What's not said at WUWT - wild swings in temperature

Anthony Watts has thrown a bone to the ice-age comethers at WUWT. He wrote a short article (archived here) about how parts of the USA are going to get a bit chilly in the next day or so. His article was under the headline:

Record cold: Single digit to subzero Valentine’s Day expected for much of NE USA

Anthony is a lazy-bones. For a supposed climate blog owned by an ex-weather announcer, there was scant information. Anthony didn't explain:

• What was causing the predicted cold weather
• How long it would last
• Anything much about it at all, except that some parts of the USA would get chilly.

His article was nothing more than a static image of a minimum temperature map and two tweets from Ryan Maue. So I decided to go elsewhere to check the weather out.

Anthony Watts gets into a dither with global weather

From some comments here at HW I discovered that there was a strange exchange at WUWT the other day. I say it was strange, because Anthony said he disagreed with a person while at the same time saying he agreed with him  - on the exact same point. Although it was strange, it was not uncommon as far as Anthony Watts is concerned. He doesn't understand what he reads, and doesn't seem to understand what he writes. He also demonstrates one of the telltale signs of a denier (and conspiracy theorist) - simultaneously adopting two mutually exclusive positions.

It started with the headline to the article from David Whitehouse (archived here - see Hotwhopper's Desperate Deniers Part 6): "2015 Global Temp, Or How Some Scientists Deliberately Mistook Weather For Climate"

The headline was over a graphic of Bart Simpson writing "climate and weather are not the same", which David Whitehouse and Anthony Watts should take to heart:

Chaotic weather and climate constraints gets Willis Eschenbach wondering

Gavin Schmidt, now Director of GISS, NASA, once wrote:

Weather concerns an initial value problem: Given today's situation, what will tomorrow bring? Weather is chaotic; imperceptible differences in the initial state of the atmosphere lead to radically different conditions in a week or so. Climate is instead a boundary value problem — a statistical description of the mean state and variability of a system, not an individual path through phase space. 

Note the words: A statistical description of the mean state and variability of the system. Every word is important. Climate is more than an average of weather. It also describes the extremes of weather, and the extent to which weather is likely to vary within those extremes.

When modeling climate and changes in the earth system, there are certain constraints, or limits, or boundaries. These constraints can include surface boundaries such as continental configurations, topography, bathymetry (topography of the sea floor), and vegetation distribution. On shorter time scales there are constraints relating to ice sheets, oceans and the atmosphere itself. Defining these constraints or boundaries is what scientists do when designing models of the earth system and climate.

This article is about two concepts - both involving the word "boundary", which need to be distinguished:

1. The boundaries to a given climate (extremes of weather), and
2. Boundary conditions, which are set when developing models of climate or the earth system as a whole. These can be any physical constraints.

Willis Eschenbach wonders about boundary conditions

Willis Eschenbach today is wondering what is meant by the boundary conditions problem for climate (archived here). At WUWT he wrote:

I’ve heard many times that whereas weather prediction is an “initial-value” problem, climate prediction is a “boundary problem”. I’ve often wondered about this, questions like “what is the boundary?”. I woke up today thinking that I didn’t have an adequately clear understanding of the difference between the two types of problems.

Bob Tisdale sez "I knew that", 'cept he didn't!

You've probably come across the sort of person who when asked a question gives the wrong answer. Then when told the correct answer will squirm and sulk and say "I knew that". They get scornful looks but it doesn't seem to faze them.

Bob Tisdale is behaving like that today (archived here). He is writing about what he regards as "An Unexpected Admission from Dana Nuccitelli at SkepticalScience". What did Bob not expect? He didn't expect Dana to explain how El Niños lift average surface temperature and La Niñas suppress it. Though he did twist Dana's words. Bob wrote:

Dana admitted that during a decade-long (or multidecadal) period(s) when El Niño events dominate (when El Niños are stronger, last longer and happen more frequently), the El Niños enhance global warming, and during periods when La Niña events dominate (when there are weaker, shorter and fewer El Niño events), the absence of El Niño events suppresses the warming of global surfaces.

Note the use of the word "admitted". Bob has been getting tips from David Rose on the abuse of rhetoric. Bob twisted what Dana wrote a bit. Fortunately he then quoted him directly. There was only one paragraph on ENSO and this is what Dana wrote (from the Guardian):

...average global surface temperatures have warmed between 0.6 and 0.7°C over the past 40 years (lower atmospheric temperatures have also likely warmed more than 0.5°C, though the record hasn’t yet existed for 40 years). During that time, that temperature rise has temporarily both slowed down (during the 2000s, when there was a preponderance of La Niña events) and sped up (during the 1990s, when there was a preponderance of El Niño events). Climate models accurately predicted the long-term global warming trend.

Do you spot the difference? Bob was saying it was the absence of El Niños, whereas Dana was writing it was the preponderance of La Niñas, when surface temperatures didn't rise as quickly were suppressed. That's not splitting hairs. Bob Tisdale wrongly thinks that El Niños cause global warming, which is why he talks about it in that way.

Weird weather

This week is a week of weird weather.  In the USA yesterday, temperatures across the country varied by an apparent 140 degrees Fahrenheit (that's 60 77.7 degrees Celsius).  Nice and warm in parts of California and Florida and freezing cold across huge areas.

Source: NOAA

(Much of Oregon and most of California have had the driest year on record.)

In the UK, it's flooding.  Waves of up to 10 metres are lashing the coast.  According to the BBC these are being caused by " a large, deep depression in the Atlantic which was "whipping waves up" out at sea - and these were coming in as a "large swell".

This video is from a couple of days ago.

While back here in Australia's summer after Australia's hottest year on record, we've had cold nights where I am and lovely weather.  But we've been lucky.  While we were enjoying mild sunny weather, there was a huge heat wave sweeping over the rest of the continent.

Source: BoM

And then there is the drought - and downpours.

Source: BoM

I figured a dose of real weirdness would help counteract the wacky weirdness I've been reporting from WUWT and Judith Curry.  (Not that all the weather is weird.)

WUWT Weather Games: Coldest day since 1974 vs hottest several days since 1906.

Anthony Watts has just posted an article (archived here) with the headline:

New record low set in the coldest city in the continental USA – much of the country headed for a deep freeze

Oh boy! We're heading for an ice age.

Thing is, his NEW RECORD LOW is for International Falls, Minnesota, USA.  Guess how long they've been keeping records - a whole forty years.  Yes, that's right.  According to this weather website:

This report describes the typical weather at the International Fa (International Falls, Minnesota, United States) weather station over the course of an average year. It is based on the historical records from 1974 to 2012. Earlier records are either unavailable or unreliable.

Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -21°C to 25°C and is rarely below -33°C or above 30°C.

So what was the "record low" that was recorded?  It was cold.  Very cold.  It was -42ºF, breaking the previous cold record of -37ºF.  I'll translate for most of my readers - that's -41ºC with the previous record a well-below freezing cold of -38ºC.

Now while Anthony has in his hand a single town in the USA that had the coldest morning in forty years, in winter time, I'll raise him two countries including an entire continent with extremely hot temperatures, not just for a day - but for days on end.

Argentina

Argentina is only now experiencing relief after some areas have had the worst heat wave since records began.  When did the records begin, you ask?  They began not forty years ago, not fifty years ago, not one hundred years ago but one hundred and eight years ago - back in 1906.

And this isn't a single town we're talking about with a few hours of record heat.  This heat wave affected the large part of a nation and lasted more than a fortnight.  Okay, it might not seem that hot to some people with temperatures in the high thirties but in some parts it got into the mid-forties.  Argentina isn't used to these sort of temperatures and its power grid can't cope with the demand.

What happens in record heat waves?  Well it happened here too so I relate to the people of Argentina who can't use their air conditioners because of power cuts.  It's causing all sorts of problems for the nation, exacerbating political problems as well as daily living.  The power cuts have made people angry, stopped shops that should have benefited from the hot weather, like ice cream parlours, from being able to earn a crust.  Yep, expect more civil unrest in various parts of the world over coming decades. 

Australia 

Australia is reporting massive areas only now getting relief from a wave of heat that emerged in the west on Boxing day and shifted across the continent.  It brought temperatures in the low to high forties (102ºF to 114ºF) to large parts of Australia sparing only Victoria and Tasmania.  This is what it's been like - not from latte-sipping city slickers in air-conditioned luxury, but from tough people who live in the bush and have lived through all sorts of weather extremes.  (Australians tend toward understatement not exaggeration or over-exuberance.)

Queensland isn't out of the woods yet - it's still in the grip of the heat wave.  They aren't used to temperatures that high in the tropics.

This after Australia's Angry Summer last year, various "hottest days" on record and the hottest year on record - with no El Nino.

USA

I wonder why Anthony didn't report this hot spell last month, a bit closer to his home.

From the WUWT comments

Okay, let me have my fun.  Sometimes I get the impression that WUWT readers think that the USA is the entire world - except for Alaska which is sometimes hot when the rest of the country gets chilly and maybe Florida which has been warm and toasty.

John Eggert doesn't remember even a month ago, when the whole world had the hottest November on record. Or 2012 when the USA had its hottest year on record - and says:

January 2, 2014 at 7:50 am
This brings to mind a question to add to Bob Tisdale’s list. For 25 . . . years we’ve been promised . . . global warming. Where . . . is it? I want a refund. Profanity free, but can be added for effect. -35C this morning. “Normal” minimum is -17C. Wind chill is cheating and isn’t included in that.

IIRC it was only yesterday that it was pointed out that the "CAGW crowd" = deniers.  They are the only people who use the acronym.  I've never tried to measure the thickness of their skulls with a ruler. physics geek says:

January 2, 2014 at 8:52 am
2014 is setting out to be another inconvenient year for the CAGW crowd.
That presupposes that a) the weather and temperature will be honestly reported and b) that reality will somehow penetrate the overly thick skulls of the CAGW crowd. I would opine that no evidence exists for the latter supposition.

Buttons, dogs and climate trends

Someone called Kip Hansen has written a long post at WUWT about buttons (archived here).  He's referred to an article of his that Andrew Revkin put up at DotEarth, possibly to show how wrong people can be sometimes.

In the Dot Earth article, Kip discusses the cute animation from TeddyTVNorge that you've probably seen before.  I'm really only writing this because it gives me an excuse to post it :D
.

The cartoon illustrates how global surface temperature (or weather) can fluctuate (the dog) but the trend continues upwards, with the man representing the temperature trend (or climate trend) being forced by increasing greenhouse gases.

At Dot Earth Kip made a song and dance about trends not determining the future and waffles on about stock markets.  Well, duh.  It's the forcing from the extra greenhouse gases that determines the climate trend.

Anyway, it looks as if Kip has chosen WUWT to try to make up for his mistake, though he does it in a very longwinded way.  After much argy bargy about how trend isn't itself a force he finally gets to the punchline, writing:

Models, not trends, can predict, project, or inform about possible futures, to some sort of accuracy. Models must include all of the causative agents involved which must be modeled correctly for relative effects. 

In general it looks as if Kip learnt something from his experience at Dot Earth.  Good for him. The same can't be said of some of the WUWT-ers.

(Personally I think models can be useful even when not all information is available.  If you waited for perfect knowledge you'd be waiting for ever.  You've got to make do with the best you've got.)

Sophisticated Satellites and Other Denier Weirdness at WUWT

How's this for a lead in from someone who studied meteorology (albeit didn't graduate).  There is so much wrong in so few words.

I have always found a stark contrast in the way the forecasts of meteorologists on television and radio are limited in accuracy to about a week and beyond that become more speculative while the claims about global warming are always stated in decades. For example, the polar ice caps were supposed to have all melted by now. The daily forecasts are formulated based on sophisticated meteorological satellites. The global warming claims are all based on computer models, not empirical observation and data.

Anthony Watts of WUWT is quoting Alan Caruba, who didn't have to tell us he wasn't a scientist.  Anyone reading the above would know that for certain.

Forecasting a few days of weather is very different to making climate projections.  I can forecast with reasonable confidence several months ahead as, I'm sure, can you.  (It will be considerably warmer in January than it is now, even though we're having a very warm winter!) But I leave it to the experts to forecast tomorrow's weather.  I'll even predict decades ahead with some confidence.  By 2050 the Arctic will be pretty well ice free and January where I (will have used to) live will be a lot hotter than it was this year.  (If I'm still around and wrong, I'll buy you a beer.  That is, if hops can still be grown in these parts, and you come here to collect.)

Deniers love their satellites and hate models.  Well I've got news for Alan Caruba!

Alan says the daily forecasts are "formulated based on sophisticated meteorological satellites".  Satellites don't predict the future.  All they can do is give information about what has happened from the past to the now.  These days weather forecasters use models. They just plug in the latest data, unlike climate modellers. That's why forecasts can go out not just a day ahead, not just three days ahead, but anything up to around ten days ahead now.  And it's why the forecast can change.   Day 7 of the seven day forecast might be different by the time it gets to Day 3, 2 or 1.  And the data doesn't just come from satellite instruments either.  Weather bureaux also get data from land based instruments such as automatic weather stations, from instruments on weather balloons, from instruments on buoys in the sea, from ships and from aircraft.

This website describes how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) makes rainfall forecasts.  BoM says "Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) or computer models included in the calculation of the rainfall totals and the chance of rain are from" - and lists the places and the computer model names as follows:

• Australian Bureau of Meteorology ACCESS-R, ACCESS-G
• US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration USAGFS
• UK Meteorological Office UKGC
• Japanese Meteorological Agency JMAGSM
• European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting ECSP
• Meteorological Service of Canada CMCGEM
• German national weather service, Deutscher Wetterdienst DWD

Don't tell Alan Caruba - he'd be terribly disappointed and would never leave his house without a brolly - because he just knows computer models can't be trusted.  And as for feeding in data from land-based weather stations - well he'll probably tell you that can't be trusted either!

Alan Caruba doesn't read science.  Here's proof!

Okay - not proof (science isn't about proof).  Here's the evidence.  I have no idea where Alan gets his crankery from but it's not science.  He wrote that "the polar ice caps were supposed to have all melted by now".  Maybe he just made it up all by himself.  Let's guess why Anthony Watts posted that silliness.  Not because he believes it, but because it's good disinformation for his readers.

Just in case there's a reader who doesn't know the facts - then he's wrong.  There is no reputable scientific source that predicted that the "polar ice caps" would have melted by now.  In fact, the Arctic sea ice is melting much more quickly than was predicted a few years back.  There are no solid predictions for Antarctica that I'm aware of.  But the general consensus (there's that word again) is that the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica are going to continue to warm and the ice there will contribute to sea level rise.

You don't have to look far to find his motive.  On his own blog Alan Caruba writes:

I am, however, a science writer who has followed the global warming hoax since it began in the late 1980s and picked up momentum as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing its computer-based doomsday claims.

Alan Caruba just makes it up as he goes along.  He's effectively denying that scientists have known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas since at least the 1860s.  He denies the work of Fourier, Tyndall,  Arrhenius, Callendar, Plass, Revelle, Broecker, Keeling and many others who were studying CO2 well before the 1980s.  And he can't claim it was a secret known only to scientists - CO2 was discussed in newspapers even in Australia, well before the 1980s.

Caruba comes across as a crank paranoid conspiracy theorist like our old mate from HotCopper, BenBradley.

I couldn't be bothered reading any further.  The first couple of paragraphs was enough to know Caruba is a fiction writer posing as a science writer and I find it difficult to imagine he fools even the most foolish of the 8% Dismissives.

From the WUWT Comments - The Daily Ad HomineMann Competition

Nothing much to report in the comments at WUWT.  A couple of people pulled Anthony up about Alan Caruba's  "sophisticated meteorological satellites" and pointed out that models are used to forecast weather.  The rest of them were too busy competing to win the prize for the most libellous ad homineMann.  That seems to have become a daily event at WUWT.  Anthony hasn't announced the Grand Prize yet.  (Maybe the prize is to share the stage with Tim Ball at an upcoming event.)

Whither winter weather whether weather or climate

If you think that headline is dumb, how about this one?

Here's the article from which Watts mangled his weird meaningless headline.

(Has anyone else noticed that Watts' blog has gone from very bad to very very bad quality lately?  Seems to have got stuck somewhere between boring, irrelevant and painfully wrongheaded.)

Addendum: Anthony now seems to be saying that the record heat extremes in the USA recently were either or both UHI effect and new weather stations.  (As if one foot in mouth wasn't enough.)

Addendum 2: Below is a chart of USA temperature records from the EPA (data from NOAA), including surface and satellite records.

Anthony's rabble cry "what about the 1930s"? Indeed, the chart shows quite a difference between this century and the 1930s.  (I'll spell it out for people who can't read charts.  There are a lot more hot years since the mid 1980s in the USA.  In the 1930s the hot years were more rare and were interspersed with cooler years.)

Getting tied up in knots over UHI

Anthony is saying the records since the 1950s are wrong because of UHI and new thermometers.  He has to be complaining about the satellite 'thermometers' as well, since going by the chart below, the satellite records support the surface measurements.  A couple of 'lukewarmers' did an analysis demonstrating that the UHI effect is already factored into the adjusted temperature records.  (Needless to say, Anthony poo poos anything that contradicts his spin.)

Oh Watt a tangled web we weave...

In among the comments, Anthony also said you can't count last summer, so I guess he thinks that UHI and new thermometers weren't causing last summer's heat.  Why the difference?  He hasn't explained why he thinks new thermometers and UHI would distort temperature records post 1950s except those from last year.

Wonder if Anthony is deliberately lying or is he just stupid? No, I don't really wonder that.  The fact that he didn't put up a temperature chart to support his silliness suggest deceitful intentions.

PS Anthony's in-line comments are getting to the ludicrous stage.  According to Tony, 90% of new thermometers in the USA are put near 'heat sinks and sources' and can't measure cooler temperatures even relative to themselves ("you don't understand physics, that's not how heat sinks work", he says).  They just keep getting hotter and hotter presumably till they blow!