Pope Francis' endorsement of science has upset deniers at WUWT

The coming encyclical from Pope Francis has really irked deniers. There've been five protest articles in the past week or so, at WUWT. Funny thing is deniers can't make up their mind about what their beef is.

You'd think that by the twenty-first century, most people who've had any sort of education would understand science basics. Yet even in countries as developed as the USA and Australia, there is a sizeable minority of people who are committed flat-earthers. People who not only reject science, they are opposed to the creation of knowledge. These people congregate at disinformation blogs like WUWT. They are the science illiterati. The wilfully ignorant hobnob with the disinformers, so that sometimes you can't tell which is which. Such people are a threat to society.  These anti-science activists are an obstacle to progress. Not an insurmountable obstacle - their greed and selfishness and lack of morals may well be their downfall.

Forget science. Follow your immoral conscience

In one of the Pope Francis protest articles at WUWT, the "guest" is trying to rationalise the immoral stance deniers have taken, by claiming it should be a conscience vote. As you know, deniers have no conscience when it comes to maintaining their cosy and warped view of the world. Their hip pocket takes priority over everything.

The Pope as a filthy capitalist wanting to rob the poor

Some WUWT deniers are claiming that the Pope is in it for the money and doesn't care about the poor people.

marque2 reckons "various governments around the world" are going to pay the Pope "billions of dollar of financing":

April 29, 2015 at 12:05 pm
...So what the Pope is doing is trying to get on these governments’ good side, by supporting the Global Warming doctrine. That way the Church feels it will still be able to get the billions of dollars of financing from various governments around the world, who want to tax us for our carbon.

Joel O'Bryan says the Pope "wants a cut"

April 29, 2015 at 1:30 pm
The Vatican is just looking to get in on a cut of the $100Billion Climate Aid fund. Expression of fealty to this new faith of Climate Change is necessary. 

The Pope as a filthy Marxist wanting to help the poor

Other deniers are claiming that the Pope wants to help the poor by stealing from deniers and giving the money to people who are living in dire poverty.

noloctd

April 28, 2015 at 8:29 am
I grow weary of this Marxist Pope. Nothing good can come from mixing him with the UN and the warmunistas.

classicalhero7

April 29, 2015 at 5:05 pm
The problem with those who want to fight climate change aren’t doing so because they care for the environment, but they only want to do it for income redistribution. It is a watermelon exercise, It looks green on the outside by the core is red, communistic red. 

The Catholic Church and science

The most interesting thread at WUWT (if you find the weird and wacky world of deniers interesting - say, from a psychological perspective) was the one under the silly and wrong article by Eric Worrall (archived here). In that thread, deniers debated Galileo, the role of the Catholic Church in science in general, and one hard-boiled denier even made the point that Pope Francis is not rejecting science - he is endorsing mainstream science. It's deniers who are rejecting science. (Elsewhere the same person describes mainstream science from the most august scientific institutions on the planet, as "pseudo-science".)

Empty rhetoric in empty rooms

The Heartland Institute used it as an excuse to send a couple of deniers to Rome during arguably the most pleasant month of the year for a vacation in Italy. The only price they had to pay was to talk to an almost empty room in a hotel.

Heartland is also running advertisements to try to get people to write to Pope Francis and tell him to forget about climate science, the well-being of the planet, and the vulnerable people and nations. As Joe Bast put it, the earth is here for deniers to rape and pillage to their hearts content. Or, in his words: "Humans are not causing a climate crisis on God’s Green Earth – in fact, they are fulfilling their Biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity."

Deniers will be delighted with UAH v. 6 beta

Roy Spencer and John Christy have finally, nine years later than first mentioned, released version 6.0 beta of the UAH temperature record. Deniers will be delighted. Here is a comparison of v5.6 and v6.0 together with RSS.

Data sources: UAH v6, UAH v5.6 and RSS

UAH v6 is now a touch cooler than RSS and the trend isn't as steep. However v6 beta lines up better with RSS for the last couple of years.

You can read about it on Roy Spencer's blog - I've archived his description of the changes here.

Blog changes

I have changed the blog around a bit, you might have noticed (the main website, not the mobile version). I've moved the menu to the left hand side. This has allowed a bit more space at the top so you can see the latest article better. It's also allowed me to stuff the menu with all sorts of things.

One thing I've added is some news items - that's on the bottom menu item third from the top, together with links to the BoM Enso tracker and WUWT-idget and other widgets in the sidebar and elsewhere. It's probably not the most comprehensive set of news items - however there are things that pop up there that I'd otherwise have missed. I just used a few search terms - you can click on the different search terms like floods, wildfire, drought etc, which are up the top of the news section - to see the news on that item.

Over the next few weeks I'll also try to get a set of commonly used charts up on the web - in a form that makes it easy to copy them or link to them. Things like surface temperature, ocean heat etc. When I do, feel free to use them and post elsewhere - preferably saying where you got them from and the data sources (which I'll include).

Let me know if you have any other suggestions - or if you come across problems.

Bombshell! Dumb Denialism from Anthony Watts about Arctic Sea Ice

Arctic sea ice is declining rapidly, yet Anthony Watts sez it may rebound! Is he claiming that an ice age cometh? Not really. He usually leaves that nonsense to his "essayists" like David "funny sunny" Archibald. Yet if you read his headline without the article he copied and pasted (archived here), that's the conclusion you'd draw.

Here's Anthony's wrong headline:

BOMBSHELL: Scripps says Arctic Sea Ice may return, forecasts of loss based on ‘oversimplified arguments’

Once again, as usual, Anthony couldn't understand a simple press release - or if he did he decided to mislead his readers.  (Which is worse - being seen as an idiot or as a liar?)

Anthony Watts and his bombshells are usually a flop - his bombshells have a habit of going pear-shaped:)

The paper that he referenced was by Till J.W. Wagner and Ian Eisenman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It was about how:

• Arctic sea ice is disappearing because of global warming, but
• IF greenhouse gases dropped (or we were desperate enough to do some geo-engineering) and the Earth cooled again
• THEN the disappeared Arctic sea ice would come back
• ELSE it won't! 

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

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

The Mock Delegation from the Heartland Institute

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

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

The Fake Enquiry by the GWPF

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

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

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

Falsifying projections from WUWT

It is becoming less fashionable to deny climate science these days. As the Paris meeting approaches, more deniers are shifting a tad away from the extreme end of denial. Even James Inhofe, one of the extremist fake sceptics in the USA, favourably quoted Dr James Hansen in a recent op-ed piece promoting nuclear power as a way to reduce emissions.

Anthony Watts at WUWT if anything has shifted toward, not away from, extremist denial. Every now and again he'll publish an article in which a person claims to accept global warming - to a point. That point being that they don't accept that it has or will warm as much as has and will.

Today he's allowed an article from one such science denier, Richard J. Petschauer (archived here). I think he's trying to portray himself as a "reasonable person", though his ideas aren't reasonable at all.

Elevated Denial: Mountains can't get warmer, everyone knows they are cold! sez WUWT

In another spurt of denier weird at WUWT, Anthony Watts from the denier blog WUWT, copied and pasted a press release about a new paper in Nature Climate Change. The paper was about warming at high altitudes.

Anthony again added some words written all by himself (archived here). He seems to be taking a renewed interest in his blog. That must be about ten sentences he's written in two days. About the same number of words he's written on his blog in the past four months or so.

Elevation-dependent warming or how some altitudes are warming faster

Transecto Cordillera Americana TCA Source: MRI

This time the article Anthony copied is about investigations into whether or not some high altitude regions are warming faster than average.

Anthony's headline is wrong. He wrote: "Despite ‘extremely sparse’ data, Mann’s buddy Ray Bradley seems sure that ‘High mountains are warming faster than expected ‘

Notice how he just had to get in a snipe at Professor Michael Mann who had nothing to do with the paper. That is straight from the Disinformer 101 textbook. It was applied give his mob someone else to aim at, in case they were bored with the topic of the article. However that's not what I meant when I said the headline is wrong. In the material that Anthony copied, but didn't absorb, one of the authors said:

Lead author Nick Pepin of the University of Portsmouth, U.K., says, “There is growing evidence that high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations and such warming can accelerate many other environmental changes such as glacial melt and vegetation change, but scientists urgently need more and better data to confirm this. If we are right and mountains are warming more rapidly than other environments, the social and economic consequences could be serious, and we could see more dramatic changes much sooner than previously thought.”

There is a difference between "seems sure" and needing "data to confirm this". The scientists have found evidence that some high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations, but this needs to be confirmed.

Do you believe wheat viruses can disappear by magic?

Some of the deniers at WUWT still believe in magic. They can't or won't see the world for what it is.

Anthony Watts' current stand-in at WUWT, Eric Worrall, has written an article (archived here) about how know-nothing Eric just knows the scientists are wrong, and even if they are right it will all go away - by magic. He's talking about something reported as a "world first" discovery by scientists at an agricultural research station in Horsham, Victoria (Australia).

Even though by now I can probably be considered a slightly jaded denier watcher, the illogic of deniers can still surprise. Every now and again a particularly silly article like that one from Eric, reminds me that if deniers are bad at one thing, it's clear thinking.

More global warming denial from Anthony Watts at WUWT

The denial continues at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He's written a few words all by himself, for a change (archived here). (In the past four or five months, Anthony Watts has written almost nothing. He's handed his blog over to his readers to post their nonsense instead of writing his own nonsense. )

Source: Skeptical Science

Today Anthony is denying something that's plain - that the world is warming and climate change is happening. He was writing about a new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change, and he topped and tailed it with some words that he wrote all by himself - in what comes across as frustrated denial that the ice age still hasn't cometh.

Global warming will continue in line with long term projections

The paper is by scientists Matthew H. England, Jules B. Kajtar & Nicola Maher of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of New South Wales. What they did was examine about 200 climate model projections, separating those that showed the sort of slowdown of the past few years from those that didn't.

Danley Wolfe continues the long, drawn out hiatus of scepticism at WUWT

At WUWT there's an article by Danley Wolfe (archived here). No, I'd never heard of him before, either. He's not a climate scientist as will become quite clear. He's just another WUWT denier who Anthony Watts decided to trot out for some inexplicable reason.

In his article, Danley is writing about the so-called hiatus in global warming. He has got so much wrong that I'll not hope to cover everything. So I'll just pick him up on a few points.