbons is very similar to the value in AR4, with a reduced RF from CFCs but increases in many of their replacements. Four of the halocarbons (CFC-11, CFC-12, CFC-113, and HCFC-22) account for 85% of the total halocarbon RF. The former three compounds have declining RF over the last five years but are more than compensated for by the increased RF from HCFC-22. There is high confidence that the growth rate in RF from all WMGHG is weaker over the last decade than in the 1970s and 1980s owing to a slower increase in the non-CO2 RF.

And on page 2-11, the report states:

Atmospheric HFC abundances are low and their contribution to radiative forcing is small relative to the CFCs and HCFCs they replace (less than 1% of the total by well-mixed greenhouse gases; Chapter 8). As they replace CFCs and HCFCs phased out by the Montreal Protocol, however, their contribution to future climate forcing is projected to grow considerably in the absence of controls on global production (Velders et al., 2009).

There is more in the report on CFCs and their replacements.

The crux of the matter is that although the Montreal Protocol had the effect of reducing CFCs, the replacement halocarbons are adding to radiative forcing.

The IPCC report has a diagram on page TS-91 showing the relative contribution of different components of radiative forcing. (Click for larger view.)

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Fig TS-7

Anthony Watts doesn't know where he is going

Anthony Watts closed his article with the following:

I don’t think anybody really knows which way it is going.

Well, that may be so.  It certainly looks as if Anthony Watts doesn't have a clue.

As for "which way it's going", it depends on what action we take in regard to all the gunk we throw into the air.  However scientists do know that some gases cause warming.  And they do know that halocarbons in the main cause more warming than cooling.  What happens to the winds in Antarctica as the ozone hole closes is probably still to be determined.  But if the winds slow down and stop whipping up sea water as much as they've been doing, then it's on the cards that southern regions of the globe will be in for a fair bit of warming.

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Francisco Estrada, Pierre Perron and Benjamin Martínez-López (2013) Statistically derived contributions of diverse human influences to twentieth-century temperature changes, Nature Geoscience (2013) doi:10.1038/ngeo1999

Korhonen, H., K. S. Carslaw, P. M. Forster, S. Mikkonen, N. D. Gordon, and H. Kokkola (2010), Aerosol climate feedback due to decadal increases in Southern Hemisphere wind speeds, Geophys. Res. Lett., 37, L02805, doi:10.1029/2009GL041320.

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From the WUWT comments

The illiterati is out in full force at WUWT - archived here.

pinroot points out that Anthony didn't remember he's already posted a (suspect) article (archived here and disputed here) about CFCs and warming and says:

November 11, 2013 at 4:21 pm
There was this from late May, which claimed to show a link between CFC levels and warming:
http://archive.is/zaDVp
So now there are at least two papers linking CFC’s with warming. That’s a consensus, right? ;)

Rhoda R hasn't even scratched the surface when it comes to climate science and says:

November 11, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Frankly, until they can explain why the world goes into and out of ice ages AND then can show that what is going on now is unique, then, and only then, will I buy into man-made climate anything.

Bruce Cobb joins in the illiterati chorus and says:

November 11, 2013 at 4:48 pm
Oh look! Bright, shiny new climate control knobs to play with on their dial- o-climate contraption.

alexwade takes the opportunity to show off his ignorance too and says:

November 11, 2013 at 5:05 pm
There is a simple answer for all this: Somehow, someway for every bad event that happens, we are at fault. So now surrender your rights and pay up. P.S. I, the enlightened telling you this, don’t have to pay and will still have full rights.

When you remember that is how environmentalists think, then nothing is a contradiction.
I am reminded of an old saying: “Jesus, save me from your followers.” Although I do not believe in “Mother Earth” or Gaia or anything like that, we could just as well re-word that saying as “Mother Earth, save us from your followers.”

ROM joins in and says:

November 11, 2013 at 5:28 pm
This is what you get when the inmates get to running the climate change mental asylum.
Or as an old saying goes and this is ever more applicable to climate change science and scientists. “Some minds are like concrete. All mixed up and set hard”.

Bryan A says:

November 11, 2013 at 6:12 pm
Must be the latest “Hypothesis de-jour”
They did need something to explain the Antarctic ice extent increase that would blend in with the Global Climate Scare MEME

p@ Dolan is really flying with illiterati wisdom and , with lots of "ilks" and "well saids" says (and this is but an extract from an overly long comment):

November 11, 2013 at 7:15 pm

@Rhoda R says: November 11, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Frankly, until they can explain why the world goes into and out of ice ages AND then can show that what is going on now is unique, then, and only then, will I buy into man-made climate anything.

Applause! Well said!

@geran says: November 11, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Based on the abstract, this might be the funniest paper ever submitted.
“Here we analyse radiative forcing and temperature time series with state-of-the-art statistical methods to address this question without climate model simulations.”

Give ‘em props, man: they DID, after all, try to do it WITHOUT the Great and Powerful Oz. The rest of their ilk are programming their own prejudices and liberal self-hatred into computer models and then statistically measuring their results against similar idiotic programs, and claiming that their conclusions have some basis in reality…obviously never heard the old computer term GIGO…

@Jimbo says: November 11, 2013 at 5:51 pm
By the way Pippen Kool, how do you know the Ozone hole hasn’t always been there? The hole was discovered in 1985.

Way to GO! I’m amazed at all these folks who assume that CFCs actually caused something they only discovered a short while ago, have no idea when it first occurred, or if it had been there since the dawn of time for all they knew, and THEN have the audacity to claim that their treaty to reduce CFCs is what’s responsible for it’s reduction in size, when they have yet to prove that’s the cause!

Are you all suitable amazed and impressed at p@ Dolan's cleverness and insight?  Wait! there's more archived here (if you have the stomach for it).

Anthony Watts can't tell the difference between international policy and climate science

There's not much happening at WUWT apart from the 750 plus comments to Wondering "I'm Wonderful" Willis Eschenbach's dummy spitting thunderstorm.

Anthony has just posted a couple of emails showing he doesn't know the difference between science and policy (archived here).  I expect the title of the IPCC "Summary for Policy Makers" got him all confused.  He read the word "policy" and ignored the word "summary".  And he didn't bother to read the report itself. Or if he did he couldn't understand it.

He's also surprisingly unfamiliar with the process at the IPCC, despite the fact that it's written quite clearly on the IPCC website.  It's even got a picture:

Source: IPCC

Given that Anthony decided to reject science on the grounds that he might have to pay tax, it's not really surprising to find out that he can't tell science from climate policy.

The IPCC has prepared a document listing all the changes to be made to the full report to ensure it is consistent with the Summary for Policy Makers.  It includes things like making sure the time periods are consistent.  I didn't read anything that could be confused with climate policy, unless you're a conspiracy theorising scientific illiterati from WUWT.

There's just the usual echo coming from Anthony's echo chamber.  So far not a single person has picked up on how the process works.  They probably don't know what "Final Draft" means.  I doubt anyone of them has been anywhere near government policy making, let alone intergovernmental gatherings at an international level.

(On the other hand - the good people in the USA elected a bunch of cowboys who are busy messing with the global economy, putting loads of people out of work in the USA, stopping services that could be crucial in the medium term and letting the bottom fall out of all our investments and superannuation.  So maybe I'm mistaken about what the denialiti get up to.)

Pine Island Ice - warming from beneath, and reaction from paid up illiterati at WUWT

Earlier this year there was a study that mapped the extent to which warmer oceans are eating away at the ice shelves around Antarctica.  Now a new study published in Science this week shows that warmer ocean waters are undermining the shelf holding back the Pine Island Glacier.

Some excerpts from the paper (my paras, bold and italics):

Currently, ice loss from the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) contributes ~7% of the global sea-level rise. The WAIS is potentially dynamically unstable, with a capacity to raise global sea level by several meters (1). Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is a principal outlet of the WAIS that has rapidly thinned, retreated, and accelerated (2–6). The spatial pattern of thinning suggests that the glacier drawdown is the direct result of increased basal melting of the ice shelf that has reduced its buttressing effect.

The restraint offered by the PIG ice shelf is dependent on its basal melt rate, which in turn is controlled by heat transport in the underlying ocean cavity. Therefore, how an ice shelf interacts with the ocean and melts now and into the future can alter the mass discharge from the Antarctic Ice Sheet in general and the WAIS in particular, affecting global sea level...

...The continuity of the channels seen in satellite imagery and the airborne radar survey, in conjunction with the vigorous melt rates here described, indicate that basal melting is active from the grounding line to at least the mid-shelf location of the observations. In addition to our observations, a recent idealized numerical simulation of an ice shelf base and ocean boundary layer has suggested that channelization is of fundamental importance, because a channelized base actually melts much less vigorously than a nonchannelized one (14). The remarkable ice/ocean coupling evident in our observations points to the need to represent channelized ice/ocean interaction in models of PIG and similar outlet glaciers in global climate simulations of sea-level change.

In other words (as I understand it), the degree of "channelisation" will determine the rate at which melting takes place.  The scientists are looking at the detail of how the water moves in under the ice shelf to try to determine where, how and how quickly the ice will melt.

Deniers scoff while the ice melts

Anthony Watts posted an item (archived here) about this, with the normal scoffing headline starting with the word "claim": Claim: atmosphere heats the oceans, melts Antarctic ice shelf.

Showing his usual form, Anthony doesn't even link directly to the Penn State news item he posts, let alone the published paper. Going by his headline, Anthony also seems to (wrongly) think that it's a new idea that the ice is melting from below, even though he's written about warm water melting ice in Antarctica before.  (Anthony Watts keeps demonstrating that he has a very bad memory - and here too.) Here is an excerpt from the website of the British Antarctic Survey, which was part of the research team:

Given the flow of warm sea water below the glacier, scientists have long known that Pine Island Glacier was melting from below — the accelerated flow of Western Antarctic Ice Shelf glacial ice into the Amundsen Sea has been a concern of scientists since the late ‘80s. An exhaustive expedition to the 50km-long floating ice shelf at the outer reaches of the glacier field, and 500 meters down into it, reveal the first measurements detailing ice-shelf melting rates and processes within melt channels bore into the shelf underbelly.

The research is difficult because while Antartica itself is a remote and dangerous continent, Pine Island glacier is remote even by Antarctic standards.  The news item at Penn State says in part:

"It has taken years and years to do the logistics because it is so remote from established permanent bases," said Anandakrishnan....

...The ice shelf is melting more rapidly from below for a number of reasons. The oceans are warmer than they have been in the past and water can transfer more heat than air. More importantly, the terrain beneath the ice shelf is a series of channels. The floating ice in the channel has ample room beneath it for ocean water to flow in. The water melts some of the ice beneath and cools. If the water remained in the channel, the water would eventually cool to a point where it was not melting much ice, but the channels allow the water to flow out to the open ocean and warmer water to flow in, again melting the ice shelf from beneath.

"The way the ocean water is melting the ice shelf is a deeply non-uniform way," said Anandakrishnan. "That's going to be more effective in breaking these ice shelves apart."

The breaking apart of the ice shelf in the channels is similar to removing an ice jam from a river. The shelf was plugging the channel, but once it is gone, the glacier moves more rapidly toward the sea, forming more ice shelf, but removing large amounts of ice from the glacier.

From the WUWT comments

I have nothing but contempt for the crowd at WUWT.  They are a pack of utter nutters.  Anthony Watts writes for the genuine illiterati who are completely ignorant of the dangers of the West Antarctic ice sheet.  Most of them are scornful of the researchers who braved goodness knows what unknown dangers to take in situ measurements at remote Pine Island. (WUWT article and comments are archived here.)


Mickey Reno doesn't have a clue about the article and seems to be talking about something else completely.  He says:

September 14, 2013 at 5:14 am
Here we see a large calving event in an area that has probably seem hundreds of similar events over the past couple of millenia. Most people would see this as an awesome display of nature’s power and grandeur. The alarmist sees an opportunity that must not be wasted.

Stacey says:

September 14, 2013 at 2:14 am
In life it is always best to give people the benefit of the doubt? I doubt if this paper has any merit whatsoever. When a scientists uses perjorative words such as dumping then they must be talking crap. (No pun intended)

Julian in Wales says:

September 14, 2013 at 2:09 am
“The researchers looked at the remote Pine Island Glacier, a major outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet because it has rapidly thinned and accelerated in the recent past.”

Maybe that should read the researchers cherry picked the remote Pine Island Glacier……..past………and then worked out how to link this to alarmist stories for warmist propaganda

DJ says "it's volcanos":

September 13, 2013 at 11:26 pm
Uh… Did I miss the part about the volcanoes at Pine Island and all along the sea floor in that region that could, possibly, maybe, provide a small amount of heat???

Caleb says "it's not warming":

September 13, 2013 at 11:02 pm
Pine Island is the silver lining on the dark cloud Alarmists are increasingly facing. It is the microcosm that defies the macrocosm. It is the exception that proves the rule, the rule being: “Global Warming is not happening.”

johanna, who can't possibly have read the paper, says:

September 13, 2013 at 10:53 pm
What rubbish! This paper highlights what is wrong with much of contemporary science. In observing and analysing the natural world, you need benchmarks, history, geography and a bunch of other things. This paper could have been a useful addition to the sum of knowledge if it had just stuck to the facts. There is a lot to learn about the Antarctic, glaciers and so on. Instead, it debased itself and destroyed its own credibility with outright partisanship.

A.D. Everard says:

September 13, 2013 at 10:17 pm
They are going to keep making stuff up – anything, everything – until every last person on the planet stares at them blankly and there is not a drop of funding left. And then they’ll probably Just Keep On Making Stuff Up. I wish some of them would actually do some science.

Eyal Porat has never been for a swim in a body of water and says:

September 13, 2013 at 10:13 pm
This is amazing: 

These people make assumptions about mechanisms they do not refer to or explain (i.e. the warming of the oceans by the atmosphere), then build their theory upon it. And voilla! we have a solution!

The simplest first grade test will tell them this is wrong. You cannot heat the oceans from above.
This is bad science and it really makes me saddened. And to see the degrees of these people… All professors… sigh.
Eyal

a jones is another denier who thinks there is a bunch of new volcanoes says, with kindest regards:

September 13, 2013 at 10:08 pm
Some years ago when there was last excitement about the Pine Island glacier I wrote to the Times of London, which for a wonder published my letter, pointing out that if you have a glacier above a volcanically active region, as in this case, the geothermal heat below tends to melt the ice above. As happens all along the Antarctic peninsula.
Kindest Regards

Mark says:

September 13, 2013 at 9:54 pm
It’s all about the money. The politicians want a crisis to capitalizes on, and they pay government money to obtain studies claiming crisis. The pseudo-scientists who want the money produce studies that claim crisis. It’s that simple.

Okay - I'll stop there.  All the other comments are at least as abysmal.  I don't think there is a single comment that makes any sense.  It's even worse than usual.  Anthony has given up any pretence at being a "science" blog.  He's pandering to the scientific illiterati.  If those comments don't demonstrate to lurkers the intent and "quality" of WUWT and the type of people that Anthony Watts caters to, then I don't know what will.

You can't help but contrast the above disbelief of actual scientific observations published in a top ranking journal with WUWT-ers unquestioning acceptance of the denialist guff from Matt "CO2 is plant food" Ridley, who is not a scientist at all.

---

Stanton et al Channelized Ice Melting in the Ocean Boundary Layer Beneath Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica; Science 13 September 2013: Vol. 341 no. 6151 pp. 1236-1239, DOI: 10.1126/science.1239373

Climate extremes, carbon cycle and more, while the illiterati at WUWT scream in protest at the onslaught of knowledge!

Climate extremes and the carbon cycle

Anthony Watts has copied and pasted a press release about a new paper in Nature, which discusses how extremes of weather can have an impact on the carbon cycle.  He called it "Vicious carbon cycles".  I saw this paper myself and thought it looked an interesting, if concerning, area of research.  It's by Reichstein et al and called: Climate extremes and the carbon cycle, Nature 500, 287–295 (15 August 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12350.

This diagram illustrates how extreme weather can affect the carbon cycle (from the Nature paper).  Click the image for a larger view:

Figure 2: Overview of how carbon flows may be triggered, or greatly altered, by extreme events.  Emphasis is on the potential contrast between the concurrent and delayed signal in the atmosphere. The arrows pointing upward represent additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The arrows pointing downward indicate that carbon dioxide is removed more slowly from the atmosphere. Orange arrows stand for short-term and purple arrows for long-term effects. 

What the paper is suggesting  is that there is more evidence that indicates that climate extremes, like droughts and storms can cause terrestrial carbon to decline, which offsets to some extent the expected increase through plants' response to the higher atmospheric CO2. (C3 plants grow faster with higher CO2, all else being equal).  The paper sets out a way to help improve the understanding of these interactions.  There are a number of news articles about it if you want to read more.

The carbon cycle and the biosphere - up north in the boreal forests

I intended to keep this short, but the above paper reminded me of another recent paper, this time in Science.  It's by Graven et al and is called Enhanced Seasonal Exchange of CO2 by Northern Ecosystems Since 1960, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1239207.  So far it's just in ScienceExpress, but should show up in the main journal soon-ish.

What this one is exploring is the reason for the extra bounce in the seasonal CO2 levels as time goes by, in some parts of the northern hemisphere.  In particular, they found that looking at CO2 levels at three to six kilometres up in the air in the region north of 45 degrees latitude, the seasonal amplitude of CO2 levels has shot up by 50% since the 1950s.  This contrasts with the seasonal amplitude of CO2 at 10° to 45°N, which has expanded by less than 25%.  They figure that it's got to do with changes in the boreal forests up north and signals a major shift in the carbon cycle.

They discount the effect of wildfire, oceans and fossil fuels.  After discussing their reasons, the authors state:

We are led to conclude that ecological changes in boreal and temperate forests are driving additional increases in the summertime uptake of carbon. This inference from atmospheric data is qualitatively consistent with expanding evidence for significant changes occurring in these ecosystems. Forest inventories show increased stand area and biomass (27, 29). Other ground-based studies show that evergreen shrubs and trees are migrating northward in response to warming (43–45), and fire, logging and other disturbances (46, 47) are shifting the age composition toward younger, early successional forests that experience shorter, more intense periods of seasonal carbon uptake (25, 48). Satellite observations generally show trends toward increased greenness in northern ecosystems (4), although many areas of the boreal forest show browning trends in recent decades (49, 50). The atmospheric evidence helps to quantify the aggregate effect of these, and other, types of ecological changes over the past 50 years. 

While the animation below is more about CO2 closer to the ground, you can see the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres in regard to seasonal fluctuations of CO2 (as featured on the NOAA website).  Use the bar at the bottom to skip through if you don't have the full three and a half minutes to be mesmerised by the whole video.

The carbon cycle and the biosphere

What interests me in these two papers is the fact that they are getting more into the detail of changes that are happening to the world.  Looking more specifically at changes in the biosphere and changes to the carbon cycle, not just the atmosphere and oceans, and considering how they affect the entire system.  I think in the next few years there will be a lot studies like these ones being published.

The WUWT Illiterati Society

Anyway, here are some comments from WUWT in response to the top paper.  The commenters have nothing but disdain for anyone who adds to the world's knowledge.  You think this is an enlightened era?  Well, it wouldn't be if the WUWT crowd had their way.  I'm amazed they made the effort to learn how to read and write given they have so much contempt for learning.

Here's a sample - two out of only six comments so far.  That's one in three commenters have declared their allegiance to the Illiterati Society:



FrankK says:
August 15, 2013 at 10:17 pm  A further example of the ever-increasing number of passengers on the global climate gravy train sucking the growing teat of “further research required” requests.

SMCG says:
August 15, 2013 at 9:45 pm  One day someone will write a paper that doesn’t say wtte “the demand for further research remains very high”


Now I've finished this there are more comments pouring in on WUWT.  I haven't done a count to see if the one in three illiterati still holds true.  However, I'll leave you with a comment without which no WUWT article would be complete - an ice age cometh!


Richard111 says:
August 15, 2013 at 11:26 pm  Whatever. None of this will stop the coming ice age.

WUWT: the Heartless and Mindless Institute

Anthony Watts really is agin the Inuit village of Kivalina in a big way.  In the past ten days he's published three articles with the level of heartlessness and mindlessness that typifies the right wing extremist and US-style libertarian's disdain for knowledge and dismissal of anyone in need of help.

First off was Jim Steele who goes to the extent of trying to kid his readers that neighbouring seas are exactly the same as the sea on which Kivalina is located.  And strenously avoiding the fact that Kivalina is threatened now by spring and autumn storms, because there is no longer ice to protect it.

Then there was Peter Kemmis, who gave a very good demonstration of, as he termed it, how to ignore data and influence people.  Wotts handled that one very well.

Today there's the Wondering Willis Eschenbach, back from his insulting sexist romp with Science to reassure his readers that the melting ice in the Arctic that's been the cause of the increased erosion at Kivalina has nothing to do with CO2.  So all the WUWT readers can go back to libelling scientists and forgedaboudit.

A lot of unsavoury people flock to certain portions of cyberspace.   The dyed in the wool dismissives.  The illiterati.  I see Anthony's about to get them to fork out for the privilege of being disinformed.  (Is no-one clicking on his advertisements or is this just a bit more pocket money?)

There are a lot of mugs in the world, aren't there.

(Wonder whatever happened to Topher's four mum's and his new best friend?  Is he making his video or did he return the funds?  Maybe the DVDs were adequate compensation - or maybe something's in the works.  Looking at his past efforts, I doubt he'll make too much of a splash even if he were to go ahead.)

Anthony Watts and his illiterati at WUWT deny ocean acidification

Anthony Watts in referring to a post in which William Connolley at Stoat expresses frustration with the uncertainty monster Judith Curry, for her lack of understanding of basic chemistry among other things:

"Is is just me, or does professionalism and f-bombs not go together? Sheesh."

Sheesh, is right, coming from Anthony Watts.  He might frown on "f-bombs" but he's not shy when it comes to ad hominems rather than science.

Not that Anthony would recognise science when he saw it.  He ridiculously quotes a sentence from this study in PLOS One (my bold, not Anthony's):

This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions".

I wonder does Anthony know what calcification means?  And I wonder why he didn't quote this sentence:

For all the marine habitats described above, one very important consideration is that the extreme range of environmental variability does not necessarily translate to extreme resistance to future OA. Instead, such a range of variation may mean that the organisms resident in tidal, estuarine, and upwelling regions are already operating at the limits of their physiological tolerances (a la the classic tolerance windows of Fox – see [68]). Thus, future acidification, whether it be atmospheric or from other sources, may drive the physiology of these organisms closer to the edges of their tolerance windows. When environmental change is layered upon their present-day range of environmental exposures, they may thereby be pushed to the “guardrails” of their tolerance [20], [68].

Or this one:

In contrast to more stochastic changes in pH that were observed in some sites, our coral reef locations displayed a strikingly consistent pattern of diel fluctuations over the 30-day recording period. Similar short-term pH time series with lower daily resolution [69], [70] have reported regular diel pH fluctuation correlated to changes in total alkalinity and oxygen levels. These environmental patterns of pH suggest that reef organisms may be acclimatized to consistent but moderate changes in the carbonate system. Coral reefs have been at the center of research regarding the effects of OA on marine ecosystems [71]–[73]. Along with the calcification biology of the dominant scleractinian corals and coralline algae, the biodiversity on coral reefs includes many other calcifying species that will likely be affected [74]–[77]. Across the existing datasets in tropical reef ecosystems, the biological response of calcifying species to variation in seawater chemistry is complex (see [78]) –all corals or calcifying algal species will not respond similarly, in part because these calcifying reef-builders are photo-autotrophs (or mixotrophs), with algal symbionts that complicate the physiological response of the animal to changes in seawater chemistry.

He seems to think the study was another "nothing to worry about" study.  He's wrong.

I won't bother with the dozens of ad homs in the WUWT comments.  Nor with the ignorant comments about acidification, pH and the like at WUWT (or Curry's blog).  It's very basic high school chemistry.  Or about the idiotic comments about corals and fish not being sensitive to pH.  That's very basic aquaculture that anyone who's owned a fish farm or home aquarium would dispute.  Sure, some species are more tolerant of a wider range of pH than others.  Some are very intolerant of any change beyond a narrow band.  Same with tolerance to temperature as has been widely observed in the ocean.  (And temperature can trigger or prevent breeding.)  An even bigger issue, which was brought out in the PLOS study quoted above, is the impact on the ecosystem as a whole, given the interdependencies.

Frankly, the more I read WUWT the more I see that what I snipe about them being illiterati is quite true. It would be hard to find more people gathering together who have such a disdain for knowledge as you'll find at WUWT.  Or such a large gathering of people who take so much pride in their ignorance.

HotCopper deniers in full swing (trading) - 'hot'!

Are most share traders members of the scientific illiterati or is it just the ones who post on 'Australia's most popular share discussion board' HotCopper?  Could be worth some research (on another day).

The following examples show that anything posted on HotCopper should be read with supreme scepticism if you must read it at all.

Monckton gets it wrong again

Source: HotCopper.com S&M forum

My buddy Daruma is a good bloke, but he mistakenly thinks it's cooling.  He's been hoodwinked by 'evidence' provided as a rambling error-filled non-science article from climate science denier, birther and professional entertainer of the elderly, Christopher Monckton.

Deniers 'need their heads read'

Not only that, but there are five more HotCopper-ites who agree with him than disagree (+5 thumbs up).  This is despite the chart that butcherboy (Physics Honours graduate currently doing a Masters in climate studies) posted and got thumbed down for his efforts:

Source: HotCopper.com S&M forum

adding a copy of struggler's chart from SkepticalScience.com (saving HotCopperites a mouse click).  The chart is a gif animation.  If the animation doesn't show up*, click on the chart to open it in a new window.

HotCopper favours dumbing down and denialism (in line with its unwritten policies /s)

Science is an elite leftist scam - what?

In another thread, this post from Denmor sums up the average HotCopperites view of science in general:

Source: HotCopper.com S&M forum

HotCopper science deniers don't know the difference between science and politics, and any science they don't like must be a 'scam' by the 'elite left of politics'.

It really is getting hotter and hotter

Finally, let's look at some real science showing how temperatures are trending with and without the influence of ENSO, solar and volcanoes (derived from Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) by SkepticalScience).  It clearly shows that this global warming is from greenhouse gases, not from ENSO, volcanoes or the sun:

(This is a gif animation.)

* If the animations don't show up, set you browser to display web animations.  In IE open Internet Options and go to the multimedia section of advanced settings and select 'play animations in web pages', then restart your browser.

HotCopper Denier Classic - Aliens and Ozone

A classic from last year on the HotCopper S&M forum.

A contribution to the S&M forum from Moondoong, the self-described 'busted-ass mining engineer'.  He thinks everything on this list is equally unlikely and not at all 'alarming'.


He equates AIDS (one of the world's biggest killers) and the hole in the ozone layer (a disaster in the making but thankfully being addressed) with an alien invasion and an asteroid striking earth.  Alar did pose a risk, albeit nothing like smoking tobacco.  Y2K was a real problem but not one that mining engineers would necessarily understand.  I don't know what was in his mind when he added magnetic pole shift or solar flares. They happen all the time.  (Does anyone know what Planet X refers to?)

          Source: HotCopper.com S&M forum

About twice as many science and medicine visitors agreed with moondoong (going by the "thumbs up" he was awarded) as thought he was talking through his 'busted ass'.

Yep, that's HotCopper :(