What a difference 19 years makes...

One of HotWhopper's visitors, Greig, referred us  to an article written back in 1995.  The article was written by someone called Thomas Gale Moore, who was at the time writing as Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. I googled Thomas Gale Moore and found that he was also associated with the pro-tobacco lobby.  It seems he has a history of disinformation.

Greig was citing the article to support his claim that "there is plenty of scientific and practical reason to question the pessimism" (around global warming).  So I thought it might be worth checking to see how Greig's chosen article fares nineteen years later.

Temperature prediction: Fail

One thing Thomas Gale Moore writes is that "Should the world warm -- and there is little evidence or theory to support such a prognostication ..."

Maybe Thomas hadn't seen any surface temperature charts back in 1995, though they were available back then (refer page 213 in Chapter 7 of the IPCC First Assessment Report).  Anyway, this is what's happened to global surface temperatures:

Data Source: NASA

In 1995 the global surface temperature was 0.33 above the 1951-1980 mean.  Since then it's gone up around the same again - rising to 0.67 above the mean in 2010 and 2013 was 0.61C above the 1951-1980 mean. One "prediction" down.

Food price prediction: Fail

What else did Thomas get wrong?  He mentioned food prices and cited a study by Kane et al (1991) (which I couldn't trace), which he said indicated "...a decline in commodity prices under moderate climate change conditions".  Let's see what has happened to food prices with the climate change over the past nineteen years.  Here is a chart of the Food Index from the FAO (click to enlarge).

Well, the food index in real terms is 50% higher than it was in 1995.  Two "predictions" down.

Rainfall prediction: Fail

Another thing Thomas suggested was that in the USA, "the Southwest would likely become wetter and better for crops".  Let's have a look at what's happening in the southwest portion of the USA according to the US Drought Monitor:

The southwestern USA is experiencing what could be the worst drought in 500 years.  And the prognosis isn't crash hot, either.

That should be sufficient to demonstrate that Thomas Gale Moore, while he may be good at some things, has not got any skill in climate predictions.

Most of the rest of his article is yearning for the "good old days" when dinosaurs roamed the earth and other nostalgia in a similar vein.  I can understand why Thomas feels comfortable with dinosaurs and other old fossils.

Rising temperatures on Google Earth brings out all the conspiracy nutters at WUWT

Anthony Watts has posted a press release about an initiative by Tim Osborne and Phil Jones at CRU (archived here).  What they've done is plot temperature land surface temperature data (CRUTEM4) on Google Earth.  It's more than a fun and interesting way to see what's happening to surface temperatures around the world, it would have been a big job.  They've made temperature data more meaningful and accessible to the public using one of the best things to happen since sliced bread - Google Earth.

Here is what happens when you click on the grid over Tasmania (click to enlarge).

You can click the links in the pop-up to get more data. It really is very, very nice.

The exercise is written up in Earth System Science Data here.  You can get the .kml file here and open it in Google Earth.

Anthony Watts is in favour of the exercise, copying the (unreferenced as usual) press release under the headline: "CRU produces something useful for a change".  Which is about the most praise that any reputable scientist would ever get from a science rejector like Anthony Watts.

Here are some excerpts from ScienceDaily.com (my paras):

Climate researchers at the University of East Anglia have made the world's temperature records available via Google Earth. The Climatic Research Unit Temperature Version 4 (CRUTEM4) land-surface air temperature dataset is one of the most widely used records of the climate system.

The new Google Earth format allows users to scroll around the world, zoom in on 6,000 weather stations, and view monthly, seasonal and annual temperature data more easily than ever before. Users can drill down to see some 20,000 graphs -- some of which show temperature records dating back to 1850.

The move is part of an ongoing effort to make data about past climate and climate change as accessible and transparent as possible. Dr Tim Osborn from UEA's Climatic Research Unit said: "The beauty of using Google Earth is that you can instantly see where the weather stations are, zoom in on specific countries, and see station datasets much more clearly. The data itself comes from the latest CRUTEM4 figures, which have been freely available on our website and via the Met Office. But we wanted to make this key temperature dataset as interactive and user-friendly as possible."

The Google Earth interface shows how the globe has been split into 5° latitude and longitude grid boxes. The boxes are about 550km wide along the Equator, narrowing towards the North and South poles. This red and green checkerboard covers most of Earth and indicates areas of land where station data are available. Clicking on a grid box reveals the area's annual temperatures, as well as links to more detailed downloadable station data.

But while the new initiative does allow greater accessibility, the research team do expect to find errors.  Dr Osborn said: "This dataset combines monthly records from 6,000 weather stations around the world -- some of which date back more than 150 years. That's a lot of data, so we would expect to see a few errors. We very much encourage people to alert us to any records that seem unusual...."

Read the full article at ScienceDaily.com 

Paranoia Plus

What is amazing is the number of WUWT readers who are not only unimpressed, they think it's all part of "the Climate Conspiracy".  One gets the feeling they wouldn't have a clue how to use Google Earth let alone add in the data that the scientists have provided.

I've listed some typical comments so you can see the sort of conspiracy-mongers and general nincompoops who gather at WUWT. I mean many of them haven't even bothered to look at the data and they obviously wouldn't understand it if they did.  Look for yourself.  This isn't just the odd stray conspiracy theorist.  This is a full on collection of utter nutters - typical of the people for whom Anthony Watts has designed his anti-science blog.  If you specialise in wilful ignorance you'll attract the wilfully ignorant.  Anthony Watts has got just what he bargained for.

If you want numbers - of the 32 responses so far, five are from Nick Stokes.  Of the other 27 comments, only three are complimentary while at least 21 are more than "skeptical" - they are from the conspiracy nutter brigade! (Archived here.)

John Peter says:

February 6, 2014 at 12:20 am
So will it now be possible for independent analysts to ascertain if CRUTEM4 is reliable as an indicator or if “warming” has been added lately by reducing pre satellite era temperatures through “adjustments”?

grumpyoldmanuk says:

February 6, 2014 at 12:23 am
Are those temperature records raw data or have they been, “Hansen-ed”? Is not putting carefully-selected everythings on Google a good way of turning doubtful computer-generated data into accepted truth to underwrite the CAGW narrative? “A lie will be halfway round the world before the truth can get its boots on”. One of Stalin’s favourite sayings just may be the watchword behind this move. CRU has form in this matter.

Mailman says:

February 6, 2014 at 12:44 am
As a few others have already touched upon it would be interesting to see if you could run “reports” using unadjusted temperature data wouldn’t it?
Somehow I doubt this data will be available? Hopefully I’m wrong and unadjusted temp data is available but I suspect it’s not.
Regards
Mailman

Somebody says:

February 6, 2014 at 1:00 am
“the temperature records do not depend on the precise location of each station”
Notice the wording. ‘Temperature records’.
Not temperature, which of course it depends on position, they do not have a system at thermodynamic equilibrium to have the same temperature everywhere. In fact, to have a temperature defined…

Stephen Richards says:

February 6, 2014 at 1:21 am
Peresumably these are the adjusted, sanitised and greenpiss approved temperatures. What’s the point. Let’s see the RAW date. You know, the stuff they haven’t adulterated in the name of CO² tax.

Kev-in-Uk says:

February 6, 2014 at 1:30 am
Regarding others comments about data adjustment, I also tend to view with suspicion. If unreasonable data adjustment has taken place, it might be fairly easy to find out (in reasonably developed areas at least). Take your local ‘main’ library for example, it may house weather records, or a copy of them. Hence, a bit like the surfacestations project, a number of volunteers could perhaps search for the ‘written’ information and then compare to the ‘official’ record shown on this dataset?
Much as I am sure that many older written records could have been removed (intentionally or not) – I’m also sure that many will remain forgotton on dusty bookshelves!

Patrick says:

February 6, 2014 at 2:00 am
“Nick Stokes says: February 6, 2014 at 1:47 am
This is gridded data, so the notion of “raw” data doesn’t really apply. It’s locally averaged, and some kind of homogenisation is likely done; it should be.”

Rubbish! Stokes stop trying!

Old Ranga says:

February 6, 2014 at 2:06 am
Are the figures fudged or unfudged, dare one ask?

John Shade says:

February 6, 2014 at 2:37 am
I do not think anything from CRU deserves such automatic trust and admiration, although I admire the generosity of spirit that such responses reveal. My own immediate reaction was less noble. It was along the lines of ‘what are they up to now?’. I would like to see some critical review of this product.

Besieged deniers Anthony Watts and Barry Woods engage in wishful thinking @wattsupwiththat ...

Science deniers are the same as everyone else in the world in regard to confirmation bias.  Well, maybe they have it worse than most of us when it comes to climate science.  Still, everyone suffers confirmation bias to some degree.

Today Anthony Watts and his correspondent, Barry Woods, have caught a bad case of it (archived here).  Most of Anthony's WUWT readers haven't.  Anthony and Barry think that Mike Hulme is disputing the fact that 97% plus of scientists who do research relating in any way to climate agree that humans are causing global warming.  But Mike Hulme is not disputing that at all.

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**Update**

Barry Woods has stated in the comments that what he meant was "Mike Hulme doesn't appear to like Cook et al's paper".

I doubt I'll ever know what Anthony Watts thinks Barry Woods meant.  Obviously most of the WUWT-ers read it the same way as I did (see WUWT comments below).

It's interesting that Barry jumped in so quickly and went to a lot of effort to explain himself here at HotWhopper, but he didn't bother correcting the same interpretation as me, which everyone at WUWT made.   I wonder why that would be...

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Anthony Watts picked out three paragraphs written by Mike Hulme and published them out of order, in contravention of the agreement with The Conversation.  (The Conversation gives permission to republish with provisos, including: Unless you have express permission from the author, you can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. To make material edits contact us.)

I'll publish the full article below, then make some observations.

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Science can't settle what should be done about climate change

By Mike Hulme, King's College London

The sight of speakers known to dispute the scientific evidence supporting climate change being called to speak at a parliamentary select committee on the latest IPCC report last week has raised certain commentators' blood pressure.

Some have gone so far as to claim that the climate change debate in Britain has become “as depressingly unscientific and polarised as it is in the United States”.

I disagree. The debate about climate change needs to become more political, and less scientific. Articulating radically different policy options in response to the risks posed by climate change is a good way of reinvigorating democratic politics.

The now infamous paper by John Cook and colleagues published in May 2013 claimed that of the 4,000 peer-reviewed papers they surveyed expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming, “97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming”. But merely enumerating the strength of consensus around the fact that humans cause climate change is largely irrelevant to the more important business of deciding what to do about it. By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point.

What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); nor whether future climate change brings additional risks to human or non-human interests (it does). As climate scientist Professor Myles Allen said in evidence to the committee, even the projections of the IPCC’s more prominent critics overlap with the bottom end of the range of climate changes predicted in the IPCC’s published reports.

In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it? Scientific consensus is not much help here. Even if one takes the Cook study at face value, then how does a scientific consensus of 97.1% about a fact make policy-making any easier? As Roger Pielke Jr has often remarked in the context of US climate politics, it’s not for a lack of public consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change that climate policy implementation is difficult in the US.

So politics, not science, must take centre stage. As Amanda Machin shows in her recent book, asking climate scientists to forge a consensus around facts with the expectation that decisive political action will naturally follow misunderstands science and politics in equal measure. If democratic politics is to be effective we need more disagreement, not more consensus, about what climate change is really about.
As I have argued elsewhere, the most important questions to be asked about climate change extend well beyond science. Let me suggest four; all of which are more important than the committee’s MPs managed. They are questions which people should and do disagree about and they have no correct answer waiting to be discovered by science.

• How do we value the future, or in economic terms, at what rate should we discount the future? Many of the arguments about urgent versus delayed interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions revolve around how much less we value future public goods and natural assets relative to their value today. This is a question that clear-thinking people will disagree about.
• In the governance of climate change what role do we allocate to markets? Many arguments about climate change, as about environmental management more generally, revolve around whether commodifying nature, by pricing environmental “goods” and “services”, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
• How do we wish new technologies to be governed, from experimentation and development to deployment? This question might revolve around new or improved low-carbon energy technologies (such as fracking, nuclear power, or hydrogen fuel), the use of genetically modified crops as a means to adapt to changing climate, or proposed climate engineering technologies. Again, these are not questions upon which science, least of all a scientific consensus, can adjudicate.
• What is the role of national governments as opposed to those played by multilateral treaties or international governing bodies? This requires citizens to reflect on forms of democracy and representation. They are no less important in relation to climate change than they are in relation to state security, immigration or financial regulation.

Any considered response to climate change will need to take a position, implicitly or explicitly, on one or more of these four questions, and others besides. And the percentage of climate science papers that accept humans are causing global warming has little to no bearing on public deliberations about these four questions.

Because the questions about climate change that really matter will not be settled by scientific facts. They entail debates about values and about the forms of political organisation and representation that people believe are desirable. This requires a more vigorous politics that cannot be short-circuited by appeals to science.

Mike Hulme does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

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From his bio at The Conversation: Mike Hulme is professor of climate and culture in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work explores the idea of climate change using historical, cultural and scientific analyses, seeking to illuminate the numerous ways in which climate change is deployed in public and political discourse....From 2000 to 2007 he was the Founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, based at the University of East Anglia, and since 2007 has been the founding Editor-in-Chief of the review journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change.

Politicians and the public should be debating policy not the science

I agree with Mike Hulme that it's way past time politicians and the public accepted the science and moved on to discuss policy.  I don't agree with him if he was suggesting that there was any value whatsoever in UK politicians giving a platform to fake sceptics like Donna Laframboise and Richard Lindzen.

Most politicians of any standing do accept climate science.  Some might be reluctant in this regard, but it's getting harder and harder to deny it.  In the USA the Republican Party as a whole seems to punish members who do accept the science but this will change.  Looking around the world, though, governments (as opposed to individual politicians) have accepted the science for more than two decades now.  Governments have made some progress in doing something about global warming - just not nearly enough progress.  Some time over the next couple of decades no-one (except the bedraggled mob at places like WUWT) will have a choice about whether or not to accept the science.  The climate will be doing it's thing.  It's happening already with hotter heatwaves and flashier floods.  More and more people are noticing.

Barry Woods and Anthony Watts engage in wishful thinking

Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are engaging in wishful thinking.  They grabbed onto one word written by Mike Hulme: "infamous".  Mike used that word to describe the 97% consensus paper by John Cook et al, published last year.  Anthony Watts and Barry Woods decided that Mike Hulme thinks there is not an overwhelming consensus among scientists that humans are causing global warming.  That's despite the fact that Mike Hulme clearly wrote that humans are causing global warming - and Anthony even published that particular paragraph.  Anthony quoted from an email he got from Barry Woods:

Perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but if Mike Hulme thinks Cook 97% is nonsense AND pointless, this will be noticed. 

Except that Mike Hulme doesn't think that the 97% is nonsense.  What he's arguing is that it's time to move beyond the science of climate and explore some big questions relating to what we are going to do about climate change.  I'll paraphrase his questions as:

• What value do we place on the future?
• What role do we want markets to play in mitigating global warming or adapting to it?
• Do we want to regulate new technologies and if so how?
• What is the role of national governments vs multi-lateral agreements vs international governing bodies?

These aren't new questions.  Nor are they single answer questions.  In fact, the article by Mike Hulme is probably quite a good illustration of the point he is making.  Scientists are good at science but can't be expected to excel at policy.

My reaction to the Mike Hulme article is - um yes.  Oversimplifying the obvious.  I reckon the people who are involved in high level discussions about climate action and associated policy development, have delved much deeper into these and other related issues.

It's science deniers who want to avoid discussing policy, not the general public. By continuing to rage against the science, deniers reckon they can avoid or put off the inevitable - deciding what to do about climate change.  Thing is, getting to policy solutions might be moving too slowly but it has been moving along.  Without the input of science deniers.  They have decided to forego the opportunity to help shape policy.  But policy is taking shape without them.  It's their choice to not participate.

From the WUWT comments

Quite a number of people pointed out to Anthony that Mike Hulme accepts the 97% consensus and is saying we have to move beyond debating science and into debating and developing policy. (Archived here.)


John F. Hultquist says:

February 4, 2014 at 9:52 am
My take-away of M.H.’s remarks is that he thinks “prominent critics” of the IPCC agree with the climate change projections, climate change is bad, governments can alter the future, and should, so let’s get on with it. Business as usual in the CAGW camp.

kenw says:

February 4, 2014 at 9:58 am
This is most telling: “What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); …”
His mind is made up and the politicians have to tell us what to do about it. If they tell us to do nothing, well, it’s all their fault and we shall all cook like the frog in the slow boil.
as with most, he incorrectly believes that Mankind is in control of the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’. If you have such a mindset, it is obviously a political solution since the underlying science is settled and all that remains is to decide what (yes, if anything) to do about it. It’s just more of a throwing up of the hands, fatalistic, we’re doomed point of view.

Ken Hall agrees Mike Hulme doesn't doubt the 97% consensus, then accuses him of being a "human hating zealot" - and says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:09 am
He is not putting doubt on the 97% figure, only the importance of it in furthering the alarmist’s aims. He is suggesting that it is so obviously self evidently true, that it must no longer be questioned, and even if questioned, policy should now urgently be taken upon the assumption of it being true. 

The telling quote for me is the following:

“By putting climate science in the dock, politicians are missing the point [.…] In the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it?”

So it matters not if it is true or not? The alarmist scientists are done with trying to prove it, we must accept it on nothing more than blind faith before the earth cools anymore and further falsifies their CAGW hypothesis, and get on with implementing the alarmist’s cure.

In other words, sod the science, start the de-industrialisation and the destruction of industrial economies now. Truly, the argument of a human hating zealot.

Jammy Dodger says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:13 am
Yes, you are reading too much into it. He does not say Cook’s 97% is nonsense. Or pointless. A bit of confirmation fantasy there.

DirkH says:

February 4, 2014 at 10:14 am
Hulme doesn’t criticize Cook’s “methodology”. He’s perfectly fine with it. He essentially just says, this propaganda approach is not relevant for The Cause right now; how can we enforce the policies we planned? And he has no answer, that’s the good thing. Another failed NATO strategy.

There are many more in that vein.  WUWT-ers aren't buying what Anthony Watts and Barry Woods are selling. Not this time.


There is of course the normal (for WUWT) science denying response. It's Just Weather says:

February 4, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Hulme seems to believe that human beings are the primary cause of climate change. And that the change is significant enough to cause “risk.” I hate to break it to him. 97% of all people do not agree with that.

The human species has proven to be amazingly adaptive and lives and thrives in a wide variety of climates already. Almost all human beings (97+%) are continuing on with their lives as if they believe they will be able to adapt to the climate change headed our way whatever it might be.

Anthony Watts thinks an asteroid catastrophe is more likely than rising seas!

Anthony Watts is a big brave man.  He's not scared of climate change.  He's especially not scared of storm surges or rising seas.  Today he wrote (archived here):

Oh my! Climate change threatens to cause ‘trillions’ in damage to world’s coastal regions

New research predicts that coastal regions may face massive increases in damages from storm surge flooding over the course of the 21st century.

Yes, and a asteroid could hit us, and some errant jihadist might get a nuke and set it off. I worry about those things more than I worry about coastlines and the affluent who build there, especially since Global Tropical Cyclone activity is at 33-year lows.

As usual, Anthony didn't link to either the press release or the paper itself.  HotWhopper readers are in luck, because I have.

First of all, the paper about which Anthony was putting on a brave face was written by Jochen Hinkel and others and was published in PNAS (open access). (Climate blog readers may be interested to know that one of the authors is Richard Tol, who has a bit of a reputation for acting up, acting out and generally acting oddly, to put it mildly).

The authors were attempting to estimate costs associated with selected strategies relating to the expected increase in coastal flooding over coming decades.  It looks as if there are no easy answers.  The estimates of flood damage and cost have a fairly wide range.  In the opening paragraph the authors wrote:

Without adaptation, 0.2–4.6% of global population is expected to be flooded annually in 2100 under 25–123 cm of global mean sea-level rise, with expected annual losses of 0.3–9.3% of global gross domestic product.

There are lots of unknowns which is one reason for the range to be rather broad.  It wouldn't just be the unknowns of how quickly we'll shift to clean energy and start to cut back CO2 emissions, or how quickly the ice sheets will melt.  There would be unknowns of just what would global gross domestic product be under a scenario of lots or little climate change.  I mean if we keep increasing emissions over the next couple of decades, by the end of the century GDP could be much closer to zero so 9.3% of global gross domestic product could be 9.3% of practically nothing.

The researchers were a lot more thorough than I and have spelt out their assumptions and scenarios.  They've obviously put some time into the "what if" part of the analysis.  They only consider sea level rise up to 123 cm by the end of this century, and of course seas won't stop rising on the 31 December 2099.

I'm sure this won't be the last bit of research attempting to work out the costs of adapting to sea level rise vs the costs of not adapting.  Here are more conclusions from the paper:

Damages of this magnitude are very unlikely to be tolerated by society and adaptation will be widespread. The global costs of protecting the coast with dikes are significant with annual investment and maintenance costs of US$ 12–71 billion in 2100, but much smaller than the global cost of avoided damages even without accounting for indirect costs of damage to regional production supply. Flood damages by the end of this century are much more sensitive to the applied protection strategy than to variations in climate and socioeconomic scenarios as well as in physical data sources (topography and climate model). Our results emphasize the central role of long-term coastal adaptation strategies. These should also take into account that protecting large parts of the developed coast increases the risk of catastrophic consequences in the case of defense failure.

Can we hold back the rising seas?

It reads as if the authors are urging nations to try to stem the rising seas by building dykes and barriers etc. On the other hand, see the last sentence, particularly with the sort of talk that's been going on in England with the flooding there.  (Many people are saying that in some parts of England the best strategy is to let the sea come in rather than try to stop it).

Anyway, the scientists are urging nations to take action of one kind or another.  From the press release:

"Countries need to take action and invest in coastal protection measures, such as building or raising dikes, amongst other options," urges Hinkel. With such protection measures, the projected damages could be reduced to below $80 billion per year during the 21st century. The researchers found that an investment level of $10 to $70 billion per year could achieve such a reduction. Prompt action is needed most in Asia and Africa where, today, large parts of the coastal population are already affected by storm surge flooding.

Whatever nations decide, it's going to be costly.  Whether it's costs of relocation or costs of trying to hold back the water. Neither choice will be easy or cheap. Holding back the water will be a temporary solution at best.

The paper touches on a few other points that can't be predicted easily - though they could be "directed" by policy decisions.  These include questions around how people will respond to rising sea levels.  Will they relocate and to where, particularly as there are expected to be another two billion people in the world by mid-century.  Will people keep building in areas that will be inundated this century?  It's reasonable to assume that the trend to urbanisation in countries most at risk will continue.  What about the impact of groundwater depletion?  The paper points out:

Another major source of uncertainty is human-induced subsidence as a result of the withdrawal of ground fluids, in particular within densely populated deltas, which may lead to rates of local relative sea-level rise that are 1 order of magnitude higher than current rates of climate-induced global-mean sea-level rise.

The paper probably raises more questions than providing answers.  They are important questions.  While I'm not necessarily persuaded by arguments to build and maintain dykes etc, it's good to see issues like this being addressed and attempts made to cost different strategies - even at the broad-brush level of this particular study.

Likelihood of an asteroid strike vs likelihood of rising seas and storm surges

Back to Anthony Watts denial.  He's being very silly and showing his lack of knowledge of the world around him when he writes:

Yes, and a asteroid could hit us, and some errant jihadist might get a nuke and set it off. I worry about those things more than I worry about coastlines.

That's what I call alarmist.  How much and how many times since the likely asteroid impact 65 million years ago, have seas risen and fallen compared to the number of catastrophic impacts by asteroids hitting Earth?

Anthony Watts is more worried about something that currently has only a very remote (miniscule) chance of happening, while not being concerned about something that is a dead cert.  He lives a fair way from the coast and a much longer distance from coastlines in the most vulnerable countries.  And he has no talent whatsoever for assessing risk.

Now if Anthony Watts had said he was more worried about the worst drought in California in 500 years, or a massive earthquake, I would have understood.  The biggest worries are closest to home.

The question about sea level rise is not how much it will rise - it's virtually certain that the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are going to eventually melt with this episode of global warming, raising seas by more than ten meters. The main question is over what period they will melt and how suddenly.   (If all Antarctica and all Greenland melt, seas will be something like 60 meters higher - but that would probably take thousands of years.)

You may also have noticed by now that Anthony didn't bother reading the paper he wrote about, because he talked about "coastlines and the affluent who build there".  The researchers on the other hand made it quite clear that it's the poorer nations and people who are most vulnerable to rising seas, sinking land and storm surges.

One of the more hypocritical and offensive memes of science deniers is that mitigating climate change will hurt poor people.  Anthony can't afford to let on to his readers that if we don't mitigate climate change, poor people will be hurting way more than people who live in more affluent countries like the USA and Australia.

From the WUWT comments

There wasn't even a faint spark of insight or knowledge of the wider world in the comments I read.  Admittedly I didn't make it through all of them.  They are archived here.  Below is a small sample.


Bob Greene doesn't seem to think that we should plan for dead certs and says:

February 4, 2014 at 4:40 pm
Wow, what glittering generalities! I missed a prediction of how much the sea level will rise sometime in the distant future. One of the things they seem to ignore is the fact that humans have adapted to real climate change for 200,000 years. If the worry is the water rising over the next 86 years, I bet even a fat old man like me can walk or wheel his way ahead of it.

What do you think? More than 6,000 people couldn't "walk or wheel" their way ahead of this storm surge. Could Bob Greene do it?

Donna Quixote doesn't know that the seas are going to rise and societies will need to adapt and says:

February 4, 2014 at 4:45 pm
This is the religion of could, might, maybe, if.

Chris4692 has a simple(ton) solution and says:

February 4, 2014 at 4:48 pm
Want to stop weather related damage along the coasts? Stop building by the coasts.

Les Johnson thinks the scientists overestimated global population and GDP for 2100 and for some odd reason thinks the IPCC estimated zero growth in population over the coming century and says:

February 4, 2014 at 4:48 pm
Interesting numbers they have. 60,000,000 people affected? 5% of the population? Thats 12 billion people.

100,000 billion damages? Thats 20% of total GDP by then.

The IPCC, in its projections (which Castles and Henderson showed to fatally flawed), had global population at 7 billion in 2100. GDP is 522 trillion.

Wow. Talk about inflation. These guys need Bernanke to control it.

(That's not to say that global warming won't kill off huge numbers of people this century.  It might indeed do that, directly or indirectly.)


Curious George asks why the Netherlands isn't alarmed and says:

February 4, 2014 at 5:03 pm
Why aren’t Dutch people alarmed?

They probably are very concerned.  Thing is, because they are way up north the seas won't rise there nearly as much - see this video to find out why that is so.


ilma630 indulges in circular thinking and says "sea level won't rise because there is a low bridge somewhere":

February 4, 2014 at 5:24 pm
Flew into SFO yesterday and noticed that the San Mateo bridge is mostly a causeway at just above sea level. If the US gov’t or CA state were that worried about sea level rise, they would be raising it up well above sea level.

There are quite a few comments from people who have not got the first clue about human settlement beyond the beachfronts in Florida or California. For example, Speed says:

February 4, 2014 at 5:37 pm
In 1870, 70-80 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture. As of 2008, less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_States#Employment

When people realized that there was no future in agricultural rural America, they moved away. If people see no future living near the ocean then sometime in the next 100 years, they will move away. Problem solved and no taxpayers were harmed.

ossqss is another one who has not the first clue about the world we live in and says:

February 4, 2014 at 6:35 pm
Ummmm, did I miss any reference to susidence and or building in flood plains or landfill construction on the water?

What percentage of the population lives near the water (any water) globally. Is it really 80%.

Perhaps I dont see how one can complain when most water threats are really an elective choice made by those who made that choice in the first place.

Just sayin……….

Ignorance and greed is no excuse.

I don't know about greed, but the people who inhabit WUWT sure have a lot of ignorance.

---

J. Hinkel, D. Lincke, A. T. Vafeidis, M. Perrette, R. J. Nicholls, R. S. J. Tol, B. Marzeion, X. Fettweis, C. Ionescu, A. Levermann. Coastal flood damage and adaptation costs under 21st century sea-level rise. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1222469111

Less snow may cause the near term collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica

There's a new paper out by scientists from Utrecht University and members of the British Antarctic Survey that looks at how the disappearance of the snow layer on top of ice shelves could be leading to their collapse. Here's an image from the paper to illustrate what happens:

Fig. 1. Conceptual illustration of firn air depletion and its consequences for ice-shelf hydrology and stability. (a) An ice shelf covered by a firn layer containing sufficient air. The inset shows meltwater being stored in the pore space of the firn. (b) An ice shelf with a depleted firn layer. Due to the absence of pore space, meltwater forms ponds that drain into fractures. Alternatively, water is routed to the fractures efficiently as shown in the leftmost fractures.
Source: Kuipers Munneke et al (2014)

From ScienceDaily.com

A number of floating ice shelves in Antarctica are at risk of disappearing entirely in the next 200 years, as global warming reduces their snow cover. Their collapse would enhance the discharge of ice into the oceans and increase the rate at which sea-level rises. A rapid reduction of greenhouse gas emissions could save a number of these ice shelves, researchers at Utrecht University and the British Antarctic Survey say in a new paper published today in the Journal of Glaciology.

Back in 1995 and 2002, two floating ice shelves in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula (Larsen A and B) suddenly collapsed -- each event occurred in a matter of weeks.

Dr Peter Kuipers Munneke, the paper's lead author, said: "This was a spectacular event, especially when you imagine the size of these ice shelves, which are several hundreds of metres thick, and have been in place for over 10,000 years."

The team of researchers suspected that the disappearance of the snow layer on top of the ice shelves could be an important precursor for shelf collapse. Their calculations confirm this hypothesis, and show that many more ice shelves could disappear in the next 200 years.

The scientists believed the snow layer plays an important role in regulating the effect of meltwater lakes on the ice shelves.

As long as the snow layer is sufficiently thick and cold, all meltwater can sink into the snow and refreeze. But in a warmer climate, the amount of meltwater increases, and the snow layers become thinner.

As a result, meltwater can no longer refreeze and forms large lakes on the surface of the ice shelves. The water drains through cracks and faults, causing them to widen until they become so wide and deep that the entire ice shelf disintegrates.

After their collapse, ice shelves can no longer provide resistance to the flow of the glaciers previously feeding them. As a result, the glacier flow accelerates significantly, contributing to an increase in sea-level rise.
The researchers performed calculations that show how this process may evolve over the next 200 years, using two different climate scenarios.

Dr Kuipers Munnekke said: "If we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, almost all ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula will be under threat of collapse in the next 200 years. Only the two largest ones seem to be safe. Even in the much colder eastern part of Antarctica, some ice shelves could disintegrate. If we manage to keep global warming below the European Union target of 2oC, more than half of the ice shelves could be saved, compared to no action taken on emissions reductions."

The study received financial support from the European Union's four-year ice2sea project. Prof. David Vaughan said "We've been observing ice-shelf retreat around the Antarctic Peninsula since the early 1990s, but for the first time this model provides a strong basis for the prediction of future changes, which is a major step forward in understanding future sea-level changes."


Peter Kuipers Munneke, Stefan R.m. Ligtenberg, Michiel R. Van Den Broeke, David G. Vaughan. Firn air depletion as a precursor of Antarctic ice-shelf collapse. Journal of Glaciology, 2014; 60 (220): 205 DOI: 10.3189/2014JoG13J183

Snake-oil salesmen and their shonky "cures" at WUWT

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale has decided he wants yet another opinion on global warming.  He's got some idea of only one of the symptoms and is looking for a diagnosis and treatment. He is trying to rebut the "if 99 doctors' opinions were the same" argument about global warming.

What Bob wrote was (archived here):

Imagine you’re running a persistent slight fever. You visit a new clinic. The nurse takes your vitals and enters them into a computer program. A short time after the computer model completes its simulations, the doctor arrives, advises you of the computer-diagnosed ailment, and prescribes controversial high-cost medications and treatment.

You’re not comfortable with the service, diagnosis, prescription or treatment, so you check out online the computer model used by the clinic. It is proclaimed to be wonderful by its programmers. But, the more you research, the more you discover the model’s defects. It can’t simulate circulation, respiration, digestion, and other basic bodily functions. There are numerous research papers exposing the flaws in the model, but they are hard to find because of all of the other papers written by the model programmers extolling its virtues.

Of course, you would not accept the computer-based medical diagnosis from a model that cannot simulate basic bodily functions and processes. But that’s the position we’re faced with climate science.

We need a second opinion for the slight warming the Earth had experienced. Unfortunately, it is not likely to be coming anytime soon, not until there are changes to the political agendas that drive climate science funding.

What are the flaws in Bob's analogy?  Yes, they are too numerous for a blog article so I'll just pick out a few of them.

Bob's assessment of symptoms is wrong

First of all, Bob's got the symptoms wrong.  Earth isn't "running a persistent slight fever", the temperature of Earth is going up faster than ever in tens of millions of years.  Faster than ever since well before any humanoid ancestors appeared on the planet.  If we don't do something soon Earth will be heating up more than ten times faster than it has in 65 million years.

There are other symptoms that Bob didn't mention.  He wouldn't have known about them because AFAIK, there isn't a simple home test for measuring the pH of his blood.  (It's not like popping a thermometer in his mouth.)  For example, the pH of the oceans is dropping.  In Bob's analogy that would be your blood supply getting dangerously out of whack. An acidifying blood supply can be a killer. The experts know the pH of the oceans is dropping because they have measured it.  It is consistent with what is happening in the atmosphere.  Much of the extra CO2 that we've been adding to the atmosphere is being absorbed into the oceans, making them more acidic.

Bob went to a shonky clinic, he should have asked the experts

Bob has gone to a clinic where the medical staff don't use their own knowledge, they rely on a stand-alone computer program.  It sounds as if the nurse took his temperature and blood pressure and popped it into the computer.

It's no wonder Bob wants a second opinion.

Bob's doctor is shonky.  He should have used his brain, his training, his years of expertise, and the years of expertise of others - as well as his computer.  And if the diagnosis was unusual, as Bob implies, the doctor should have consulted others in the field.  Obtained a second opinion, explored the Cochrane Library and other sources and probably sent Bob to hospital for a further battery of tests to make sure his diagnosis was correct and the treatment was the best.

Earth system science is advanced

In Bob's analogy, his questionable doctor is using a questionable computer program.  Bob went to a shonky medical clinic with one doctor who relies on a computer rather than his own expertise and a nurse who simply measures his "vitals" rather than exploring Bob's symptoms in more detail.

One could compare Bob's single doctor mickey mouse clinic with himself and his excel spreadsheets.  Or with Wondering Willis Eschenbach and his mathturbations.  Or with any of the Dunning Kruger set at WUWT.

Bob's analogy bears no resemblance to the vast amount of work done by real scientists studying all the different aspects of the Earth system.

The Earth's problem is getting way more attention than that.  Thousands of people have been studying the earth for decades.  Bob's image of a single doctor and nurse working in a single clinic punching numbers into a black box rinky dink desktop computer is laughable.  And even though Bob isn't the brightest spark in the universe, I cannot imagine he doesn't know that.

There are thousands of scientists working in independent teams all around the world taking observations of all the different components of the Earth system and analysing them.  There has been detailed work going on for decades.  Scientists have examined individual parts of the system and the system as a whole. Scientists aren't just popping numbers into a computer.   These are people who are experts in their various fields.  And they all came to the same conclusion quite a while ago.  The data supports their findings.  And there is a lot of data.

Bob Tisdale is acting like a snake oil salesman

Bob claims to have been "studying climate" full time for at least a few years.  He is like the shonky doctor in his example.  If Bob were just an ordinary bloke in the street you could argue that he can't be expected to know what's happening in climate science.  But Bob presents himself as an expert in climate science.  He doesn't hide his lack of qualifications but he nevertheless allows people to regard him as some sort of expert.

Bob's acting just like a snake oil salesman. He is making believe that if we all just wait a little bit longer, someone will develop a sweet tasting syrup that will cure global warming without any need to shift to clean energy.  He reckons someone will find some snake oil that will be a magical cure.

In trying to add some credibility to his snake-oil solution, Bob misrepresents the symptoms and the entire body of earth system sciences.  He pretends there is a little computer program somewhere that a handful of people have plugged a few numbers into and made a diagnosis.

Here are some facts and figures just from the latest IPCC report:

• 9,200 scientific publication were cited, most would have been authored by a team of people - so this taps into the research of at least tens of thousands of scientists who, in turn, built on the work of tens of thousands of scientists (or more) who went before them
• 859 authors from around 85 countries drafted the actual IPCC report itself
• 54,677 comments from 1089 "Expert Reviewers" from 55 countries and 38 Governments who vetted the work and help refine the end product.

Compare that to Bob's single doctor, nurse and mickey mouse computer program.

Beware the magic cures and wrong diagnoses from snake oil salesmen at WUWT.

Global Warming by the Numbers and the Ice Age Drought

Despite a flurry of articles during the cold snaps in the USA last month, there has been a noticeable drop in the number of "ice age cometh" articles at WUWT in the past few months.  I've not noticed anything recently from David "funny sunny" Archibald or Ed Hoskins or Tony Brown or Norman Page.  There is still the occasional remark in the comments that "it's about to cool".

Using trader tools to predict global surface temperature

A few days ago Eric Worrall wrote an "it's about to cool" article (archived here).  (Some people might remember Eric.  He was eventually banned for his repetitive conspiracy ideation about eugenics and stuff at Watching the Deniers )

Eric figured it might be about to cool based on an indicator used by share traders, moving averages.  His notion wasn't embraced by the chorus, who weren't singing in tune.  Several people pointed out that share trading indicators work mainly because so many people use them.  They are an indication of human behaviour.  Of course, with temperatures going up the way they are, sensible human behaviour would be to cut back a lot on greenhouse gas emissions.  That will slow the rising trend but it won't reverse it until we cut emissions very drastically. Even then it will take a very long time to reach equilibrium in the slow moving carbon cycle (like thousands and thousands of years).

January as a leading indicator for the year

Today there was an article by Walter Dnes about how the global average surface temperature in January is a leading indicator of the annual global average surface temperature (archived here).  Walter worked out that if a January was hotter than the previous January, the chances were very high that the full year would be hotter than the previous year, and vice versa.

Walter found that between 1980 and 2013, there were 20 years for which January was warmer than January of the previous year, of which 17 whole years were warmer than the previous year.  Two of those years that weren't warmer were affected by Pinatubo (1991 and 1992).  2003 had a warmer January but the year as a whole wasn't warmer.

As for cooler January's, there were 14 that were cooler than the previous January.  Of these years, 10 were cooler than the previous year.  1993, 1994, 2000 and 2012 were exceptions.

What almost no-one commented on (Willis Eschenbach was one exception) was that the odds of any particular year being warmer than the prior year are better than even.  Of the 33 years, 20 were warmer than the previous year, only 13 years were cooler than the previous year.

Maybe more of the WUWT deniers are now accepting that the world is heating up.

Here's a chart of the period.  I've marked the ENSO years using this WMO press release as a guide, which may be a tad conservative compared to some other records.  I've also indicated Pinatubo.  I've even done what Bernard J. suggested some time back, and animated the chart.  (Is this the sort of thing you had in mind, Bernard?) Click to enlarge as always.

Data Sources: NASA and WMO

Each La Nina year is warmer than the previous La Nina year.  All but one El Nino year is warmer than the previous El Nino year, and that one was 1992 (post Pinatubo). The linear trend for the period from 1980 to 2013 inclusive is 0.16°C a decade. There was not a single year colder than the 1951 to 1980 mean.

From the WUWT comments

Here is a sample of comments to Walter Dnes article (archived here).


There are a couple of the usual conspiracy theorists like Latitude who says (excerpt):

February 1, 2014 at 4:49 pm
Note: GISS numbers are…….fake

Jeff Alberts doesn't "believe in" temperatures or anomalies and says:

February 1, 2014 at 6:54 pm
Once you realize there is no global temperature, and therefore no anomaly, this article becomes pretty much moot.

Eric Worrall makes an irrelevant and meaningless comment and says:

February 1, 2014 at 4:50 pm
So, BAU is still the best short term climate model, despite billions of taxpayer’s money spent on developing analytical approaches.
I want a refund :-)

MikeN says:

February 1, 2014 at 5:24 pm
That could just be luck.

Werner Brozek says, sagely:

February 1, 2014 at 5:32 pm
We have all heard of numerous adjustments, but I think that this is one time that the adjustments are not relevant. After all, we are not interested in the rate of warming over the last several decades but how the January anomalies predict annual anomalies. And any adjustments that are made would affect January as much as the annual anomaly more or less equally.

Kip Hansen says somewhat obliquely:

February 1, 2014 at 5:32 pm
If this were a medical issue, I would ask to see some prior explanations regarding biological plausibility.

Robert of Ottawa says:

February 1, 2014 at 5:47 pm
Coin toss.

walterdnes replies to the "just luck" and "coin toss" responses with (excerpt):

February 1, 2014 at 5:50 pm
If you get 70% to 90% accuracy at blackjack in Vegas, you get thrown out of the casino for being a card-counter

walterdnes qualifies the above with:

February 1, 2014 at 6:08 pm
wws says: February 1, 2014 at 5:58 pm
> And to put it even more simply yet: You are predicting that the numbers you have already measured are likely to influence your final measurement. There’s a reason oddsmakers generally don’t take any more bets once the game has started.

I agree with what you’ve said. That’s how leading indicators work. There is still some value in getting a future forecast.

Tom says:

February 1, 2014 at 7:53 pm
I don’t understand. I thought this was ment to be humerous yet from the comments it appears all are taking it seriously

Willis Eschenbach says (excerpt):

February 1, 2014 at 8:21 pm
...I agree. I don’t find this result to be anything other than expected. Since your “leading indicator” is included in the data you are trying to predict, of course it will be correlated....

...Finally, the author hasn’t adjusted for the fact that the data has a trend … and that means that on average, both the January to January and the year to year data both will have a positive value.

I may run a monte carlo analysis on the data to confirm what it looks like, but as far as I’m concerned, and with my apologies to the author, this is a non-event. This is what you’d expect.

Willis later put up a bunch of charts from his Monte Carlo analysis and wrote (excerpt):

So … what did I find from that? Well, the so-called “leading indicator”, which isn’t leading, agrees with the annual results some 66 percent of the time, with a standard deviation of ± 4%. This means that 95% of the “leading indicator” results for the proxy temperature datasets fell between 58% and 74%. And this, as I suspected, means that at 70%, the author’s “leading indicator” is not doing any better than random chance … as as such, it is useless as a prognostication device.

(Given Willis' "emergent phenomena" (Gaia style) hypothesis, it seems odd that he's now acknowledging that Earth is getting hotter.  Science deniers can be very inconsistent.)


To which  walterdnes responded (excerpt):

February 1, 2014 at 9:44 pm
For the satellite era, the GISS numbers I get are 85% (17 of 20 when forecast warmer than previous year) and 79% (11 of 14 when forecast cooler than previous year). That’s with the Pinatubo years included. The numbers look even better with Pinatubo years eliminated.

Nick Stokes says:

February 1, 2014 at 9:43 pm
I’ve put here a table of the correlation coefficients for the six land/ocean indices I deal with. Each is over the whole length of data. The correlations are between each month and the annual (calendar) average. Naturally they improve as you advance in the year; mid-year months are a more representative sample.

I don’t think the result is worthless. As said, Jan is a leading indicator. It has limited use as a predictor.

WUWT and the headless chooks

Deniers are enraged at Prince Charles for referring to them as "the headless chicken brigade" (see here).  First Jo Nova and now Anthony Watts (archived here).

At least Anthony Watts made a half-hearted attempt to justify his rejection of science - if only by quoting a pair of science deniers, Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels!

Anthony put up a chart of climate sensitivity estimates which were up the spout.  For starters, it reversed IPCC AR4 and IPCC AR5 and had numerous other errors.

Then he put up this chart (click to enlarge).  Just look at the scale on the y axis.

Does Anthony Watts really think it quite reasonable for temperatures to have shot up by more than 1 degree Celsius since 2001? Does he also not realise that climate changes over multiple decades?  Of course he shows monthly data to try to hide the fact that 2010 was the hottest year on record (equal to 2005) - but he can't quite hide that fact even using his denier tricks.

I can't imagine Anthony Watts ever showing these charts. Can you?

The other really weird thing Anthony wrote was this.

Compare that to climate sensitivity predictions, which center around .2°C

That after putting up a diagram showing that climate sensitivity is estimated (by most studies) as lying between 1.5 and 6 degrees Celsius, most probably around 3 degrees Celsius. What he was trying to say, but didn't, was that since 1998, global surface temperatures haven't risen as much as some people expected. Tamino has written a terrific article about that - it's a "must read".

Then Anthony tries to argue (again) that the "response of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is nearing saturation".  Yet even his charts show that a doubling of CO2 could lead to a rise of 3 degrees Celsius or more.  And that's just a doubling.  A quadrupling could lead to a rise of six degrees or more in global surface temperature. (At the rate we're going and if WUWT-ers had their way, CO2 could double before 2050!)

There's a linear relationship between carbon emissions and surface temperature, which is shown by this chart from the IPCC AR5 WG1 report.

After reading his protest, about the only thing that Anthony got almost right was this sentence.  If you strike out the middle bit like I have he's not far wrong:

By making an emotional label about climate skeptics, instead of dealing with facts, Prince Charles demonstrates that’s he’s no different than Bill McKibben and Al Gore. 

Prince Charles has a reputation for being a tad nutty.  But this time he's making sense when he says it's...

"baffling ... that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything — until, that is, it comes to climate science."

And the headless chooks at WUWT and Jo Nova's don't like it.  I expect what is particularly irksome is that WUWT-ers just adore royalty - or at least the ones who live on the other side of the pond do.  They bow and scrape to Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.  But he's not a real royal.  His title is only a generation old.  They'd love to have a proper "royal" on their side.  It won't be the bonny prince.

Deniers running around like headless chooks!

Have a geek at the "bunch of headless chooks" at Jo Nova's blog

In my last blog article I was slinging off at someone who complained that a scientist referred to the work of other scientists when discussing climate science and evolution.  This led to some comments about appealing to authority.  So I thought I'd look around to see just who the fake sceptics appeal to when they reject the science.

Coincidentally, in Joanne Nova's latest article, she was rousing at Prince Charles for saying "baffling ... that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything — until, that is, it comes to climate science".  He is quoted by AP as calling calling climate science deniers the "headless chicken brigade".

Jo Nova wrote:

This is the same old argument: authorities want us to believe authority, while stupid punters ask for data instead.

So just who do the headless chooks at Jo Nova's place appeal to?  Well, Jo Nova doesn't call on any authority.  There were 87 comments to Jo Nova's article so I looked through them all to see what authorities the members of her fan club prefer. (Archived here.)

I've listed nearly every name mentioned in the comments to Jo Nova's article.

Kevin Lohse complained that David Bellamy was uninvited to some do at "Buck House" (presumably Buckingham Palace).  So maybe Kevin regards David Bellamy as the ultimate authority on all things climate. David Bellamy made it into George Monbiot's top ten list of climate science deniers back in 2009.  He's been woefully wrong on things climate so not much of an authority, sad to say.

Tom Harley referred to a Richard Lindzen comment that climate scientists aren't the cleverest people on the planet, or something.  Such a comment presumably meant that Tom doesn't regard Richard Lindzen as an authority, if he's that dumb.

Another commenter referred to Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall.  I wasn't aware they were climate scientists, but I guess that discovering H pylori is an achievement.  Maybe on par with John Tyndall's experiments but then again, probably not.

There were several disparaging comments about Greens Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young.  I don't think the commenters were touting her as an authority on climate science though.

Quite a number of people decided Prince Charles didn't know what he was talking about when he said that people should trust the science, because he's a fan of homeopathy.  One would think that argument would have led to support for the idea that it pays to take note of science.  On the contrary. That chain of logic didn't follow.  Jo Nova's blog is devoid of logic.  The critical reader will recognise their comments as the "ad hominem" fallacy, which is arguably the reverse of the "appeal to authority".

I might have missed a couple of names, but I covered it fairly well.  No name stood out as an authority that the fake sceptics would defer to.  I'll keep my eyes and ears open.  If you come across an authority on climate science that all fake sceptics support, do let me know.

Looking through the 87 comments, the term "headless chicken brigade" was as good a description of Jo Nova's flock as any you're likely to find.  It reminded me of why I almost never visit her blog.

Here are some typical comments, in case you thought I was understating the insight and wit of the Jo Nova crowd:

Skitz

February 1, 2014 at 5:11 pm · Reply
Always thought he was a complete Bozo ! This just confirms emphatically what I believed.

David

February 1, 2014 at 6:35 pm · Reply
At least for a couple of weeks after Charles goes to meet his Anglican Maker.
I’m an unashamed Constitutional Monarchist and sincerely trust that William is the next Sovereign.

John F. Hultquist

February 1, 2014 at 4:24 pm · Reply
What a nitwit. No wonder his mom won’t let him play king.
I suppose he has never heard of Helicobacter pylori and the Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall. To name one instance.

Pointman

February 1, 2014 at 3:59 pm · Reply
25% of his future “subjects” now live in fuel poverty. Youth unemployment is rife. Because of sky high energy costs, manufacturing is moving abroad. The list goes on but all the result of inbreeding can talk about is saving the planet.
Pointman

Turtle of WA

February 1, 2014 at 8:34 pm · Reply
Charles I believed in the divine right of kings – the notion that the king is chosen by god to rule with absolute Authority. It’s similar to the Divine right of Alarmists, whereby the representatives of absolute scientific Authority are chosen by Gaia

JLC

February 1, 2014 at 4:36 pm · Reply
He’s a nitwit.

RoHa

February 1, 2014 at 4:59 pm · Reply
Bother! I’ve been ignoring overwhelming scientific evidence. Could you show me where it is, please, so that I can stop ignoring it?

Reed Coray mentioned a couple of people I missed, but I get the impression he doesn't regard them as authorities on climate science

February 1, 2014 at 3:23 pm · Reply
Australia has Tim Flannery. The US had Al Gore. It’s nice to hear from England’s entry in the my-idiot-can-beat-your-idiot race. I wonder what the odds are on each contestant?

Science vs Scientists: How many climate science deniers are evolution deniers?

Spotted on WUWT today:

Tom G(ologist) says:

January 31, 2014 at 7:47 am
As an Earth Scientist in Pennsylvania, I was peripherally involved in the 2005 Katzmaier v Dover School District action and, as a result, followed P.Z. Myers’ web site for a while. I had to give it up though once that furor was over and he began ranting about climate science. I have not followed his site since because his arguments on both evolution and climate were founded on the authority of the scientists – not on the sciences.

Climate science and evolution are "founded on the authority of the scientists - not on the sciences"!  What science are the scientists hiding, pray tell :)

That dumb comment wasn't the only thing that spoilt what might have been a rare reasonable article at WUWT today. (Archived here.)  Anthony used his article to take a swipe at Michael Mann, basically saying he should lie down and take public accusations of fraud by journalists, without challenging them.


PS Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District happened in the 21st Century, would you believe.  I wouldn't have believed it myself had I not read it in Wikipedia :(