Unstoppable meltdown in Antarctica - and at WUWT, with a doozy of chart

Anthony has taken another trip to Antarctica. This time he is complaining about an article in the Guardian, written by Suzanne Goldenberg. What Anthony seems to be complaining about is that the time scale of the projected total collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheets isn't in the headline, which reads:

Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn

So there is an indication of time - it's already started. Anthony's upset though. He reckons his deniers will only read the headline and get too scared to read any further. He's really scared that deniers won't read as far as the fourth sentence in the article, which is about the resulting four metre rise in sea level:

But the researchers said that even though such a rise could not be stopped, it is still several centuries off, and potentially up to 1,000 years away.

Abused by buried facts

Anthony thinks that if you have to read beyond 75 words of an 880 word article, then the next few words can be regarded as "buried".  He wrote:

Truly an abuse of the headline. Buried below the headline in the article, there is agreement with Revkin:

Anthony was referring to a five-year old article in DotEarth, which was about two papers published in Nature early in 2009. At the time (March 2009), Andy wrote about a paper in Nature, which modeled the West Antarctic ice sheets and reported that:

In this simulation, the ice sheet does collapse when waters beneath fringing ice shelves warm 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit or so, but the process at its fastest takes thousands of years. Over all, the pace of sea-level rise from the resulting ice loss doesn't go beyond about 1.5 feet per century.

Obviously as far as Anthony Watts is concerned, some models are good!

Collapses to the West and the East

What Suzanne Goldenberg was writing about in the Guardian today was a new paper by Eric Rignot and colleagues. This is the same Eric Rignot that Andy Revkin quoted five years ago (in Anthony's preferred 2009 article) writing:

Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory cautioned that the new findings were based on a single, fairly simple simulation and said that while the results matched well with the seabed evidence, they lacked the precision needed to know what will happen over short periods.

"This new study illustrates once more that the collapse of West Antarctica and parts of East Antarctica is not a myth." he said. "It happened many times before when the Earth was as warm as it is about to be. In terms of time scales, I do not think the results of this study are relevant to what will be happening in the next 100 years and beyond. The problem is far more complex. But this is a step forward."

Western Antarctica has already started to collapse, but it will take time

The long and short of it is that in denier land, it's an "abuse" to have a factual headline about new research findings:

Western Antarctic ice sheet collapse has already begun, scientists warn

That Guardian headline was mild compared to the NASA headline about the paper, which was:

West Antarctic glacier loss appears unstoppable

Anthony, for a change, not only included the title of the paper, which is:

Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011.

...he even copied and pasted the abstract. Though he didn't go as far as providing a link to it. (My paras & bold italics)

We measure the grounding line retreat of glaciers draining the Amundsen Sea Embayment of West Antarctica using Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1/2) satellite radar interferometry from 1992 to 2011.

Pine Island Glacier retreated 31 km at its center, with most retreat in 2005–2009 when the glacier un-grounded from its ice plain.

Thwaites Glacier retreated 14 km along its fast-flow core and 1 to 9 km along the sides.

Haynes Glacier retreated 10 km along its flanks.

Smith/Kohler glaciers retreated the most, 35 km along its ice plain, and its ice shelf pinning points are vanishing.

These rapid retreats proceed along regions of retrograde bed elevation mapped at a high spatial resolution using a mass conservation technique (MC) that removes residual ambiguities from prior mappings. Upstream of the 2011 grounding line positions, we find no major bed obstacle that would prevent the glaciers from further retreat and draw down the entire basin.

Below is a map showing a couple of these glaciers. (Click to enlarge it.)

Source: Rignot13, Science

Anthony Watts doesn't usually go beyond newspapers and press releases. Scientific papers are a bit too deep for deniers. Anyway, he was comforted by Andy Revkin's 2009 headline, made especially for the scaredy cats like Anthony Watts and other science deniers:

Study: West Antarctic Melt a Slow Affair

Andy's latest headline on the subject was similarly aimed at calming the scaredy cats:

Consider Clashing Scientific and Societal Meanings of Collapse When Reading Antarctic Ice News

He's right of course. But deniers go way too far in the other direction.  They don't realise that only a couple of centuries from now, there could be a massive collapse causing a big rise in sea level. It might be later (I guess it might be sooner, too.)

Rabbet Run has the scary science

Eli Rabett has written about the study and what it means. It means that sometime in the next few centuries - maybe as soon as 200 years ahead (that is, it could be the children of your children's children who have to cope), the ice in West Antarctica could, over a matter of decades, cause a sudden large rise in sea level. Not something you would wish on your children or theirs.

Where are all the fake sceptic fact-checkers?

I don't know where all the fake sceptic fact-checkers have gone. They are quick off the mark if they see a similar mistake here, but a worse mistake at WUWT eludes them.  See if you can spot it.  Anthony wrote the following and put up a chart:

And there’s not any significant warming over the entire continent, as it is nearly flat as well (from 70S to the pole):

Source: WUWT

I think annual averages allow you to see the trend a bit better than monthly charts.

Data source: RSS

Did you see the main problem? Of course you got it. Anthony plotted a chart of the lower troposphere from the outer edge of Antarctica upwards to the equator. Antarctica is more like 70 south to 90 south. RSS doesn't show lower troposphere temperatures below 70S.

What happens near the surface is much more important

The other thing of course is that it's the temperature of the ocean that plays a very big role in melting the ice in West Antarctica. Probably much more so than the temperature of the lower troposphere.  There have been other papers about that. A reduction in snow cover can also speed up melting rather a lot.

From the WUWT comments

John Boles is optimistic and thinks the collapse will happen later rather than sooner, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:41 pm
It might be worse than we thought, well maybe in the distant future, our models suggest that it could happen perhaps in 1000 years.

Justthinkin doesn't do any thinking at all (or reading) and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:49 pm
So what’s the problem? She writes a piece full of BS,gets paid,and doesn’t give a hoot about what others say. Until you take away her paycheck,same old,same old. And scientific or un-scientific facts will not stop that. And just what the heck is “several centuries” or a thousand years? To me,several could be 20,000years from now.

Martin C is relieved that the seas may not rise quite four metres until after he's six feet under and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:51 pm
I think it’s great to see these extremely ‘alarmist’ headlines, followed by a bit less alarmist in the text. People will continue to see the ‘alarmism’ for what it is. And likely continued to get turned off by it. Especially when the same ‘journalists’ keep printing this crap. 

pablo an ex pat has been misled by Anthony, who recently made a big fool of himself, and doesn't realise how big Antarctica is (it's about twice the size of Australia ie around twice as big as contiguous USA), or that there are lots of mountains separating east and west, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:53 pm
So in two alarmist stories reported during the space of on one day on WUWT the Antarctic is getting colder and warmer all at the same time. It’s both gaining ice and it’s losing ice. And both these occurrences are issues that needs us to do something right now. What exactly ?

Ed P is not good at assessing relative risk but he values money, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 2:53 pm
Yellowstone could explode or meteors might wipe out most of humanity before the sea rises that much. All that is certain is that governments will steal your savings long before you need a boat. 

Jeff in Calgary doesn't have a clue what the new paper is about and yes, he's missing something:

May 12, 2014 at 3:22 pm
Isn’t this about a floating ice sheet? How is a floating ice sheet melting going to raise sea levels? Am I missing something? 

sadbutmadlad is sad and deluded and doesn't realise that climate is changing in the here and now, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 9:53 pm
The narrative works. Lie first, lie big. Just watching a BBC Breakfast item on the newspapers at 5:50am and they talked about not being able to do anything about global warming as its already here. No mention of the 1000 years, everything was couched in terms of immediacy. Even journalists don’t read the small print and are fooled by the article. Ultimate scaremongering

In all the 97 comments over 13 hours I didn't see one that picked up on Anthony's gaffe with his RSS temperature chart. There may have been one or two that discussed the science. The rest were pure unadulterated wails of denial.

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E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi, B. Scheuchl. "Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011".. Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140

Rignot, E., S. Jacobs, J. Mouginot, and B. Scheuchl. "Ice-shelf melting around Antarctica." Science 341, no. 6143 (2013): 266-270. DOI: 10.1126/science.1235798

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

Huybrechts, Philippe. "Global change: West-side story of Antarctic ice." Nature 458, no. 7236 (2009): 295-296. doi:10.1038/458295a

Naish, Timothy, R. Powell, Richard Levy, G. Wilson, R. Scherer, Franco Talarico, L. Krissek et al. "Obliquity-paced Pliocene West Antarctic ice sheet oscillations." Nature 458, no. 7236 (2009): 322-328. doi:10.1038/nature07867

WUWT Spin: climate report news flash

Anthony Watts is going great guns into deniersville. He's now up to 11 protests about the  US National Climate Assessment.

The pan flashed so much it could have burnt down the kitchen

In his latest WUWT protest (archived here), Anthony called the news about the report a "flash in the pan".  He showed, via a Google chart, that the report generated a lot of media interest for about four days around the time of its release after which, unsurprisingly, it tapered off in the news.

Anthony seemed to think that meant it climate news isn't important in the USA. I think it's a feature of the news. The importance is shown by the fact that the bump went for four or five days, not just one.

Source: Google Trends

In the USA, the latest National Climate Assessment was as newsworthy as the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Talks

If Anthony had shown a longer time frame, back to 2004, he could have shown that the spike in the news about climate, generated by the National Climate Assessment, was almost as big as that generated by the climate talks in Copenhagen in December 2009.  Which is a very big deal!

Source: Google Trends

 From the WUWT comments

There are hardly any comments even though the WUWT article has been up for almost five hours. Only 13 of them. It might be a sign that climate change is getting all too much for deniers to cope with:

crosspatch says:

May 12, 2014 at 10:34 pm
It is the most expensive non-issue in the history of mankind. This has been the largest robbery of world taxpayers ever pulled off.

Jimbo says:

May 13, 2014 at 2:43 am
Once you take out the sceptics from the above graph it falls even lower. National Climate Assessment headlines will soon be a thing of the past. Children won’t know what a National Climate Assessment headline is. 

Denier weirdness: The WUWT recycle cycle is ridiculously short. Must be the ozone.

I wasn't wrong when I said that Anthony Watts is having trouble finding stuff to fill his daily quota.  Either that or he's suffering denier fatigue or he's really rattled or his memory is getting much, much worse.

Less than a week ago he wrote about a report that summertime ozone levels in the USA will worsen as global warming kicks in.

The ink is barely dry on the webpage and he's already recycling it. The only difference being that he got it from another website this time and he changed the headline. But the press release is word for word the same. It can't have made much of an impression on Anthony!

May 6 headline: Claim: Climate change threatens to worsen U.S. ozone pollution (archived here)

May 12 headline: Claim: Climate change may worsen summertime ozone pollution (archived here)

What do you reckon? What with recycling stuff from five years ago, now recycling a press release from only six days ago. Must be a WUWT record! (Anthony must be really rattled. I mean who forgets something they posted on their blog only six days ago?)

Here's a link to the paper, which Anthony neglected to provide - both times! And here's an excerpt from the press release as reported on ScienceDaily.com. (Needless to say, Anthony didn't link to a press release either time.)

Ozone pollution across the continental United States will become far more difficult to keep in check as temperatures rise, according to new research led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The detailed study shows that Americans face the risk of a 70 percent increase in unhealthy summertime ozone levels by 2050.
This is because warmer temperatures and other changes in the atmosphere related to a changing climate, including higher atmospheric levels of methane, spur chemical reactions that lead to ozone.

Unless emissions of specific pollutants that are associated with the formation of ozone are sharply cut, almost all of the continental United States will experience at least a few days with unhealthy air during the summers, the research shows. Heavily polluted locations in parts of the East, Midwest, and West Coast in which ozone already frequently exceeds recommended levels could face unhealthy air during most of the summer.

It's a long article, which you can read in full here if you want to.

From the WUWT comments

So far no-one else has commented about the rapid recycle cycle. The WUWT-ers are exhibiting climate change fatigue though.

Eustace Cranch says:

May 12, 2014 at 9:03 am
It’s just broadside after broadside now. Rationality abandoned, panic button pushed.

Rhoda is getting on in years and says:

May 12, 2014 at 9:08 am
Damn, 2050 is going to be such a remarkable year. Shame I won’t be around to see it. 

Shawn in High River says lots of dots and a few words:

May 12, 2014 at 9:15 am
notice how every projection these days goes into 2050? Wonder why that is……..

 Col Mosby says they should be using a Commodore 64, or something:

May 12, 2014 at 9:16 am
Once again comes the bogus claim that superior computing power provides superior modelling.

Update: I just did a refresh and, although the article has now been up for an hour and a half and got more than 30 comments, not one of Anthony's readers has noticed that it's a repeat article. Maybe he's not getting any repeat readers at WUWT these days :)

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G. G. Pfister, S. Walters, J.-F. Lamarque, J. Fast, M. C. Barth, J. Wong, J. Done, G. Holland, C. L. Bruyère. Projections of Future Summertime Ozone over the U.S.. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2013JD020932

Denier Nostalgia: A blast from the past at WUWT

I get the feeling that Anthony Watts doesn't know which way to twist or turn. Everywhere he looks he's facing climate change. WUWT has so far posted ten articles protesting the US National Climate Assessment (nearly two a day on average), with the following headlines:

1. National Climate Assessment report: Alarmists offer untrue, unrelenting doom and gloom (archived here), which is an article by "dirty energy industries' best friend" Marlo Lewis, who is some chap from the US-based right wing lobby group the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
2. I’ve been waiting for this statement, and the National Climate Assessment has helpfully provided it (archived here), in which Anthony quotes "Steve Goddard" of all people, then goes on to push Evan Jones' as yet unpublished work with as yet no substance to underpin it (discussed here and here)
3. Quotes of the Week: Some early comments on the National Climate Assesment report (archived here); in which Anthony has some more quotes from science contrarians and disinformers like Pat'nChip
4. Some advance copy on the National Climate Assessment Report (archived here); in which Anthony appeals to the scaredy cat deniers "they are trying to make people afraid of the more mundane weather" and goes on to give a bit of the content of the report.
5. What the National Climate Assessment Doesn’t Tell You (archived here); a protest article by Pat'nChip from the right wing science disinforming lobby group, the CATO Institute.
6. National Climate Assessment ‘frequently confuses climate with climate change (archived here) A copy and paste of another silly protest by Chip of Pat'nChip of the Cato Institute.
7. Commentary on the salesmanship of uncertain science in the National Climate Assessment report (archived here). An article where Anthony says he "I didn’t comment much yesterday, I decided to read the report and consider it. Having done that, I’ll throw in my two cents with this statement." And his own two cents turned out to be nothing more than a comment about the website, nothing else. Really and truly. He's incapable. (I agree with Anthony about the bling. It's web designers gone mad. Awfully frustrating.) Having nothing further to add, Anthony filled his article up with comments by other people, including James "interpreter of interpretations" Delingpole, Roger Pielke Sr, Judith Curry and his mate from the weather station among others. 
8. Official statement by ACS: Release of National Climate Assessment demands action (archived here) and yes, that was just a copy and paste.
9. FT: ‘No one trusts Washington on climate change’ (archived here) a copy and paste courtesy Eric "eugenics" Worrall of part of an article by Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times plus a snippet from the Wall St Journal.
10. Manmade ‘climate disruption’ – the hype and reality (archived here) a guest article by climate science denier Paul Driessen from CFACT.

There could be more or maybe Anthony thinks that ten is enough. The National Climate Assessment is obviously not as important to deniers as Marcott13.

In between protests, Anthony tried to resurrect some old and worn out denier memes, including freshening up the 97% consensus attack using material stolen from SkepticalScience - but it was a real fizzer.

Poor Anthony. No-one was paying him any attention. In a moment of daring he decided to risk the family home by shooting off a defamatory tweet about Michael Mann. We'll probably have to wait and see if Anthony's attempt at grabbing the justice system limelight works but I doubt it. He's too small a fish to bother frying. 

For good measure, and not knowing how else to fill his daily quota, Anthony decided to wind back the clock to the glory days of WUWT, when he garnered some attention from the denialati with cherry picked snippets of stolen emails.  (What is it with deniers and their obsession with stolen property?) He elevated a comment by the irreverent reverend, sometime playground monitor at WUWT and Cornwall Alliance pastor, Richard S Courtney.

Now Richard isn't too bright (he and Anthony suit each other). Even after all these years he doesn't know his decline from his nature trick, and he wrote:

Anthony:

In the same week as MBH98 was published I wrote an email on the ‘ClimateSkeptics’ circulation list. That email objected to the ‘hockeystick’ graph because the graph had an overlay of ‘thermometer’ data over the plotted ‘proxy’ data. This overlay was – I said – misleading because it was an ‘apples and oranges’ comparison: of course, I was not then aware of the ‘hide the decline’ (aka “Mike’s Nature trick”) issue.

Richard is convinced that one cannot compare temperature reconstructions with the instrumental record, which is pretty dumb. How does he think that scientists can work out how much cooler or warmer it was in the past if they don't compare it with the present? Goodness knows how he copes with satellite data being converted to temperature. Anyway, being of the normal denialist bent Richard was sure that something was amiss back then and having a brain that can't be shifted no matter what evidence is put before him, he is still stuck in the 1990s. (Do I need to add that of course there was nothing hidden? All the charts in the papers were discussed well and truly in the literature. But that would spoil a good denier story. For people who are new to climate discussions, this article at the Union of Concerned Scientists will bring you up to speed.)

As for Anthony, he was happy enough to use a couple of stolen emails as a filler article while he waits patiently for someone to offer him another "guest essay". He figured he'd let his readers indulge in a bit of denier nostalgia.  Who can blame them. The present isn't giving them anything to work with. And about all he's got at the moment is Eric "eugenics" Worrall and Tedious Bob Tisdale.

I wonder how far back he'll go next time? If he travels too much further back in time he'll run out of climate stuff. I suppose he could write about airconditioners in Washington DC.  His readers are old enough to remember, though some of them may have a bit of trouble in that department, going by the comments he's getting these days.

WUWT is getting very tired. The glory days are gone, never to return. How much longer will it last?
.

Let's have a serious debate about climate...

In the HW comments recently there was been a bit of a discussion (no, not really a debate) about scientific consensus and climate.  Here's a video that should help you work through all the ifs, buts and maybes that are inherent in any climate science debate.

Over to you, John Oliver.

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Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024.doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat makes a fool of himself (again), this time in the southern hemisphere

I've often noticed that Anthony Watts doesn't read the articles he puts up on his blog. He doesn't even read the articles he posts himself, let alone his guest articles.

This time he's done it again (archived here), with another "claim" article, getting overexcited thinking he's finally found something that will make scientists look foolish - writing as a preface (my bold underline):

From the Australian National University and the department of “claim anything” comes this reversal over what was said two years ago about Antarctica:

“If this rapid warming that we are now seeing continues, we can expect that ice shelves further south along the peninsula that have been stable for thousands of years will also become vulnerable,” said Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University.

So which is it? Rapid warming, or not warming as much because the winds are “strengthened by carbon dioxide”? 

Reversal? Not at all. Anthony thinks he's caught the scientist contradicting herself. But it's only Anthony who, as usual, doesn't understand what he's blogged. Compare the above snippet from his two year old article with this excerpt from today's article, which Anthony himself copied and pasted but claims is contradictory (my bold italics):

While most of Antarctica is remaining cold, rapid increases in summer ice melt, glacier retreat and ice shelf collapses are being observed in Antarctic Peninsula, where the stronger winds passing through Drake Passage are making the climate warm exceptionally quickly.

And if Anthony had bothered to read the abstract of the paper that his article was all about (but of course not, Anthony doesn't even link to the press release he copied let alone cite the paper itself), he could hardly have missed this sentence (my bold italics):

We find that the SAM has undergone a progressive shift towards its positive phase since the fifteenth century, causing cooling of the main Antarctic continent at the same time that the Antarctic Peninsula has warmed.  

So there's no "reversal" at all and, as usual, it's Anthony Watts who looks foolish.

As you know, the Antarctic Peninsula and parts of West Antarctica are warming rapidly (think Pine Island Glacier). The east not so much. As well as wondering about his cognitive disorder, you've got to wonder if Anthony Watts realises just how big the continent of Antarctica is. Perhaps he thinks that it's just a tiny island covered in ice. That's if he is aware that Antarctica is a land mass at all, and not floating ice.

The paper itself obviously includes new research, but the fact that the weather patterns in my part of the world (south eastern Australia) are shifting southward has been known for decades. What's new is that scientists have reconstructed the past 1,000 years of annual mean changes in the Southern Annular Mode, using proxy records spanning the full mid-latitude right down to the polar region across the Drake Passage sector. Here's an excerpt from ScienceDaily.com:

Until this study, published in Nature Climate Change, Antarctic climate observations were available only from the middle of last century.

By analysing ice cores from Antarctica, along with data from tree rings and lakes in South America, Dr Abram and her colleagues were able to extend the history of the westerly winds back over the last millennium.

"The Southern Ocean winds are now stronger than at any other time in the past 1,000 years," Abram said.

"The strengthening of these winds has been particularly prominent over the past 70 years, and by combining our observations with climate models we can clearly link this to rising greenhouse gas levels."

Study co-authors Dr Robert Mulvaney and Professor Matthew England said the study answered key questions about climate change in Antarctica.

"Strengthening of these westerly winds helps us to explain why large parts of the Antarctic continent are not yet showing evidence of climate warming," said Dr Mulvaney, from the British Antarctic Survey.

"This new research suggests that climate models do a good job of capturing how the westerly winds respond to increasing greenhouse gases," added Professor England, from the Climate Change Research Centre at UNSW.

"This isn't good news for farmers reliant on winter rainfall over the southern part of Australia." 

From the WUWT comments

There aren't many yet and those that are there are largely incoherent nonsense. None of the people commenting so far have read the press release either, just like Anthony. One thing is for sure, no-one goes to WUWT to learn anything from people commenting. (Why do people go there? Is it to have a laugh at the crazy science deniers?)

climatereason as usual shows no ability to live up to his nickname and says:

May 12, 2014 at 12:16 am
Dear Anthony
Sigh…
I would like some funding to continue my research into historical climates.
I am willing to put anything into the title of the submission in order to secure some funding, no matter how fanciful.
However, official researchers seek to be cornering the market in all possible explanations of what co2 can do. We need a brainstorming session with readers here so they can submit some plausible titles, no matter how daft they are on closer examination. The only rules are that the words ‘co2′ ’1000 years’, ‘escalating’ and ‘alarming’ should be somewhere in the title.
tonyb

LevelGaze could be an admirer of Professor Matthew England's work but, more likely, he is just another WUWT science denier, and says:

May 12, 2014 at 12:18 am
Oh, Matthew England is a co-author.
That tells you everything you need to know.

Jeff thinks the research can't be true, not because he has other evidence, but because he's been told that the world as a whole is warming. He can't conceive that some places might warm more quickly than other parts of the globe. I guess he's never travelled more than a mile in either direction from his front door (and doesn't have a radio or television and doesn't know how to get anywhere on the internet except WUWT).

May 12, 2014 at 12:28 am
If this were true we wouldn’t be worrying about global warming at all. It would be ice age time. The problem is, despite this so-called “consensus,” these people can’t keep their stories straight and literally say opposite things which contradict each other. It’s obvious many of these people have no clue what they are talking about.

Otter (ClimateOtter on Twitter) mutters something meaningless adding, for some reason known only to Otter, lots and lots of dots followed by an interrogation mark:

May 12, 2014 at 12:54 am
Wait… CO2 is trapping cold air over the Antarctic…. but CO2 is causing cold air to break free and flow all over, from the Arctic……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………?

Jones manages only one word. Wonder of wonders, s/he even manages to spell it correctly.

May 12, 2014 at 1:06 am
Magical

I missed a few but you get the gist. That's pretty much it.  The sum total of wisdom and intelligence at the scientific illiterati society aka WUWT.

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Nerilie J. Abram, Robert Mulvaney, Françoise Vimeux, Steven J. Phipps, John Turner, Matthew H. England. Evolution of the Southern Annular Mode during the past millennium. Nature Climate Change, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2235 

Anthony Watts' bombshell goes pear-shaped. 82% of WUWT-ers aren't interested!

In a burst of unfettered excitement, Anthony Watts has uncovered yet another bombshell (archived here,  latest update here). He wrote his shocking headline:

John Cook’s 97% consensus claim is about to go ‘pear-shaped’

About the shape of a pear

Anthony began by spending some time explaining to his readers the meaning and origin of the term "pear-shaped". Or one supposed origin - a military one. There are several other possible origins.

The top-ranked ERL paper of 2013

Most readers will be familiar with Cook13, the 97% consensus paper, which got deniers in such a tizz without them even reading the paper. Many of you will remember how Anthony Watts blew a gasket at the Presidential tweet.

What you may not know is that the 97% consensus paper was the most read of all the papers published in Environment Research Letters last year. And not just last year - it's the most read paper in ERL for all time. In fact it's the most-read paper in all (80+) Institute of Physics Journals - of all time, ever. Or that it was awarded the "Best Article of 2013" by the Editorial Board of ERL.

Is it any wonder that some devious deniers will not stop at anything - not just lying but also stealing - to try to discredit this solid piece of research.

Pears or nuts, anyone?

Anyway, once Anthony got his "pear-shaped" explanation out of the way, he copied part of a blog article by Richard Tol. Richard has been going nuts (acting nuts?) for months trying to find a flaw in the paper he accepts as having correct results, writing in one of his silly and wrong protest drafts (trying to prove the researchers got tired. Yes, really!):

There is no doubt in my mind that the literature on climate change overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that climate change is caused by humans. I have very little reason to doubt that the consensus is indeed correct.

Despite his certainty that there is an overwhelming consensus, Richard said he's finally got someone to publish his "comment" of protest at Cook13.  This is after almost 12 months and four failed attempts with three different journals. And that's somehow going to prove - just what exactly neither Anthony nor Richard say! (Most likely that Richard doesn't know what he's talking about, going by his early attempts at knocking the paper.)

Anthony also quotes Brandon Shollenberger, who apparently lacks ethics (like Anthony) and has no sense of proportion. Brandon, remember, is the same person who buries his long nose in trivia looking for misquotes and tiny glitches and then yells for weeks about it, long after his alleged errors, where they exist, have been corrected or at least acknowledged (where correction is either not possible or seen as too trivial to matter in the slightest). Brandon, being a true blue science denier, bypasses the very real and grievous frauds and deceptions. Disinformation about climate science itself doesn't bother Brandon, the "denier".

According to this latest WUWT article there must have been nefarious activity afoot, or ahand or asomething-or-other. This as yet un-identified nefarious activity is based, not on any analysis of scientific papers, but on a hack of a private forum (where apparently SkS authors discuss blog posts to make sure they are correct and readable before posting them to the main SkepticalScience blog, or whatever).

It's quite possible that Brandon himself hacked his way into the SkS private forum, which is what his tweets suggest, when he writes - "I just made a really cool discovery" and "Too bad there's no way to sell it. That'd be cool" and "I've posted a teaser of my recent discovery. I wonder how many people can figure out what the image is".

On the other hand, Brandon might have just been the willing receiver of stolen property from the thief who hacked the SkS forum in 2012.

Upstaged! (What a shame shambles)

Poor old Richard Tol, having finally attained his moment (half second?) of glory in deniersville, he's been upstaged by Brandon Shollenberger, of all people! With Anthony Watts doing his best to get in on the action, of course.  And all of them completely missing the fact that if they wanted to do their own analysis of scientific papers on climate change they could have done so ten times over in the past twelve months, or at any time.

The deniers could have done their own Web of Science search. If that was too much like hard work (after all, they might get tired), they could have used the data all packaged up for them by the hard (tiring) work of John Cook and his co-authors.  The Cook13 researchers have already provided them with all the data they need in the form of 11,944 papers written by 29,083 authors and published in 1,980 journals from the past 20 years! SkepticalScience even has a tool with which you can rate the abstracts yourself. And anyone interested can download the details and see the researchers ratings as well as download the ratings of the papers' authors by year and rating.

The mugger politely asks his victim for more ...

So who has the nefarious intent?  Brandon Shollenberger, Anthony Watts and Richard Tol are sorely lacking in the ethics department. Anthony Watts quotes Brandon writing quite openly and without a hint of the shame any decent person would feel if they were tempted to steal:

I’ve sent John Cook an e-mail alerting him to what material I have, offering him an opportunity to give me reasons I should refrain from releasing it or particular parts of it. I figure a day or two to address any potential privacy concerns should be enough.

His response will determine how much information I provide. No obligations were placed upon me regarding any of the material I have, but I don’t see any compelling reason to provide information about how I got it either. I’d need a better reason than just satisfying people’s curiosity.

That's a bit like a mugger asking their victim if there is any good reason why the mugger should give her back her wallet. And then graciously offering to not publish her love letters immediately, giving the victim time to dwell on the privacy implications.

Maybe if Brandon got a sharp knock on his door from someone in blue waving a badge, they should be able to give him a very good reason for "providing information" about how he "got it".  Being a thief or a receiver of stolen property is a much better reason than simply "satisfying people's curiosity", don't you think?

What is the startling new information?

There is no new information that would change the results of Cook13.  Brandon says he has information that will show which people rated which papers and how - or at least that's what I think he's saying. This information is going beyond "need to know" and I don't know of any scientific publication that would provide that amount of detail. The most that climate science papers normally show is who did the data collection, who did the analysis and who wrote the paper or similar, not normally the details of who collected which precise tiny bits of information.

In any case, to demonstrate the accuracy or otherwise of the Cook13 findings, you'd have to either categorise scientific papers the Cook13 team used or do another study from scratch. At a pinch, you could ask the authors of the papers to categorise their own papers though I think an independent categorisation is preferable. To my knowledge, no denier has bothered doing any of these options, or if they have they haven't come up with any different results.  (The Cook13 researchers categorised the abstracts and validated their findings by asking authors to categorise their own papers.)

Laughably, Richard Tol, in his befuddled brain apparently thinks that "only" twelve people completing the ratings is somehow or other something or other (archived here). Never mind that it's eleven more people than did the ratings in Naomi Oreske's study published in Science several years ago. And eleven more people than did James Powell's unpublished works, the most recent of which came up with only one out of 2,258 recent articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors, which rejects the human influence of global warming.

Richard Tol's cause clause

What's even sillier (if possible) and shows just how far into conspiracy thinking Richard has gone, is the second part of the sentence where he wrote:

There were only 12 raters (24 at first, but half dropped out), picked for their believe (sic) in the cause. 

Seriously? He thinks that the ratings were skewed by a belief in "the cause"! What "cause" that would be Richard doesn't say. Remember, he is already on record, as writing that he accepts the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. Not only that, but the Cook13 study showed that the researchers were slightly more conservative than were the scientists who rated their own papers!

From the WUWT comments - how Anthony's bombshell goes pear-shaped

This one is classic. Anthony was in such a rush to print his bombshell (devoid of any bomb) that he spelt Brandon Shollenberger's name three different ways: Brandon Schollenberger, Schollenberg and only writing it correctly in his pastes from Richard Tol as Brandon Shollenberger. At least Brandon now knows how he's regarded (or not regarded) by Anthony. Brandon Shollenberger says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:42 am
My last name was spelled three different ways in this post. I don’t think that’s enough. We should see how many different ways we can spell it.

REPLY: Apologies, fixed. – Anthony

Many people were more interested in colloquial expressions than they were in the boring topic of scientific consensus. Latimer Alder was first cab off the rank and says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:13 am
A rather more lively Brit expression is ‘tits up’. Means the same

Pamela Gray says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:34 am
That would be of USA, not British origin. It is either a vulgar version of “belly up” (most likely), known in the US and first captured in print in 1920, or a reference to WW2 (unlikely) aeroplanes and one of their dials, which when broken, turns upside down. The upside down lettering looks like breasts, and usually means enough damage to the cockpit that you had better bail if you still can.

 And then decides that breasts is a dirty word at WUWT, and corrects it to:

Oops. I should have said tits instead of br***ts.

There were several more comments about colloquialisms, such as from The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley who says:

May 10, 2014 at 10:17 am
I don’t mean to start a pond war, but why do so many Americans think everything was started there? It reminds me of a conversation I heard a few years back. An American woman was talking to an English woman, and remarked on the Peter Rabbit books. “Do you have Beatrix Potter in England?” asked the American lady. The English woman just groaned.

One of the few comments that started off on topic, quickly went off topic and diverted to cricket or soccer or whatever the world cup is for at the moment. Auto says:

May 10, 2014 at 10:50 am
I would agree with Dr. Tol, and our host, that – as many here suspected – John Cook’s number resemble a crock of r*t s**t [no, not suet].
I continue to be disappointed in the media – the BBC today is pushing
“Scorching El Nino event could scupper England’s World Cup ”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27343057

Absolutely nothing about England not having enough players who are good enough, unhappily – it might be a degree or three warmer when we play our matches than the long-term average.
I guess that means weather . . . . .

Auto

In fact, out of all the comments there were only a few that had anything to do with the 97% consensus.  Yep, I've even just refreshed the page and updated the archive. So far, after around four hours of prime time, there are only 38 comments. Of those:

• 58% (22 out of 38 comments) were about pear-shaped or tits up or similar
• 8% (3 comments) were about the spelling of Brandon's name
• 24% (6 comments) were random off topic comments protesting climate science in general or other meaningless waffle of an unrelated nature
• 18% (7 comments) were vaguely related to the consensus discussion

Here are six of the seven comments that were more or less on the consensus topic, some at a stretch. The other one, which devoted more words to sport than science, is already listed above. Very deep and incisive commentary as you can see :)

Matthew R Marler says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:39 am
My applause and thanks to Brandon Schollenberger. This should be interesting.

Jimmy Haigh says:

May 10, 2014 at 9:49 am
More proof – were it even needed – that, basically, Warm-mongers are pretty thick.

michael hart says, quoting Richard's meaningless comment:

May 10, 2014 at 10:51 am
Theirs was not a survey of the literature. Rather, it was a survey of the raters.

And they found that they agreed with themselves. It doesn’t usually require a survey.

Mike Maguire talks about the "known law of photosynthesis" and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:01 am
In a world that gives Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize and an Emmy for his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” and brainwashes the known law of photosynthesis out of people, while brainwashing in a theory on paper that has busted in the real world for 15 years……………..the 97% consensus of climate scientists paper fits right in.

John Whitman advocates forgetting ethics and petty things like the law of the land, and going for broke, and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:13 am
{all bold emphasis mine – JW}
Shollenberger writes in comments at his blog:,
His [Cook's] response will determine how much information I provide. No obligations were placed upon me regarding any of the material I have, but I don’t see any compelling reason to provide information about how I got it either. I’d need a better reason than just satisfying people’s curiosity
- – - – - – - -
Brandon Shollenberger,
That turn of phrasing implies fairly reasonably that you got from a person(s) the “part of the missing data [from Cook’s consensus paper]“. It implies you didn’t just find the data.
After you duly consider any potential harm to the raters by making their names and IDs public, I do think it would be valuable in assessing bias if the names and IDs of the raters in the data you have were made public.
John

John F. Hultquist starts off with 97% and then launches into some unintelligible ramble about US history and says:

May 10, 2014 at 11:18 am
The 97% story just keeps going on and on and ….
… and speaking of rabbits, Ghost @ 10:17 asks why so many Americans think everything started there.
Many groups of people that become organized (a tribe?) and name themselves use a word or phrase that translates as “the people” and their beginning or origin story starts the history or timeline of what they know. For example, when Gouverneur Morris wrote the words “We the People … do ordain … the United States of America” – history began. It is that simple.

Anthony's big boast that a denier hacker stole private property from SkepticalScience went down like a lead balloon.  His bombshell went pear-shaped!

When deniers have nothing, they recycle dead arguments....

In the ongoing effort to demonise the work of Professor Michael Mann in particular, Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Judith Curry and John Christy are passing around wrong and worn out "arguments", presumably to try to bolster a defense for the people who allegedly libelled Professor Mann.

It's a pathetic effort on behalf of a pathetic lot from the climate science disinformation brigade.

In a repost at WUWT, Steve McIntyre (and Anthony Watts) are arguably wanting to be added to the list of people being sued.  It's as if they think that if they misrepresent history often enough someone will believe them.

I don't know what point they think they are trying to make. It looks as if they are trying to resurrect "trial by email", which has been tried before and failed dismally. (Update: see especially Marco's comment below, and the links to deepclimate's damning indictments of Steve McIntyre here and here).

I've already written about the misrepresentations from John Christy, which Judith Curry resurrected recently and that is now apparently being touted again at Steve McIntyre's blog and WUWT.  Anthony Watts (archived here) copies Steve McIntyre who copies Judith Curry who quoted from John Christy's misleading testimony to the US government:

Christy gave the following damning summary of Mann’s conduct as IPCC TAR Lead Author:

Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

Three things.

1. Serengeti Strategy: Singling out one from 850 plus people

Firstly, John Christy was also a lead author of Chapter 2 of TAR, the chapter in question, so he is as culpable as any other lead author of its content.  The other lead authors were: R.A. Clarke, G.V. Gruza, J. Jouzel, M.E. Mann, J. Oerlemans, M.J. Salinger, S.-W. Wang.

In addition there were two coordinating lead authors of Chapter 2, C.K. Folland, T.R. Karl, who presumably vetted the final content.

And two review editors:  R. Hallgren, B. Nyenzi who would also have had a say.

Not only that but there were 140 contributing authors:

J. Bates, M. Crowe, P. Frich, P. Groisman, J. Hurrell, P. Jones, D. Parker, T. Peterson, D. Robinson, J. Walsh, M. Abbott, L. Alexander, H. Alexandersson, R. Allan, R. Alley, P. Ambenje, P. Arkin, L. Bajuk, R. Balling, M.Y. Bardin, R. Bradley, R. Brázdil, K.R. Briffa, H. Brooks, R.D. Brown, S. Brown, M. Brunet-India, M. Cane, D. Changnon, S. Changnon, J. Cole, D. Collins, E. Cook, A. Dai, A. Douglas, B. Douglas, J.C. Duplessy, D. Easterling, P. Englehart, R.E. Eskridge, D. Etheridge, D. Fisher, D. Gaffen, K. Gallo, E. Genikhovich, D. Gong, G. Gutman,W. Haeberli, J. Haigh, J. Hansen, D. Hardy, S. Harrison, R. Heino, K. Hennessy,W. Hogg, S. Huang, K. Hughen, M.K. Hughes, M. Hulme, H. Iskenderian, O.M. Johannessen, D. Kaiser, D. Karoly, D. Kley, R. Knight, K.R. Kumar, K. Kunkel, M. Lal, C. Landsea, J. Lawrimore, J. Lean, C. Leovy, H. Lins, R. Livezey, K.M. Lugina, I. Macadam, J.A. Majorowicz, B. Manighetti, J. Marengo, E. Mekis, M.W. Miles, A. Moberg, I. Mokhov, V. Morgan, L. Mysak, M. New, J. Norris, L. Ogallo, J. Overpeck, T. Owen, D. Paillard, T. Palmer, C. Parkinson, C.R. Pfister, N. Plummer, H. Pollack, C. Prentice, R. Quayle, E.Y. Rankova, N. Rayner, V.N. Razuvaev, G. Ren, J. Renwick, R. Reynolds, D. Rind, A. Robock, R. Rosen, S. Rösner, R. Ross, D. Rothrock, J.M. Russell, M. Serreze,W.R. Skinner, J. Slack, D.M. Smith, D. Stahle, M. Stendel, A. Sterin, T. Stocker, B. Sun, V. Swail, V. Thapliyal, L. Thompson,W.J. Thompson, A. Timmermann, R. Toumi, K. Trenberth, H. Tuomenvirta, T. van Ommen, D. Vaughan, K.Y. Vinnikov, U. von Grafenstein, H. von Storch, M. Vuille, P. Wadhams, J.M. Wallace, S. Warren,W. White, P. Xie, P. Zhai 

And nearly 700 "expert reviewers".

So to my way of thinking, to put imagined "wrongs" of any single IPCC report (which has been twice superseded) on the shoulders of one lone individual and neglect the more than 850 other people who played a part, is a bit much!  What it demonstrates is the Serengeti Strategy so beloved of disinformers and deniers. This time they try to isolate one individual from a very large herd.

2. A false claim from the disinformers

Secondly, the chapter did not misrepresent the temperature record of the past 1,000 years. At the time, arguably the paper by Mann and colleagues was indeed the "best estimate". In any case, Chapter 2 of the IPCC TAR included references to other reconstructions with citations and charts.

3. Deniers are out of touch and out of date

Thirdly, there have been two more IPCC reports since TAR and they present more recent research, which has refined knowledge with new data and multiple new temperature reconstructions, all of which lend support to earlier findings.

Box TS.5 Figure 1 Last-millennium simulations and reconstructions Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Disinformers are misleading

Anthony's copy and paste misleadingly includes the following claim:

Further, both the Oxburgh and Muir Russell reports concluded that the IPCC 2001 graphic was “misleading”. 

This is misleading! The Muir Russell report referred to the WMO graphic used on the cover of the 1999 report and only indirectly, in parenthesis, to the IPCC TAR, writing about "one of the series" (not the others of the series):

25. The WMO report is a short document produced annually. It does not have the status or importance of the IPCC reports. The figure in question was a frontispiece and there is no major discussion or emphasis on it in the text. The caption of the figure states: "Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records”.

26. Finding: In relation to "hide the decline" we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.

The Oxburgh report does not use the word "misleading" in relation to the WMO graphic or any TAR temperature reconstruction.  The only relevant passage I could find was this:

Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

I think it's worth emphasising what the Oxburgh report noted. For example, one of the papers referred to in TAR emphasizes uncertainties and limitations in its title - Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, 1999: "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations". Geophys. Res. Lett., 26, 759-762.  Since that paper was published there have been numerous other reconstructions. When you take them together with the instrumental records you end up with a hockey stick!

It's also worth highlighting the Addendum to the Oxburgh report, which clearly states about "any research group in the field of climate change":

For the avoidance of misunderstanding in the light of various press stories, it is important to be clear that the neither the panel report nor the press briefing intended to imply that any research group in the field of climate change had been deliberately misleading in any of their analyses or intentionally exaggerated their findings. Rather, the aim was to draw attention to the complexity of statistics in this field, and the need to use the best possible methods.

Meanwhile, the world takes its sweet time to act decisively

The main point, though, is that all this is past history.  There has been a lot more work in the thirteen years since then.  While climate science deniers are obsessed with misrepresenting the past, we keep marching on toward hotter global temperatures and rapidly changing climates. The world hasn't even stopped increasing annual CO2 emissions, let alone reduced them.

A diversion and thank you for one million page views

Climate change is a demanding topic. This is a brief diversion by way of thank you to all HotWhopper readers and contributors.

I know it's not the "done thing" to write about reader stats (when did HotWhopper ever worry about the "done thing"?) - but according to Google blogger, HotWhopper reached it's one millionth page view earlier this week, which astounds me. It's way beyond what I envisaged when the blog was started seventeen months ago. All thanks to readers.

This milestone is also a reality check to lift the game and keep striving for better content.

Here's my thank you to climate scientists everywhere and to HotWhopper readers, particularly to those of you who comment here, and to those of you who retweet and link from other blogs and discussion boards - at least those of you who like bird photos :) These photos were all taken in our back yard or just over the back fence, and are of common visitors. As always, click to enlarge.

First a little Grey Fantail, a lively bird.

Grey Fantail

Then the Laughing Kookaburra.

Kookaburra

And a view of its tail :)

Kookaburra

The Pied Currawong pops in quite often, usually with lots of mates.

Pied Currawong

Eastern Rosellas are a tad shy, but enjoy eating the thistles in the land on the other side of our back fence:

Eastern Rosella

While the Satin Bower Bird likes figs:

Satin Bowerbird

White (sulphur-crested) cockatoos make a racket - this one is screeching while flying overhead:

Cockatoo

Finally my favourite bird, the Magpie, which sings the most beautiful and complex songs in between chatting. Magpies are the friendliest birds and very smart (and playful). They also get to know individual people. They don't swoop on their friends :)

Magpie

Arctic warming: It's not natural variability, it's all down to soot, sez Anthony Watts at WUWT

In yet another "anything but CO2" article (archived here, latest update here), Anthony Watts wants to blame all the recent warming in Greenland on soot.  He reaches left, right, up and down to get out of carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas and warming the world. Which is pretty funny when he also tries the "I'm a reasonable man, really I am" tack by posting articles where he pretends that he really does think there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect.

What's even funnier is that Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in his effort to blame soot for Greenland warming.

Changes in atmospheric circulation caused some of the Arctic warming

Anthony is disputing another Nature paper, this one is about attribution of the causes of the very high amount of warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada. Going by the abstract and the press release, the authors have concluded that up to half the recent warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada may be natural variability. These areas have been warming at around 1° Celsius a decade since 1979, which is about twice that of the global average temperature rise.  The scientists have found that about half of this (0.5° Celsius a decade) is related to changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic, caused by a warmer western tropical Pacific Ocean.

From ScienceDaily.com:

The natural variations in the new study related to an unusually warm western tropical Pacific, near Papua New Guinea. Since the mid-1990s the water surface there has been about 0.3 degrees hotter than normal. Computer models show this affects the regional air pressure, setting off a stationary wave in the atmosphere that arcs in a great circle from the tropical Pacific toward Greenland before turning back over the Atlantic.

"Along this wave train there are warm spots where the air has been pushed down, and cold spots where the air has been pulled up," Wallace said. "And Greenland is in one of the warm spots."

In previous studies, Wallace and Battisti have documented the existence of decades-long climate variations in the Pacific Ocean that resemble the well-known shorter-range El Niño variations.

This particular location in the tropical Pacific may be a "sweet spot" for generating global atmospheric waves. A series of studies led by co-author Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, working with Ding and Battisti, showed that waves starting in the same place but radiating southward are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.
Researchers can't say for how long the tropical Pacific will remain in this state.

"Our work shows that about half of the warming signal in Greenland comes from the predictable part -- forcing of climate by anthropogenic greenhouse gases -- but about half comes from the unpredictable part," Steig said.

The atmosphere makes the world seem small

The world is large, but studies like this show that the world isn't so large that the ocean right down near New Guinea, which is in the tropical southern hemisphere can affect the Arctic, way up north. And at the same time this same area of the Pacific is causing atmospheric waves that are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.

Anthony's sooty fixation

Anthony doesn't believe it.  He wrote about a photo of a pool of water in Greenland, which I traced back to here originally.  Anthony isn't talking about the dirty snow in the foreground. He's talking about the dark section of the pool in the shadow.

Water Filled Canyon (Greenland) Although snow has dammed outflow from the lake, nearby melt streams continue to fill sections of the canyon where snow has not accumulated.

Credit and Source: Polar Science Center, University of Washington

Anthony doesn't say how he can tell from a photograph what is causing the darker colour in the pool - whether it's dust or dirt or soot or algae or just extra deep water or all of these. Anthony Watts has done his photo-science and decided that it's definitely soot, writing:

[Note: part of the answer is in the photo they provide with the press release below, but they don't see it. - Anthony]...

...Note the black at the bottom of the melt pool, that’s carbon soot. That’s something the UW authors aren’t paying attention to....

…it has a big effect on albedo, and thus absorbed solar insolation, likely far more so than CO2 forcing, 

Another thing is, if Anthony had bothered to read the abstract and the references, he'd have noticed that the authors do indeed acknowledge that black soot does play a part in warming the Arctic (and the world). If he'd read the paper the scientists referenced, he'd have noticed that black carbon, although it does have a large effect it's not as large a forcing as CO2. As Hansen and Nazarenko wrote:

The substantial role inferred for soot in global climate does not alter the fact that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming in the past century and are expected to be the largest climate forcing the rest of this century.

You may recall that Anthony has tried this argument before, misrepresenting the findings of another more recent study, which showed that the impact of soot on the Arctic depends on where it comes from. If it comes from the Arctic itself it will have a bigger impact than if it comes from the mid-latitudes. ("The Arctic surface temperature is almost 5 times more sensitive to black carbon emitted from within the Arctic than to emissions from mid-latitudes.")

Since I started this article, Anthony has added another photo showing how the albedo on Greenland has changed over the years. Thing is, it's not just dirt and dust and soot that causes the surface to become darker. As it states in the NASA article that Anthony refers to, it's not just soot:

Climate scientists have long expected that Earth’s icy North would become less reflective as global temperatures rose. Rising temperatures melt snow and ice. The uncovered terrain is darker—ocean water, vegetation, bare ground—so the area absorbs more sunlight than it used to, leading to more warming, which causes more melting. In short, the loss of reflectiveness amplifies the initial warming. This feedback is underway on Greenland’s ice, especially since 2006, a year that marks a fundamental shift toward a warmer, greener Arctic, according to the Arctic Report Card.

...The darkening in the non-melting areas, says Dr. Box, is due to changes in the shape and size of the ice crystals in the snowpack as its temperature rises. Snow grains clump together, and they reflect less light than the many-faceted, smaller crystals. Additional heat rounds the sharp edges of the crystals. Round particles absorb more sunlight than jagged ones do. 

Here is a chart showing overall contributions of humans to global warming. CO2 is by far the biggest followed by methane, but soot plays quite an important role as well. Click for larger view.

Figure TS.7 Radiative forcing of climate change during the industrial era shown by emitted components from 1750 to 2011. Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

A couple of other points. Anthony wants to blame the hotter Greenland and north eastern Canada on soot. What about the rest of the Arctic? Is soot not falling there? And is there more soot falling in the Arctic now than it did in the past?  I don't know the answer to those questions, but from what I've read there isn't any more soot being produced than there was in the past. If anything, it's decreasing.

The really weird thing is that in his focus on soot (much of which comes from human activity), Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in the recent rapid warming of Greenland and north eastern Canada, which is what the paper was all about after all.

From the WUWT comments

Surprisingly a lot of people are quizzing Anthony on his interpretation of the photograph he showed above. He's not having a good day.

Francisco Fernandez thinks that we should have all perished by now. He's quite impatient and has no concept of geological time scales when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:35 am
What I don’t get is, with all this modelling and VERY (sarc) high climate sensitivity, how is it that there’s still life on earth?

Wouldn’t the extintion of the dinosaurs, due to a catastrophic event that obliterated the species, would have caused more damage than mere CO2 <0.04%v/v?

Now, I am not sure if the dinosaur extintion due to the meteorite is a fact or theory. But if it is a fact, shouldn't it shed some light on how resilent the climate is?

steveta_uk thinks the study means he doesn't have to be concerned about global warming and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:36 am
If they’re right, and 1/2 the warming is natural, then that about agrees with the recent lower estimates for sensitivity, and means that the expected 1.5C warming by 2100 is nothing to panic about.
So Steig has joined us at last!

john challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:40 am
Anthony, is it ALL carbon soot? Does wind blown glacial dust, or atmospheric dust, also take on a dark color when submerged? Not disagreeing about albedo effect, just wondering if carbon is the only source of dark coloration at the bottom of a melt pool on a glacier.

Billy Liar also challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:47 am
Can someone point to a chemical analysis of the black stuff in that Greenland pond?
I’m sceptical that it is ‘soot’. Oh, and where does the red stuff that you see over arctic glaciers occasionally come from?

When Paul Woland compliments Anthony for posting an article from Nature, Anthony sticks to his photo-science:

May 8, 2014 at 7:48 am
Well done WUWT for finally starting to publish research papers that, like virtually all climate-related papers in Nature, attests to the reality of significant temperature increases caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

REPLY: So like the authors of the paper, you missed what was in the photo too? – Anthony

SIGINT EX quibbles with Anthony, but Anthony is sticking to his guns:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
No soot in the pool ! Just a photograph, low sun angle, shadow and diminished illumination against a very bright foreground on top ! Particulate measured in Firn and glacier ice is at the ppm level. Not enough to make a difference.

REPLY: No, sorry, you are wrong. It’s soot, dust, etc. people have sampled the bottom of those pools. Read the links provided before inserting foot in mouth. See map I’m adding from NASA showing deposition – Anthony

Neil says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

richard says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:27 am
To me the dark part looks like a deeper part of the water, i notice that there are no darker parts elsewhere or if it is does the movement of water carry it to one part.

The bottom of the picture shows discoloration of the snow- soot? that has melted and yet everywhere else looks pristine. 

Shawn in High River doesn't realise that the scientists have crunched the numbers and says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:44 am
How do they know that exactly half is due to AGW and the other half is the unpredictable part? How did they come up with that figure of 50% AGW ?

hunter confuses Greenland and north eastern Canada with the entire world when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:58 am
In a sense they are back peddling from the apocalypse. Now it is only 50% due to evil humans. Last year it was all human CO2. Is it due to highconfidence that the AGW believers have ‘won’ and will see their self-serviing policies imposed no matter the facts?

Steven Mosher becomes a bit impatient with Anthony Watts and his fake sceptics and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:39 am
“Neil says: May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

1. There is no evidence that this photo shows soot.
2. Its assumed and asserted as fact.
3. Note the lack of skepticism about this “evidence”

That said, soot plays a role. thats part of the human forcing equation.
If you want to know how much of a role soot plays you have to run a GCM.
or you can just speculate and assert that it plays a major role.

Science: build a tool to try to understand the role of soot.

Politics: assert that its all down to soot. no comprehensive data, no methods, a few pictures, no testing of the hypothesis.. just assertion.

Doug Proctor also thinks that Greenland is the whole world and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:55 am
To say that half is natural, not human-caused, is to say that you are a denier (of consensus, IPCC science). It is to say that any action to reduce human generated CO2 will have half the effect of the IPCC scenarios, and kill both the economics and the actual result of what is proposed “must” happen. 

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Qinghua Ding, John M. Wallace, David S. Battisti, Eric J. Steig, Ailie J. E. Gallant, Hyung-Jin Kim, Lei Geng. Tropical forcing of the recent rapid Arctic warming in northeastern Canada and Greenland. Nature, 2014; 509 (7499): 209 DOI: 10.1038/nature13260

Hansen, James, and Larissa Nazarenko. "Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101, no. 2 (2004): 423-428. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2237157100

Sand, M., T. K. Berntsen, Ø. Seland, and J. E. Kristjánsson (2013), Arctic surface temperature change to emissions of black carbon within Arctic or midlatitudes, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50613.