Bob Tisdale goes AMO-ing to a big chill - not!

Update: The University of Southampton has issued a clarification. It doesn't address the substantive issues raised here. There's also no mention of 0.5C.

Also see Gerard McCarthy's replies to my query to him via Twitter - here and here and here.

Sou 2 June 2015

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There was a new paper that came out this week in Nature, which had a bit of coverage around the traps. Deniers rather liked it not so much because of what was in the paper itself, but because of what was in the press release.

The paper was by a team from the University of Southampton, led by Dr. Gerard D. McCarthy. The paper was about the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO and ocean heat transport, and related.

The AMO is used to indicate changes in sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic. It is of such long duration that there aren't instrumental records going back far enough to show multiple repeating patterns. It's probably not a regular cycle with a fixed period. Estimates seem to place the latest period at around 70 years (from the beginning of a warm phase in the 1920s to the end of a cool phase in the 1990s - see here). The latest IPCC report had this to say about it (page TS-25):

A number of studies have investigated the effects of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) on global mean surface temperature. While some studies find a significant role for the AMO in driving multi-decadal variability in GMST, the AMO exhibited little trend over the period 1951-2010 on which these assessments are based, and the AMO is assessed with high confidence to have made little contribution to the GMST trend between 1951 and 2010 (considerably less than 0.1°C). {2.4, 9.8.1, 10.3; FAQ 9.1}.

From the above paragraph I take it that the nature of the AMO is not all that well agreed upon - by some at least.

Ice Ages, Witches and Magic from Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and Alan Carlin

I suppose I can understand the fixation that deniers have with religion, given the world view they hold. It goes some way to explaining their inability to distinguish scientific research from witchcraft and sorcery. Those who've had the benefit of any education in science, not so much.

Marc Morano - burning witches

Today Raw Story reported how Marc Morano, a professional disinformer, explained to a rapt audience of science deniers, how policies designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions are like blood sacrifices to the gods. He is reported as saying:

Aztec priests encouraged people to sacrifice blood to the gods to end severe drought...Today we are told we need a fundamental transformation of our lives in order to end bad weather, ...  We are told we need EPA regulations and UN treaties in order to spare us from more hurricanes and floods and droughts and all this bad weather.

Anthony Watts and his ozone hole deniers are out in force (again)

In yet another "claim" headline, Anthony Watts shows yet again how he denies science. Not just climate science but atmospheric chemistry as well. This, mind you, is the same week as he sent his fans to spam Wikipedia denying his denial of science.

This time his headline is about a press release that he copied and pasted, about the ozone layer (archived here). Anthony's denial only comes via his headline: Claim: ‘Severe ozone depletion avoided'. It's not the first time he's denied that ozone-depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) react with ozone in the stratosphere, destroying it (see further reading below).

The paper, by Professor Martyn Chipperfield and colleagues, is in Nature Communications. The authors discuss how the ozone hole would have been much worse had the world not agreed (through the Montreal Protocol) to stop releasing ozone-depleting substances. The researchers developed a model to investigate what would have happened if action had not been taken. They describe this as (from the abstract, my dot points and emphasis):

• A deep Arctic ozone hole, with column values <120 DU, would have occurred given meteorological conditions in 2011.
• The Antarctic ozone hole would have grown in size by 40% by 2013, with enhanced loss at subpolar latitudes.
• The decline over northern hemisphere middle latitudes would have continued, more than doubling to ~15% by 2013.

How influential deniers flock to their echo chamber (and stay there)

A new paper in Nature Climate Change discusses from where the elite in the USA get their opinions about climate. Echo chambers are significant. The elite are described in the abstract as "the community of political elites engaged in the contentious issue of climate politics in the United States". The researchers used exponential random graph (ERG) modelling (don't ask me :D) and found that both "the homogeneity of information (the echo) and multi-path information transmission (the chamber) play significant roles in policy communication".

There's a press release at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) of the University of Maryland (where the lead author, Lorien Jasny, resides). It translates the social science speak into everyday language.

WUWT proposes harassment and lawsuits to stop climate research

Matt Manos is going great guns with his conspiratorial thinking over at WUWT (archived here). He comes across as a real nutter, albeit one who can manage to write an entire sentence with proper use of nouns and verbs. Flush with his success at flushing out all his fellow WUWT conspiracy theorists, today he's urging WUWT-ers to spam governments with FOIA requests. Matt wants to get to the bottom of what he thinks is a giant climate conspiracy. He wrote, using the same "sheeple" concept from his last article:

In my previous post, Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists, I introduced the concept of bellwethers and rational ignorance to explain why it’s so hard to convince warmists using empirical evidence. 

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.

Climate denial blog-owner Anthony Watts calls his troops to Wikipedia action

Anthony Watts has sent his troops to rewrite the Wikipedia entry for his blog. wattsupwiththat (archived here). He says he's not allowed to do it himself because of bias. But he thinks his biased fans are allowed to do so I guess. His headline was "The sad tales of the Wikipedia gang war regarding WUWT – ‘creepy and a little scary’". Poor Anthony - the creep is creeped out.

Anthony decided to go to what he calls gang warfare, calling up his gang. He wrote: "As we all know, Wikipedia has one major flaw in it’s design: it allows gang warfare." And Anthony tried to exploit that major flaw. Wikipedia has safeguards against gang warfare, which Anthony probably didn't know about.

The WUWT Wikipedia article opens with the line:

Watts Up With That? (or WUWT) is a blog dedicated to climate change denial[a] created in 2006 by Anthony Watts.[1] 

For a very short time, one of his biased fans managed to change it to: "Wattsupwiththat is a blog dedicated to climate science." (It was reverted back too quickly for me to get a screen shot.)

Killer heat wave in India and even extreme rain and floods in the USA don't get a hearing at WUWT...

Anthony Watts almost never reports extreme weather consistent with climate change, unless it's heavy snow (or hail that Anthony mistook for snow!).

Anthony claims he used to be a meteorologist. He used to tell weather forecasts on television and still does give weather reports on his local radio station AFAIK. Which makes it all the more strange that he rarely reports on extreme weather. So far his almost total lack of reporting on the drought and record temperatures in his home state of California is a wonder.

Record-breaking rains and massive flooding across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana

Here's the latest that you haven't seen at WUWT. It's the wild weather and record-breaking rains in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas.

I started writing this a day or so ago and let it rest for a while. I figured maybe Anthony Watts, ex-meteorologist from the USA, would write something after he'd collected enough you-tube videos and photographs and confirmed all the broken records. There's still no sign of him being aware of the grave situation not far to the east of him.

The Texas drought has finally broken - with a vengeance. Some call it weather whiplash. From extreme dry to extreme rain - with more than 90% of Texas having been declared at risk of flash flooding.

WUWT's "sheeple" conspiracy nuttery - and forecasting God

You might have noticed a comment by Matt Manos the other day. He was about the only person who understood what President Obama was saying, when Eric "eugenics" Worrall wrote his silly article. Matt spoiled it by swerving off into an utter nutter conspiracy.

Matt Manos' "sheeple" conspiracy theory

Well, today Matt's expanded his conspiracy theory (archived here). He's using the "sheeple" argument that's a favourite of crank conspiracy theorists the world over.

The "sheeple" argument goes like this. People don't "believe [insert conspiracy theory of the day here] because they are "sheeple" who are:

• incapable of thinking for themselves
• brainwashed by some unseen, unknown higher power
• in thrall or in fear of authority (variously experts, government officials, common sense)

Matt's article has all the hallmarks of the classic conspiracy theory.

WUWT's unethical use of the most vulnerable, denying them clean energy

One thing few would accuse Anthony Watts (or any science disinformer) of is applying ethics. Today is no exception. Unethical Anthony has a hypocrisy posing as "care" in an article with a headline:"The Ethics of Climate Change" (archived here).

He's using an article by someone called Bob Lyman** to pretend that letting poorer nations sink under rising seas is good for them. Once again he is hosting someone arguing that letting people starve from drought-caused famine, die from heat exhaustion or thirst, or suffocate under heavy smog, will be better than helping them modernise, survive and thrive with lots of clean energy.