"Up yours!" sez Anthony Watts with another Tim Ball "Climate Hoax" conspiracy theory

See hypotheses - added below.


There had only been two three WUWT articles since the Tim Ball fiasco of the other day. Now there's a third fourth. Who'd a thought it - it's by the man himself, Tim Ball (archived here). Anthony is bowing to his conspiracy theorising readers and reassuring them that he hasn't thrown their favourite number one climate conspiracist to the dogs. (Edit: I missed one article. There was one talking about some chap who said something or other about the new health care system in the USA, therefore climate science is a hoax. Or something like that.)

This is also Anthony getting back at all those nasty science types, who objected to Tim Ball claiming that climate science is a giant hoax. This is Anthony thumbing his nose at Richard Betts and Tamsin Edwards and telling them - go jump. He figures he'll probably never be invited to dine with them again anyway.

Local news - conservatives lose out, Greens gain in Victoria

Tides turn. We've just had state elections today.

It's no surprise that the Labor Party was elected back in after the conservatives, the Liberals in coalition with the Nationals, had been governing my home state of Victoria for a while. The Victorian Liberals aren't the same as the Federal Liberal Party - they are much less conservative here. However they had their problems and it was predicted they'd miss out today. Which they did.

A lot of the credit can probably go to our dismal Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, even though this is a state, not a federal election. The interesting bits was the election of a Greens candidate to the seat of Melbourne. It's the first time a Greens candidate has been elected to the Lower House. And there could be more, but it's too close to call just yet. The other interesting result was the likely loss of a rural seat (Shepparton) from the conservative party, the Nationals. The swing against the Nationals in that seat is currently sitting at 32.5% - which is massive. It's not unlike what happened in my electorate of Indi in the Federal election, when Cathy McGowan was elected.

State elections are not really anything to get too excited about.  What the result does show is that pendulums swing. And governments can't count on conservative voters. The Federal government should be getting a bit nervous, as should the conservative government in Queensland, which from what I read is not very popular either.

Why did the water in the kettle boil? Because it got hot!

WUWT has been really, really quiet since the fiasco with Tim Ball's latest conspiracy blurb and the response. Usually there are anything from three to eight articles a day. There have only been three articles in the past three days, including the fiasco article.

There's one by Willis Eschenbach about a buoy and temperatures. It's too trivial to archive. There's another by "Bob Tisdale", about an article on Ed Hawkins' blog by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. "Bob's" article isn't worth reading, either, though if you want to do so it's archived here. The article on Ed Hawkin's blog is worth reading.

Dr. van Oldenborgh's article is explaining how there is more energy being stored on earth than is coming in from the sun. He writes how most of it is being accumulated in the ocean.

"Bob" on the other hand doesn't want his readers to hear about that. He's gone off on some tropospheric tangent. He's also gone down the route that deniers go down, foolishly writing:

As we can see, yes, the oceans to depths of 2000 meters (about 1.25 miles) have warmed according to the NODC data, but note the warming rate. It is only +0.03 deg C/decade. That’s read 3 one-hundredths of a deg C per decade, which is a very tiny warming rate. It would be even tinier if we had data for the oceans from the surface to the ocean floor.

"Bob" doesn't mention the enormous heat capacity of the ocean. Just tosses around words like "miniscule" to describe ocean warming, which demonstrates his ignorance or his deceit. Or a mix of the two. Globally, the oceans are now probably as hot as they've been at least since the beginning of civilisation - and it won't stop as long as we insist on turning up the heat. The oceans absorb more than 90% of the extra energy that's being built up in the system. It won't take much for the surface to get quite a bit warmer. Here's a chart I did a while back on the ocean heat content:

Data Source: NOAA

You might recall that scientists have figured out that the oceans in the southern hemisphere have been warming faster - which doesn't show in the above.

There are some interesting charts in Dr. van Oldenborgh's article. He's plotted anomalies of surface temperatures against CO2, putting in the years. Go over and have a look. And while you're there you might think of something worthwhile to add to the comments, to let them know it's not just deniers reading the article :)

"Bob's" circular thinking

"Bob" is getting his excuses lined up for the next bout of global warming, writing:

Global surface temperatures in 2014 are very likely to be at record high levels in 2014. We are going to see that framed in many ways in months to come. However, we understand the reason for those record high levels to be the unusual warming of the eastern North Pacific. 

That's a bit like claiming that the water in the kettle boiled because it got hotter. It didn't boil because you put it on the stove and lit the gas.

From the WUWT comments

There aren't a lot of comments. I'll just pick out two as typical:

Neillusion is very sure what is not causing this very rapid rise in temperatures;

November 29, 2014 at 5:32 am
It is a change, a change from warming to ‘no change’ in temp that has three possible future trends, to start warming again, to stay even, or to start cooling. Until it is known why it warmed in the first place (and was cooling before that), no-one knows which of the three futures it’s gonna be. The only thing I’m personally sure of is that the ‘why’ has nothing to do with CO2

david smith, for some inexplicable reason, thinks that we here will be annoyed about what he thinks is virtually undetectable warming, that has been detected:

November 29, 2014 at 5:02 am
Thank you Bob. Informative as always.
The essential message from this post is (quite correctly) that we have absolutely nothing to worry about, the ocean ‘warming’ is virtually undetectable, and the models have been useless.
They’ll be annoyed over at Hot Whopper. 

Disgusting Deniers: Anthony Watts exploits the publicity he got from Tim Ball

Added an addendum. Sou 28 Nov 14

Update again - The article I've written about now has more than 500 comments (archived here) and Anthony has chosen to not dilute it's impact (he's not posted any other article today), unusually but not unexpectedly. Thus adding considerable weight to my contention that Anthony Watts saw the opportunity presented by Tim Ball's article as too good to pass up. He couldn't believe his luck when he got the huge bonus that scientists themselves even offered to lodge a complaint at WUWT. This is being mis-sold as if it means Tim Ball's nasty weird impossible ideas has legs (smoke and fire). Meanwhile Anthony Watts is sitting back with a big smirk on his face, rubbing his hands gleefully.
Sou - 28 November 2014


Tim Ball wrote an absolutely disgusting article from his first words to his last and everything in between, and Anthony Watts went and put it up on his blog - see here. Lots of people were appalled and shocked. So you can guess how bad it must have been. For anyone to be shocked at something that appears at WUWT it has to be really, really bad.

Anthony's reaction was shameful and continues to be so. He tweeted at one point (h/t rubiginosa):

@BarryJWoods I've offered Betts a guest post to refute it and I've put a disclaimer on it. See PM to you
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) November 26, 2014

Can you imagine? WUWT claimed that all climate scientists, including Richard Betts, are fooling the world and engaged in some giant deception, and Anthony has the gall to invite a scientist to "refute" it. He sees a chance to get more people to read his blog.

Various views flying about at WUWT

There's not a lot happening in the deniosphere today as far as I can see. Anthony Watts posted another of his "claim" headlines, this time with slight variation (archived here). His headline read "Model claim: airplanes of the future won’t be able to take off at some airports due to global warming". His headline implies some airports would have to close, which isn't what the paper said.

The copy and paste this time was the abstract from a paper in the AMS journal, Weather, Climate and Society, about how the increase in surface temperatures is affecting aircraft. (For some reason, Anthony Watts said it was published in BAMS, but it wasn't.) The abstract, which was all Anthony published, states in part:

For a given runway length, airport elevation, and aircraft type there is a temperature threshold above which the airplane cannot take off at its maximum weight and thus must be weight restricted. The number of summer days necessitating weight restriction has increased since 1980 along with the observed increase in surface temperature. Climate change is projected to increase mean temperatures at all airports and significantly increase the frequency and severity of extreme heat events at some.

It goes on to discuss how it will be a particular problem in the future for airports having short runways and no room to extend them.

Anthony Watts tries for one foot in the Hitler camp and one foot out

I've noticed a few people expressing shock and disbelief that Anthony Watts would put up the article that Tim Ball wrote the other day.

I don't know why they picked out that particular one.

Yes, it was shocking. Yes, it was not only one of the dumbest articles you'll ever read, it was horrible. Tim Ball was basically accusing climate scientists of being Hitlers. He quoted a passage from Hitler's writings to prove that climate science was one big con. (Yeah - weird!) He was accusing climate scientists of massive deception on a centuries-long world-wide scale, which is something that Anthony encourages his readers to believe quite often. So that's nothing new.

Belief trumps fact at WUWT. And are fake sceptics "cynics"?

Anthony Watts gives another illustration of his limited vocabulary and poor grasp of English (archived here). Anthony put up a rather nice photo of a researcher at Michigan State University and described him as looking "angry". He doesn't. He's even showing a hint of a smile.

Many times when Anthony disagrees with someone, he describes them in terms of being "angry" or "full of hate" or "mendacious" or a variation. Those are three of his favourite ways of describing people with whom he disagrees. He couldn't label this scientist using what is pretty well the only other descriptor in his arsenal, an "anonymous coward" or a "hateful anonymous coward", because his name was on the research paper and in the press release. And anyway, he showed his photo, which tends to dispel any notion of anonymity.

Anthony seems unable to write: "I disagree with X because Y".  Many times it's because Anthony can't figure out what "X" is.  All he knows is that it's something that he disagrees with. Maybe because a scientist wrote it. Or maybe because the person who said "X" votes Democrat. Or maybe because they wear yellow socks, or a polka dot tie, or a skirt and high heeled shoes. Whatever. If by some chance Anthony does work out what is being said (the "X"), then he's unable to articulate the "Y" - why he disagrees. In this case it's really hard to figure out what Anthony Watts disagrees with or finds contentious. The research results should not surprise anyone.

This particular researcher, Michigan State University sociologist Aaron M. McCright, has had a paper published about American perceptions of weather and human-caused global warming. Interestingly it was published in Nature Climate Change, rather than a sociology journal.

An unsustainable planet - and yellow submarines in Antarctica

I was reading WUWT today, there's an interesting article about new research on Antarctic sea ice, which the WUWT-ers are finding difficult to get their head around. Anthony didn't go to any trouble as usual (archived here), he just copied and pasted the press release. If you want to keep up with science news, you'd do better by reading ScienceDaily.com than WUWT. So here's a bit more about it, plus the denialati reaction.

First the research itself. There's a press release at ScienceDaily.com about how scientists have produced detailed, high-resolution 3-D maps of Antarctic sea ice. That means ice thickness as well as showing how ice behaves in winter (there's not much sea ice in summer around Antarctica). Here's a map highlighting the areas that the scientists wrote up about in the paper in Nature Geoscience. As always, click to enlarge.

Bob Tisdale gets into a spot of hot water

Today Perennially Puzzled "Bob Tisdale" is puzzling over sea level. He's branching out a bit from his normal sea surface temperature, or SST for those "in the know" like "Bob" :) - but not too far. And, for a change, he's decided to prove that it's not ENSO that's causing global sea levels to rise, sort of. He doesn't go quite as far as admitting that melting ice and thermal expansion of water from the hotter oceans or changing salinity have anything to do with sea level change, let alone that it's got anything to do with human activity. But it's a small step in the right direction.

Of course, he didn't admit to that.

The spot of hot water "Bob" got into (archived here) is near the Philippines. He wrote about "The region east of the Philippines" and said:

For months, I’ve wanted to plot the data for that region, so that I could get a rough idea of its contribution to the global rate of sea level rise.

Smaller volcanic eruptions helped slow warming, but deniers at WUWT don't believe it

There was a paper that came out last week that you might have heard about. It was by David Ridley from MIT and a team of others, including some very high profile scientists. What they did was investigate the impact of volcanoes over the past few years. They found that the cooling effect of volcanoes since 2000 could be from 0.05°C up to as much as 0.12 °C, which would be quite a bit more than previously thought.

The Sarychev Peak Volcano, on Matua Island, erupted on June 12, 2009.
Credit: NASA via AGU

There have been other recent studies looking at the impact of volcanoes, including by some of the co-authors of this paper. I've written previously about the article by Gavin Schmidt, Drew Shindell and Kostas Tsigaridis,  in a special edition of Nature Geoscience, "Focus on recent slowdown in global warming". That issue also had an article on volcanoes, two of whose co-authors were also co-authors on the Ridley paper.

This new work was different.

What this team did was look particularly at the impact of volcanic aerosols in the stratosphere below 15 km. From satellite observations, scientists know that above 15 km, volcanic eruptions that are smallish in size can perturb incoming solar radiation. David Ridley found that below 15 km in the stratosphere, there has also been a measurable impact by volcanoes.