WUWT misleads deniers: downplays climate change affecting wildfires

Larry Hamlin is an occasional guest denier at WUWT. He's just another WUWT nutter, though his articles hide that fact behind his smooth words. He suits WUWT because he tells the pack what they want to hear. This time he's downplaying the fact that wildfires will become a worse risk as the world heats up (archived here), under a headline:

AP misleads the public, again, saying man made global warming worsens wildfires.

Larry appeals to the scaredy cats

Larry doesn't like it when he gets scared. He knows the denialiti don't like being scared either. That's how he's framed his disinformation.  He even opens his article with the words:

The climate fear media ...

He uses the word "alarmist" five times - making out that there's really nothing to worry about in regard to wildfires. He uses the word "fear" four times. His closing paragraph he continues his "scaredy cat" framing writing:

The climate fear propaganda media have again misled the public with unwarranted alarmist headlines alleging claims which do not reflect what this study of large western U.S. wildfires actually presented. The alarmist media twisted and misrepresented the studies information in an effort to  try and frighten the public into supporting its scientifically unsupported climate fear political ideology. 

What Larry is disputing this time, for a change, is not the scientific research - though he arguably misrepresents that as well. No, it's an article written by Seth Borenstein about the research into wildfires in the USA. The article itself was based largely on the US National Climate Assessment as well as three recent papers. In a departure from the norm at WUWT, Larry links to one of the papers and writes about it as if it's the only one. Seth Borenstein wrote:

In the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it's only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year. While scientists are reluctant to blame global warming for any specific fire, they have been warning for years about how it will lead to more fires and earlier fire seasons.

Larry doesn't agree and writes:

While the climate alarmist press loudly proclaim that “man made climate change is to blame” for these findings the actual study is much more circumspect about what the contributors are that could be impacting the results.

Even in the abstract to this study other factors are identified that the authors believe contribute to these results including the impacts of invasive species and consequences of past fire management practices in addition to changes in climate and in particular increasing drought severity. 

Yes, there are other factors that contribute to wildfires as Larry points out, not just climate change. Nevertheless, one of the main factors that's most concerning as global warming kicks in is higher temperatures combined with drier vegetation.  Here is the abstract to the paper to which Larry refers:

Over the western U.S. and in a majority of ecoregions, we found significant, increasing trends in the number of large fires and/or total large fire area per year. Trends were most significant for southern and mountain ecoregions, coinciding with trends toward increased drought severity. For all ecoregions combined, the number of large fires increased at a rate of seven fires per year, while total fire area increased at a rate of 355 km2 per year. Continuing changes in climate, invasive species, and consequences of past fire management, added to the impacts of larger, more frequent fires, will drive further disruptions to fire regimes of the western U.S. and other fire-prone regions of the world.

One of the factors cited is "continuing changes in climate". It's not the only factor by a long shot, but it will become increasingly important as time goes by.

Dumb deniers

Sometimes you are reminded of just how dumb deniers can be. Many of them would never have been exposed to wildfire. Most would live in cities and all they'd see is smoke when it blows their way. What do they think happens when lightning or an arsonist strikes, or when sparks from an angle grinder, train or powerline ignite vegetation? Do they think that even on days where there are catastrophic fire conditions, there won't be any greater risk from fire than the same thing happening when it's cooler and wetter?

Here is an excerpt from a recent paper on wildfire in the USA. It is from scientists with the US Forest Service and the University of California, Jay D. Miller and Hugh Safford:

Our results suggest that the positive trend in percentage of high severity in YPMC in our study area is due to two factors: 1) an increase in the percentage of high severity in large fires, and 2) the absence of years without any large fires after 1993. The second factor is important because we found that large fires had a significantly greater percentage of high severity in YPMC forests than did small fires. More years with large fires and increasing areas of high severity over the 1984 to 2010 period are consistent with observed increases in the number of large fires across the western US that have increasing percentages of high severity with increasing annual areas burned, and predictions of more large fires due to climate change (Westerling et al. 2006, Lenihan et al. 2008, Westerling and Bryant 2008, Littell et al. 2009, Lutz et al. 2009).

I'm not sure what they mean by their first point, which reads as if the cause causes the cause. However their work suggests that there is an increasing trend in high severity fires in some regions, which is consistent with what is expected as global warming kicks in.

Fires in south eastern Australia

There are some parallels between south-eastern Australia and California. Both would be considered among the regions most at risk of devastating wildfires. In a 2007 paper looking at fire danger in south eastern Australia as climate change progresses, scientists found that:

The number of ‘extreme’ fire danger days generally increases 5-25% by 2020 for the low scenarios and 15-65% for the high scenarios (Table E1). By 2050, the increases are generally 10-50% for the low scenarios and 100-300% for the high scenarios.

The authors also looked at "very extreme" and "catastrophic" fire danger days and found that under high scenarios, by 2050 there'll be a four to five-fold increase in frequency at many sites. In regard to "catastrophic" fire danger days, the authors found that "Only 12 of the 26 sites have recorded ‘catastrophic’ fire danger days since 1973." By 2050, some sites will have "catastrophic" days every three years or less.

I'd say the 2003 Canberra fires and definitely the 2009 Black Saturday fires in Victoria were both "catastrophic" conditions.

Even more worrying (if the scaredy cat deniers paid it any attention), the authors warned that the fire season is going to get longer:

Taken together, the model results suggest that fire seasons will start earlier and end slightly later, while being generally more intense throughout their length. This effect is most pronounced by 2050, although it should be apparent by 2020. 

This is what happens when there are too many fires all at the same time and resources are stretched too thinly. Local firefighters were fighting a fire two valleys away and couldn't get back in time to contain this one.

Are high severity fires getting worse in the Sierra Nevada?

In contrast to the above two studies, there is this paper by Chad T. Hanson,C and Dennis C. Odion that suggests that there has not been an increase in "proportion, area or patch size" of high severity fire in the Sierra Nevada conifer eco-region.  These findings don't necessarily conflict with the paper by Miller and Safford, which found differences between the occurrence of high severity fires in different regions and different mixes of vegetation. My reading is that one of the main points being made by Hanson and Odion is that fire can affect ecosystems in a bad way. Another is about fire management. Some extracts:

A better understanding of spatiotemporal patterns in fire regimes is needed to predict future fire regimes and their biological effects. Mechanisms underlying the lack of an expected climate- and time since fire-related trend in high-severity fire need to be identified to help calibrate projections of future fire. The effects of climate change on high-severity fire extent may remain small compared with fire suppression. Management could shift from a focus on reducing extent or severity of fire in wildlands to protecting human communities from fire.

And from their conclusion, in which they refer to incorrect predictions of "plenty of suitable habitat" and biodiversity:

Finally, our results suggest that predictions that there will be ample, or excessive, high-severity fire, and plenty of suitable habitat for biota dependent on natural early-successional conditions created by fire (Stephens and Ruth 2005), or a diversity of vegetation age classes created by high-severity fire, may be incorrect. Post-fire early-successional habitat appears to be an important conservation priority, but it is not protected as such (Hanson and North 2008; Hutto 2006, 2008). Moreover, many natural forests have been replaced by even-aged, single species tree plantations or modified by silvicultural activities so that they will not function as post-burn habitat for some species (Hutto 2008). Increased recognition of the relative scarcity and ecological importance of burned forest habitats can improve protection of b diversity (Lindenmayer and Franklin 2002; Lindenmayer et al. 2004; Swanson et al. 2011). 

It's complicated

Like with most things, there are different factors that contribute to fire severity and area burnt, as well as to post-fire "recovery". For example, in my home state of Victoria, priority is given to protecting towns and buildings (and commercial forests). That means that when fires burn in national parks they can be left to burn not just because they are in such inaccessible terrain but because native forests are not currently valued (by the powers that be) as highly as privately-owned property. The effort is put into containing the fires so they don't spread to areas inhabited by people - with greater or no success depending often on the fire conditions. (Catastrophic conditions make it virtually impossible to contain wildfires.) The scars on our native forest landscape devastated by very severe fires in the past decade bear testament.

Here is a paper by Gill, Stephens and Cary that discusses some of the problems and policy implications of wildfire management. It covers issues such as prescribed burning (fuel management), property protection, as well as the impact of fires and wildfire management on air and water quality, biodiversity, social and economic assets and more.

From the WUWT comments

Not many WUWT readers are interested in wildfires. Like I suggested, probably few of them have experienced any up close and personal.  Here are some of the comments to Larry's "scaredy cat" article.


Joel O'Bryan says:

May 19, 2014 at 10:53 pm
Grant proposals to study natural climate variability impacts on western wildfire potentials won’t get a high panel score with John Holdren whispering into the NSF’s ear. Grant proposals to study Western Wildfire potentials as a response to projected Climate Change are much more likely to get a better score. If you were a academic researcher needing tenure and a grant, which would you chose? The incentives are obvious with the current political climate.
political
Time for ^climate change.

Leigh says:

May 19, 2014 at 11:40 pm
Funny that.
We’re getting the same BS studys here in Australia.
The warmies are just changing places and dates on their studys.
Otherwise its word for word on the studys done here.
Some wag earlier this year had a thought bubble that there was this giant invisible cloud of CO/2. That works its around the world increasing the ferocity of bushfires where ever it settles over.
Seems like its moved from Australia to America.
I heard it had turned up in Italy not long ago or was that Greece.
It really is becoming quite tedious.
Lets talk about the global warming that froze America…..

aussiepete says:

May 20, 2014 at 4:40 am
What are the trends in deliberately/accidentally lit fires, numbers of campers and miles of power lines over the last few years? Vandalism generally and graffiti in particular has exploded in recent years, therefore, is it not reasonable to assume that it would be the same with arson ? I do not have a degree so i guess i’m not qualified to ask these questions or even have these thoughts.Nonetheless my instincts tell me that an increase of 0.8 of a degree will not lead to spontaneous combustion.

Aussiepete might be interested in reading about fires that get started in haystacks!

MattS doesn't know much about the climate and vegetation differences across the USA and says:

May 20, 2014 at 6:33 am
Why is this such a big problem in the western states and not the rest of the US?
Because the federal government owns and manages most of the land in the western states, but has relatively little land in the mid-west and eastern states.

elmer reverts to an "algore is fat" type comment and says:

May 20, 2014 at 10:17 am
The fact that these fires were set on purpose and that the doomsayers use these fires to push their global warming propaganda kinda makes me wonder, where was Al Gore when these fires were set?

LogosWrench says something unintelligible:

May 20, 2014 at 10:28 am
The wildfires are man made and I believe they a few people in custody but it aint for CO2.

Chad Wozniak says that all forests should be razed and covered in concrete, or similar:

May 20, 2014 at 11:03 am
The increase in wildfires is attributable very specifically to environmentalist extremism, which has interfered with prudent forest management practices (such as thinning underbrush and removing dead trees) and with natural fire cycles which are much less destructive than the fires resulting from environmentalist practices.

---

Dennison, P. E., S. C. Brewer, J. D. Arnold, and M. A. Moritz (2014), Large wildfire trends in the western United States, 1984–2011, Geophys. Res. Lett., 41, 2928–2933, doi:10.1002/2014GL059576.

Miller, Jay D., and Hugh Safford. "Trends in wildfire severity: 1984 to 2010 in the Sierra Nevada, Modoc Plateau, and southern Cascades, California, USA." Fire Ecology 8, no. 3 (2012). doi: 10.4996/fireecology.0803041

Bushfire weather in Southeast Australia: recent trends and projected climate change impacts. Melbourne, Australia: Bushfire CRC, 2007.

Hanson, Chad T., and Dennis C. Odion. "Is fire severity increasing in the Sierra Nevada, California, USA?." International Journal of Wildland Fire (2013). http://www.californiachaparral.org/images/Hanson_and_Odion_Fire_Severity_in_Sierra_Nev_2014.pdf

Gill, A. Malcolm, Scott L. Stephens, and Geoffrey J. Cary. "The worldwide “wildfire” problem." Ecological applications 23, no. 2 (2013): 438-454. http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/stephens-lab/Publications/Gill%20et%20al.%202013.pdf

Roy Spencer grows even wearier...

Some of you may remember how Roy Spencer fudges charts so he can write emotive and alarmist stuff like this (archived here):

I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or “97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming”, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good.

Roy has just made a belated appearance, commenting on my article where I exposed his shenanigans, writing:

we aligned all of the observations so that the *5 year average* at the beginning of the record (1979-1983) was the starting point. There is NO deception here, nothing nefarious, as you suggest. You can make your own graphs to suggest we did the same as you, but we didn't.

Roy can't have read my article, because what he claims to have done is exactly what I accused him of doing except that I pointed out that what he did was deceitful. In reply I asked him to explain:

Perhaps you will explain why you chose a "five year average" at the beginning of the record and not a thirty year average. Perhaps you will explain why, since you did pick a five year average instead of a thirty year average, you picked that particular five year period when UAH was abnormally high such that it distorted the difference (as I showed above) . Why did you pick 1979-1983 2004 rather than, say 2001 to 2005. Why did you move away from your normal baseline of 1981 to 2010?

Roy hasn't explained yet. Anyway, because there were a couple of people who still apparently didn't understand Roy's deception, let's do what I suggested in my comment, and compare using a different five year baseline (2001-2005) and a thirty year 1981-2010 baseline. Here is the result - as always, click to enlarge:

Data Sources: NASA , UAH ,  Met Office Hadley Centre and KNMI Climate Explorer

It should be obvious by now why Roy chose the baseline he did. It was because in that five year period, the UAH readings were abnormally high while CMIP5 mean was on the low side compared with observations. (Compare the 1979-1983 baselined chart with the 1981-2010 baselined chart. As climate watchers know, Roy Spencer reports UAH monthly and annual observations using the 1981-2010 baseline, so his use of the unusual five-year baseline 1979-83 for this exercise is a once-off for his own purposes.)

By picking a very short window where UAH was way above (and other observations were also above) CMIP5, Roy was able to create his illusion. Effectively what Roy's little trick did, was to artificially shift the CMIP5 model runs up compared to observations, making it look as if there is more of a difference than in actuality.

Roy wanted to make the CMIP data look more divergent from observations than they actually are. He used a simple arithmetic trick. Pick an abnormally short window when UAH and CMIP5 are both more divergent from other observations, and in opposite directions, and it will make it appear that there is even more of a divergence. When in fact over the medium term (thirty four years or so) there isn't anything like the difference Roy's trick makes it appear.

What isn't obvious is, when it's pointed out to him, why Roy doesn't just 'fess up to the reason he used his trick.

Snow-befuddled deniers at WUWT

The mood at WUWT can be measured by the type of comments. Today it's a bit of a mixture. Some people noticed a really silly and wrong analysis, which I wrote about earlier. Yet on the same day, the nutters came out of the WUWT woodwork when Anthony posted about brand new paper on snow (archived here).

Anthony got a press release from the University of Bristol (via Eureka Alert), where scientists W. R. Berghuijs, R. A.Woods and M. Hrachowitz studied the impact on stream flow of less snowfall. Based on their research they argue that, contrary to what is commonly thought, where there are significant reductions in the proportion of precipitation falling as snow (as opposed to rain), there will most likely be a reduction in the mean streamflow.

They've based their analysis on observations in 420 catchments in the USA.  Which is rather a lot, isn't it. As they say in the press release:

“With more than one-sixth of the Earth’s population depending on meltwater for their water supply, and ecosystems that can be sensitive to streamflow alterations, the socio-economic consequences of a reduction in streamflow can be substantial.

“Our finding is particularly relevant to regions where societally important functions, such ecosystem stability, hydropower, irrigation, and industrial or domestic water supply are derived from snowmelt.”

From the WUWT comments

The deniers at WUWT are virtually unanimous in their rejection of this paper. Almost all of the people commenting at WUWT think the research is useless. The thing is, though, that just as deniers have only one thing in common when it comes to climate science (they all reject it but for a multitude of different reasons), this time some deniers reject the study because they say it's wrong. Others reject it as useless because the findings are "obvious"!

Anthony Watts sets the ball rolling, writing:

From the University of Bristol  and the department of obvious science.

Charlie Martin says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:06 pm
Golly, I bet in areas with monsoons, the outflow of the river depends significantly on how much raInfall there is.

Joel O'Bryan didn't bother to read the article but had to have his say, and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:13 pm
So a warmer world is a drier world???? I think not.

norah4you opts for the "scientists don't know nuffin'" meme and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:24 pm
Is it possible that some educated persons might send the Alarmists no matter if the later has or hasn’t degree or scholartitle a hint of what every 4th grader around the world should have learnt – the Water cycle? Sadly enough the alarmists seems to have missed that essential part.

Brian M. Babey also opts for "it's wrong" and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:35 pm
B.S. Snowfall moisture is based upon the temperature it is formed. Warmer the temperature the more moisture is in it! As a person who lives in Snowy and Cold Climate of Minnesota, this is crap research. For Example a quarter inch of rain can produce either 1 inch of snow or 4 inches of snow depending upon the temperature, While a quarter of rain at any temp is still the same. So instead of it falling as snow it will fall as rain. LOL, too much stupidity from people who dont have a clue about cold and snow. FYI last winter i recorded a low of -23.9 F. As a side note i think we need to stop recording snowfall in inches of depth and only measure content of moisture, because 96 inches of snow one season isn’t the same as 96 inches of snow in another since moisture content varies!

Does Steve Case want an honest answer to his question when he asks:

May 18, 2014 at 5:36 pm
Let’s see, precipitation (rain & snow) changes with regard to the ratio between rain and snow, but overall in a warmer world there is more precipitation. And we are being told that more rain and less snow equals less flow in the rivers.

How stupid do they think we all are? 

Latitude, I think, comes down on the scientists are correct side, but maybe for the wrong reason when he says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:48 pm
They already knew this:
With more than one-sixth of the Earth’s population depending on meltwater for their water supply
But they didn’t know this:
New research has shown for the first time that the amount of water flowing through rivers in snow-affected regions depends significantly on how much of the precipitation falls as snowfall.
…and they got paid what for this?

Nick Stokes asks a pointless question, given the venue, and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:51 pm
It’s not obvious science. It asks the relevant question, how does the amount of river runoff vary depending on whether a given amount of precipitation falls as rain or snow? Is that something you all knew? 

TimB says - well, I'm not really sure what he's saying except it's clear that he toes the illiterati line and claims the research is useless:

May 18, 2014 at 5:55 pm
Meh. Snow allows the trees to have a more continuous supply of water. No snow, trees die. Less trees, more albedo and more water available to people. It’s win-win-win. Or it’s such a narrow view of the entire coupled process as to be virtually useless information.

John Eggert is an expert on peer review (WUWT-style) and just knows it shouldn't have passed. I wonder how he thinks the scientists got their data, of which most goes back to 1948? He says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:58 pm
The statement “How river flow is generated in snowy areas is poorly understood due to the difficulty in getting appropriate measurements. ” tells me these people don’t know what they are talking about. In Ontario, the electrical utility measures snow pack regularly and has a clear view of how many inches of water it contains. This is used by many parties to estimate how much runoff there will be (this has been going on for decades). Also, there are two periods of increased water flow. The spring freshet, associated with snow melt and the fall freshet associated with precipitation from the contrast of the impending winter and the departing summer (for want of a shorter term, Joe Bastardi could give a long and detailed description I’m sure). How river flow is generated in snowy areas is VERY well understood. How did this pass peer review?

John Eggert, being a dinky di true blue fake sceptic who makes it his business to scoff at anything and everything that's published in a science journal, wouldn't realise that the lead author has a PhD in civil engineering, and that he and Dr Woods are with the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bristol, and that Dr Hrachowitz is also an engineer and is an expert in hydrology in the Water Resources Section, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. John says:

May 18, 2014 at 6:06 pm
Nick Stokes: Nothing in science is obvious. Else Aristotle would have known that F=ma. This “study” is rehashing settled science, or to use the appropriate term for “settled science”: engineering. Civil engineers have been doing this type of work for years. It is somewhat important in things like dam design. The authors of this study have reinvented a wheel. And a hand chiseled stone wheel at that.

José Tomás also misses the point of the study and its findings when he says:

May 18, 2014 at 6:25 pm
You don’t need to live in a snowy country to know that.
Even here in Brazil, a virtually snowless country, small kids in school learn about the water volume in the Amazon River basin depending on the melting of the winter snow on the Andes…
Indeed, “How did this pass peer review?”

Pamela Gray misses the point of the research too, and foolishly says:

May 18, 2014 at 6:41 pm
The water content in snow pack and the conditions of the melt season are bigger measures of water flow in rivers during the summer/fall season. Snow pack and melt rate have been studied and results used for decades to manage water resources for agriculture purposes in closed ecosystems like Wallowa County. This article sounds like the authors are at the kindergarten stage.

Finally, there is a lone WUWT commenter (apart from Nick Stokes) who seems to have understood the article, though I'm not sure his conclusions can be applied universally. kenwd0elq says:

May 18, 2014 at 7:02 pm
This makes at least a little sense; precipitation that falls as rain runs downstream IMMEDIATELY, while snow remains on the ground and flows downstream at the rate of the snow melting.

Further, in places like the Sierra Nevada, rain not only runs downstream immediately, it also causes accelerated snowmelt.

So if the goal is a constant flow in the river rather than flood and drought, we either need precip as snow, or we need dams and reservoirs to control the downstream flow. Good thing we have them!

Hoser decides the scientists are wrong and says:

May 18, 2014 at 7:59 pm
A significant fraction of precipitation as snow is lost through sublimation. Rain will either run off or flow as groundwater. Certainly some will be lost through evaporation, but not during the precipitation event. Did the authors confuse total discharge and peak discharge? Peak snow melt will occur in spring, Multiple rainfall in a season would tend to decrease snow pack and reduce peak discharge unless a powerful late winter warm storm melts a substantial snow pack. The point is, if it rains, the water will stay on (lakes, streams) or in the ground. If it snows, a lot of the moisture will be lost to the air (typically from tree branches). Thus, it is likely the paper is quite wrong.

Jimmy Finley doesn't like Nick Stokes barging in uninvited (and spouting sciency stuff) to a denier festival  and says (excerpt with quote removed):

May 18, 2014 at 8:25 pm
Nick Stokes says:
...The question I want to ask, is, how truly stupid, arrogant and unknowing about the world are you? What are you, who has some snide remark to offer all the “deniers” here? We would really like to see your CV, and all the exalted degrees from exalted Universities, so we can give you proper respect. 

Steve Keohane who, being a typical WUWT fake sceptic, didn't look at the research let alone the data the scientists provided, says:

May 18, 2014 at 8:42 pm
Agreed, not worth reading.
In Colorado they watch accumulation of snow and water equivalency, time of accumulation maximum, and continual water flow rates for the Colorado River at least, the data already exists and they aren’t looking at it. Typical.

I didn't count up the votes, but you can if you want. I'd say the WUWT comments can be grouped into four categories:

• It's so obvious that the research was a waste of time and, of course, money
• It's wrong and proves that scientists don't know nuffin' - and therefore the research was a waste of time and, of course, money
• I don't understand what the article is all about but I like seeing my name in cyberspace at the world's most read anti-science blog
• It's useful science (almost no-one)

---

W. R. Berghuijs, R. A.Woods and M. Hrachowitz, "A precipitation shift from snow towards rain leads to a decrease in streamflow", Nature Climate Change, Vol 4, June 2014. doi:10.1038/nclimate2246

Denier Weirdness: WUWT sez it's anomalously cold in the sky!

There's been a lot of nonsense posted at WUWT in the last few days as usual. One thing that I noticed was an article (an ahem "guest essay") by David Dohbro (archived here).  This is a good example of Anthony Watts not bothering to read what he posts. Or am I wrong? Perhaps Anthony is still having his own troubles with anomalous anomalies :)

David Dohbro is an "ice age comether". He has previously recommended selling global temperature stocks because he reckoned they were about to fall through the floor. He doesn't say, this time, whether he reckons they are still a sell or whether you should hold or buy them. (Archived here.)

What David's done today, or at least what he claims to have done, is compare three global surface temperature data sets with two satellite lower troposphere data sets. He's differenced some numbers, and it's not clear to me if he even knows what his different data series are each measuring.

What David says he found was that "Three land-based data sets consistently report monthly higher values". I don't think he means "land only". I think when he says "land-based" he's referring to the combined land-ocean surface temperature. Whatever he means, what he claims sounds a bit odd because these are in anomalies rather than "values", and if they are "consistently" reporting higher anomalies, then by now one would expect them to have a markedly steeper slope than the satellite lower troposphere data.  As you'll see below, there are differences in the slopes but the differences aren't all that great. (I haven't tested for significance.)

The other odd thing is that he refers to all the data sets as GSTA's. That is, as global surface temperature anomalies. Yet the two satellite sets of data that he uses for comparison are for the lower troposphere, which is an average of the air temperature over a vertical distance above the land and sea surface.

David put up a pretty pointillistic chart - not as pretty as a Seurat but pretty just the same. I've copied it below. Click to enlarge as usual, if you must:

Source and all credit to David Dohbro at WUWT

Here's a painting by Seurat for comparison:

Bathers in Asnières by Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859 – 1891)

David describes the chart as follows:

I then simply subtracted the UAH monthly GSTA from the corresponding monthly GSTA of the other data sets (in this case, GISS, Hadcrut 4, RSS and NCDC; Data from January 1979 through March 2014). I then plotted these differences for each corresponding month and performed linear regression through each set of differences (Figure 1). A value of 0 means that the UAH data and the other dataset are similar, a value >0 means the other dataset reports a higher monthly GSTA compared to UAH and vice versa.

As I said earlier, UAH (and RSS) are not global surface temperatures. They aren't even global lower troposphere temperatures because they don't quite cover the entire globe. But let's put that to one side. It looks to me as if David should have done a bit more work and thought things through before writing his article. (As for Anthony Watts, goodness knows what he was thinking when he posted it.) For example, David makes the not so startling find that:

As you can see, the three land-based data sets consistently report monthly GSTA higher than that of UAH.

Of course they do. UAH is an anomaly from the 1981 to 2010 mean. GISTemp is an anomaly from the 1951 to 1980 mean and HadCRUT is an anomaly from the 1961 to 1990 mean. So of course the anomaly is going to be greater for data sets with an earlier baseline.

David also comments about the difference between UAH and RSS, writing:

The other satellite based data-set, RSS, reports values rather similar to UAH (average difference of 0.058°C). 

It should be different. UAH anomaly is from the 1981 to 2010 mean whereas RSS anomaly is from the 1979 to 1998 mean, so the RSS anomalies should have been higher than the UAH anomalies.

David concludes by writing:

In summary, all five GSTA datasets analyzed here show an average GSTA over the past 35 years of between 0.01 to 0.42°C above their respective baseline period that varies between each data set. The land-based data sets report in all most all cases monthly GSTA that are higher than the satellite based GSTAs. In addition, there is a general trend towards larger differences between the former and later data-sets over time (since 1979). The GISS data-set has the strongest trend in difference over time and will soon report the largest difference with UAH if this trend continuous, as well as diverge more from the other land-based data-sets. The continuing divergence to the point where the difference is larger than the long term averages between satellite-based and land-based reported GSTAs warrants more in-depth analyses and attention.

Interestingly, he calls for more research, more in-depth analysis and attention - which is unusual for someone at WUWT :)

Since we're on the subject, I've plotted all except NCDC (four is enough) having adjusted all the sets to the same base - 1981 to 2010. Here is the result:

Data sources: UAH, RSS, Hadley Centre, GISS NASA

As you probably know, there's not a great deal of difference between the two surface data series. GISTemp has a slope of 0.0159 and HadCRUT a slope of 0.155. UAH and RSS are pretty close except for the last couple of years, where RSS is lower than everything else. UAH on the other hand starts off higher than anything else. Also, RSS only goes from 70s to 82.5N, whereas UAH supposedly covers more area. (I can't remember where UAH starts and stops - can someone remind me?) However I'd expect that the UAH team have to deal with the problem that prompts RSS to leave out Antarctica - that the mountains get in the way and muck up the readings.

From the WUWT comments

Streetcred, despite the name, is a fake sceptic and says:

May 19, 2014 at 12:28 am
GISS not all that Kosher? Tell Steven Goddard something that he didn’t already know. There’s clearly a fiddlin’ going on about there. ;)

Mike Jonas is one of many who gently points out the obvious and says:

May 19, 2014 at 12:44 am
Because of the different base periods for anomalies, maybe the comparisons are not as useful as they might be. Can you get hold of the base period data for all series, then re-construct the absolute temperature series for all except UAH (say) and re-base them on UAH’s base period. The results could be a bit different.

If you can’t get hold of the base period data, then you can rebase them all to a common period (eg. 1979-1989), provided you then report annual averages not monthly data. Given that your main findings are expressed in deg p.a., the results will I think be equally valid. The graphs might also be easier to interpret.

Nick Stokes goes one further and points to an interactive chart he's prepared and says:

May 19, 2014 at 1:10 am
“As you can see, the three land-based data sets consistently report monthly GSTA higher than that of UAH. With NCDC > GISS > Hadcrut4 > RSS. NCDC’s data set reports on average a monthly GSTA 0.41°C higher than that of UAH”

As Mike Jonas says, this is meaningless unless you put them on the same anomaly base. The trend differences are meaningful, but the only one that stands out is the difference between UAH and RSS. UAH and the surface measures are relatively close. It is Lord M’s favourite, RSS, that is the outlier.

Theer is an interactive graph here of those five indices, plotted monthly on a common base. It is interactive – you can rescale etc. Scroll up for details. 

Is thegriss being sarcastic or serious?

May 19, 2014 at 1:12 am
Its good to know that 1 out of 4 is close to reality. 

Hmm, looks like thegriss wasn't being  sarcastic, but is a resident WUWT conspiracy theorist, and says:

May 19, 2014 at 1:15 am
With Gavin and Phil still in charge of Had and Giss, the real temperatures will continue to show divergence,

Gavin and Phil will continue to try in vain to CREATE a positive trend as the temperatures start to drop slightly over the next several years. 

Squirrels seen by WUWT in West Antarctica

Anthony Watts at WUWT has a short article by David Middleton (archived here, latest update here). David has found an older paper about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), published in Science in 1999. David thinks it shows that the latest scientific research is "nothing new".  He's wrong.

"Look, a squirrell!" sez WUWT

The WUWT article is a classic case of "look, squirrell", diverting attention from the most dangerous areas - particularly the Amundsen Sea Embayment and the Antarctic Peninsula, to the Ross Ice Shelf.

About West Antarctica

Here is a description of WAIS, from AntarcticGlaciers.org:

There are principally three sectors of the ice sheet, which flow northeast-ward into the Weddell Sea, westward into the Ross Ice Shelf and northward into the Amundsen/Bellingshausen seas. The highest elevations reached are 3000 m above sea level[2], occurring at the divides between these sectors. The size of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is limited, despite its high average snow falls, by the faster speeds of its ice streams.

AntarcticGlaciers.org has a nice map of West Antarctica on its website (click to enlarge it):

Credit: AntarcticGlaciers.org

Different rates of collapse in different parts of Antarctica

The opening sentence in the 1999 paper is:

The grounding line of the WAIS has retreated nearly 1300 km since the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) about 20,000 years before present.

If the grounding line retreat was even over the past 20,000 years (which it wasn't), that would mean it was retreating at a rate of 65 metres a year or 0.65 km a decade. The authors go on to write about the changes in different parts near the Ross Sea in West Antarctica:

The grounding line today is about 900 km from McMurdo Sound, which implies average recession of about 120 m year−1 for at least 7500 years. Recent measurements indicate that grounding-line retreat is continuing at about the same rate; at Ice Stream C, it retreated about 30 m year−1 between 1974 and 1984 (29), whereas at Ice Stream B, it withdrew ∼450 m year−1 over the past 30 years (30). There is no evidence to indicate that recession is slowing; it will likely continue (at least in the near future) because the current mass balance of the Ross Sea Embayment is strongly negative (4). Others have suggested that West Antarctica deglaciated completely in the past and, if the grounding line continues to pull back at the present rate, complete deglaciation will take about 7000 years.

The 1999 paper was about a different region to the recent paper by Eric Rignot and colleagues, whose research was about measurements in the Amundsen Sea Embayment of West Antarctica. What they found recently was that over the nineteen years from 1992 to 2011:

• Pine Island Glacier retreated 31 km at its center - that's 1,632 metres a year on average.
• Thwaites Glacier retreated 14 km along its fast-flow core - that's 737 metres a year on average.
• Haynes Glacier retreated 10 km along its flanks - that's 526 metres a year on average.
• Smith/Kohler glaciers retreated the most, 35 km along its ice plain - that's 1,842 metres a year on average.

Compare the 120 metres a year in the Ross Sea Embayment estimated in 1999 with 1,842 metres a year of the Smith/Kohler glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment estimated as at 2011. That's a huge difference.

Compare and contrast - 1999 vs 2014

In 1999, Conway and co-authors concluded saying that the WAIS could "perhaps" completely disintegrate within the present interglacial period - that is, in the next 50,000 years!

We suggest that modern grounding-line retreat is part of ongoing recession that has been under way since early to mid-Holocene time. It is not a consequence of anthropogenic warming or recent sea level rise. In other words, the future of the WAIS may have been predetermined when grounding-line retreat was triggered in early Holocene time. Continued recession and perhaps even complete disintegration of the WAIS within the present interglacial period could well be inevitable. 

By contrast, in 2014, the authors concluded, about the Amundsen Sea Embayment (not the entirety of WAIS):

We conclude that this sector of West Antarctica is undergoing a marine ice sheet instability that will signi cantly contribute to sea level rise in decades to come.

That's decades to come, not centuries to come or millenia to come!

What about the Ross Ice Shelf?

It looks as if the Ross Ice Shelf will be okay for the near term (the next couple of centuries at least). I found this 2013 paper that discusses recent changes in the Ross Ice Shelf, but only the abstract. It mentions "widespread slowing and minor areas of acceleration in the Ross Ice Shelf".  So the Ross Ice Shelf does look to be okay for a while yet.

From another recent paper (Munneke13), which has featured here before, this time looking at structural changes within the ice shelves and how lack of snowfall can contribute to the collapse of ice shelves:

Our model further suggests that a projected increase in snowfall will protect the Ross and Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelves from hydrofracturing in the coming two centuries.

And on the Antarctic Peninsula...

However as found by Munneke13, elsewhere, like on the Antarctic Peninsula, the situation is not promising, as reported at ScienceDaily.com:

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."  

From the WUWT comments

David Riser is more interested in getting his name up at WUWT than in finding out about West Antarctica and says:

May 17, 2014 at 8:51 am
Soooo if its been going onward for 20000 years what is the likely hood that it will be done and gone in the next 200?

Rud Istvan is a disinformer who says:

May 17, 2014 at 8:56 am
Collapse of the Ross was all the alarmist rage from this paper until the Andrill program in 2005-2007 (if I recall correctly) that showed it hasn’t for three million years and very likely won’t now. anchored by islands, decelerating that sort of thing. The 2014 alarm was fed/manufactured by NASA and by knowingly wrong comments by Rignot of JPL. For example, the 1.2 meters is the calculation of all the ice in the entire catchment basin of 360,000 square km. one of the two papers at issue showed that the interior portions are gaining ice and have virtually no seaward creep. Neither the NASA PR, the NASA website, nor Rignot mention these facts. Pure alarmism, one presumes perhaps in support of the NCA/EPA/Obama agenda in an election year.

Rud is wrong of course.  He is also referring to different areas of WAIS without distinguishing between them. He is only talking about the Amundsen Sea Embayment when he refers to "the 1.2 meters", not the entire WAIS and not the Ross Sea Embayment. In any case, contrary to what Rud claims about "no seaward creep", the latest paper by Rignot et al shows the very fast rates of flow into the ocean as I described above.

pat mindlessly parrots the usual denier conspiracy ideation, saying more about pat's motivation than anyone else's and says:

May 17, 2014 at 9:33 am
They will say anything to maintain the funding. The goal is funding, not science. In fact the corruption is so bad the research and work ups have become childish and the Warmists desperately try to say something that was not said the week before.

Billy Liar might be surprised in his lifetime, depending on how old he is, and says:

May 17, 2014 at 9:48 am
The trouble with all these ‘catastrophic’ ice sheet collapses is that they all happen so slowly no-one ever notices. Except the alarmists, of course, looking for an excuse to impose their view of the world on everyone else. 

Louis demonstrates he is a fake sceptic who doesn't bother checking what he reads, and could hardly be more wrong when he says:

May 17, 2014 at 11:49 am
So the latest paper from Rignot et al., proclaiming the “Irreversible Collapse” of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is basically a repeat of this older paper from 1999. Why is it that alarmist researchers can rehash old stuff without having a reviewer say, “The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low,” as they did with the Bengtsson paper?

milodonharlani at least seems to have cottoned on to the fact that Rignot14 is about a different area to that of Conway09 and says:

May 17, 2014 at 1:50 pm
You’re right. It doesn’t apply to the Amundsen Sea. The ~10% of the WAIS drained by the PIG is IMO a special case, not least because of the Hudson Mountain volcano & maybe higher precipitation in its basin (haven’t checked on the latter though, & in any case it’s hard to work in that area; IIRC the 2012 summer expedition had to be cancelled due to even more inclement than normal WX).

---

Conway, Hall, B. L. Hall, G. H. Denton, A. M. Gades, and E. D. Waddington. "Past and future grounding-line retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet." Science 286, no. 5438 (1999): 280-283. DOI: 10.1126/science.286.5438.280

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

Hulbe, Christina L., Ted A. Scambos, Choon-Ki Lee, Jennifer Bohlander, and Terry Haran. "Recent changes in the flow of the Ross Ice Shelf, West Antarctica." Earth and Planetary Science Letters 376 (2013): 54-62.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2013.06.013

Munneke, Peter Kuipers, Stefan RM Ligtenberg, Michiel R. Van Den Broeke, And David G. Vaughan. "Firn Air Depletion As A Precursor Of Antarctic Ice-Shelf Collapse." Journal Of Glaciology 60, No. 220 (2014): 205.  doi: 10.3189/2014JoG13J183

Denier weirdness: Ignominious legacy of a climate scientist

When climate science battles ideology and loses, the results are not pretty. That seems to be the story with an elderly scientist from Sweden, Dr Lennart Bengtsson. In the past month he's emerged from relative obscurity (as far as the general public is concerned) to being a minor celebrity of denialati.

If he was trying to trash his scientific reputation he could hardly have chosen a more effective way to do it.

Lennart Bengtsson very publicly declares his ideology and joins the GWPF

Earlier this month, Lennart decided to formally declare his political leanings. Lennart joined the Board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a denier group in the UK that lobbies against the mitigation of global warming. As Greg Laden points out, that organisation mostly attracts misfit economists and failed financiers, not climate scientists. Nigel Lawson, who is the public face of the group, was probably getting some pats on the back that he had managed to entice a genuine climate scientist to align himself with them in such a public fashion.

Lennart has voiced his opinions on policy and politics on other occasions in the past. For example, he has written (h/t Marco and idunno):

It's a shame that the GDR disappeared otherwise we would have been able to offer one-way tickets there for these raving socialists. Now there's unfortunately not many orthodox countries left soon and I surely do not imagine our romantic green Communists want a one-way ticket to North Korea. But if interested I will gladly contribute to the trip as long as it concerns a one way exit. Perhaps you could arrange a Gallup study, then it can not be ruled out that I underestimated utresebehovet.

(Does anyone know what utresebehovet translates to in English?) Answer, thanks to Frank D: Literally "outward need", in context I think he means he underestimated the need of the "romantic Green communists" to get out of the "orthodox" western countries.

Lennart Bengtsson very publicly declares he'll stick to science and quits the GWPF

After joining the Board of the GWPF things started to go wrong because, although Lennart is 79 years old, he's still publishing and holds a post at the University of Reading. That made things tricky, because apparently Lennart wants to continue to publish. Lennart said that his colleagues warned him that so publicly joining the GWPF was not a good look and other scientists would probably steer clear of him. No reputable scientist would want to be associated with anyone from a science denying organisation. According to Lennart he's already had collaborators withdraw from collaborating with him although he hasn't named anyone as far as I know. So Lennart did an about face and resigned from the GWPF.

Lennart Bengtsson changes his mind again and very publicly declares ideology won his inner battle between his ideology and science

His resignation would have been the end of the matter if he'd just shut up, put his head down and continued with his research. However he chose to take a different route, which makes his resignation from the GWPF inexplicable.  He chose to go to the papers and yell and scream. He chose to politicise the situation even further.

Why quit the GWPF so you can continue as a scientist only to turn around the very next day and burn your bridges as a scientist?

Why does Lennart scream "politicisation" when it's Lennart who's the only person showing his ideology?

Lennart made an even bigger fool of himself by getting a front page spread on The Times newspaper.  And now he's made it into The Australian as well. (Lennart didn't even get top billing in the article in The Australian. He was just a footnote to a blurb about some pimply-faced script kiddie from the USA who annoyed the University of Queensland.) Lennart told a denier journalist that a paper he submitted for publication got rejected. The spin is that he was persecuted. I suppose he thought that if he could make out that scientists are ganging up on him he could play the victim card.

Now that will work with the denialiti. Over at WUWT for example, they are up in arms (archived here and here and here). It proves their "nefarious intent" conspiracy theories. They aren't interested in whether or not the paper had any merit. It's sufficient that someone they'd never heard of a month ago has come out as a martyr for the deniers' cause.

It won't work with the scientific community (or much of the general public who read more broadly). Lennart has broken the rules and revealed part of what was in a referee report on a rejected paper. Lennart decided his ideology trumped science and "came out" as a science denier. Lennart should have expected the consequences from the scientific community.

The consequences are that the IOP, the publisher of the journal in question, Environmental Research Letters, has come right out and shown that the paper was without merit. They've published one of the referee's reports in full and are seeking permission to publish the others as well. The IOP press release states:

The draft journal paper by Lennart Bengtsson that Environmental Research Letters declined to publish, which was the subject of this morning’s front page story of The Times, contained errors, in our view did not provide a significant advancement in the field, and therefore could not be published in the journal.

Lennart's "paper" didn't just contain errors, it didn't even include any research from the look of things. It was just an article about already published research.  Turns out that Lennart's so-called scientific paper was nothing more than a bit of denialist propaganda, about on par with articles by the usual quacks in Quadrant magazine (Bob Carter etc). Based on the referee's report that was published, it looks as if all that Lennart did was say "ooh, there are some differences between climate sensitivity calculations published in different papers so "something must be wrong"" (nefarious intent-style), without bothering to look at the reasons for differences. Here are some excerpts from one of the referee's reports:

The manuscript uses a simple energy budget equation (as employed e.g. by Gregory et al 2004, 2008, Otto et al 2013) to test the consistency between three recent "assessments" of radiative forcing and climate sensitivity (not really equilibrium climate sensitivity in the case of observational studies).

...The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low, as the calculations made to compare the three studies are already available within each of the sources, most directly in Otto et al.

The finding of differences between the three "assessments" and within the assessments (AR5), when assuming the energy balance model to be right, and compared to the CMIP5 models are reported as apparent inconsistencies.

...What a paper with this message should have done instead is recognising and explaining a series of "reasons" and "causes" for the differences.

...The IPCC process itself explains potential inconsistencies under the strict requirement of a simplistic energy balance: The different estimates for temperature, heat uptake, forcing, and ECS and TCR are made within different working groups, at slightly different points in time, and with potentially different emphasis on different data sources. The IPCC estimates of different quantities are not based on single data sources, nor on a fixed set of models, but by construction are expert based assessments based on a multitude of sources. Hence the expectation that all expert estimates are completely consistent within a simple energy balance model is unfounded from the beginning.

Wanting to be remembered for ideological flip-flops, flouting professional ethics and writing shoddy papers?

You've got to wonder what motivates someone who's had a decent career as an academic to decide they want to be remembered for:

• joining a science denying lobby group - then quitting it because they don't have the courage of their convictions
• flouting professional ethics not just by publicising a referee report on a rejected paper of theirs, but by misrepresenting it and the journals decision that it wasn't worthy of their journal
• letting the whole scientific community know that they write very shoddy papers
• coming out very publicly as a science denier.

Science deniers are having a bad time of it at the moment. They can't win a trick. There's more at Rabett Run and Greg Laden's blog and William Connolley's Stoat and And Then There's Physics, as well as at The Guardian.

From the WUWT comments

Yes, there was a big commotion about their new-found hero at WUWT. Here is a sample of the comments:

Frank K. thinks it's a good thing (for deniers, not Lennart, obviously) that Lennart has brought his shoddy paper to the attention of the world and says:

May 16, 2014 at 7:36 am
I think the good thing to come out of all of this is that Dr. Bengtsson’s paper will now have so much attention that it can be judged on its merits by a much larger scientific audience than if it were just quietly published by some narrowly-focused climate journal. So, I think this whole episode just backfired badly on the warmists…(heh)

omnologos links scientist Dr Lennart Bengtsson with denier bloggers, the tabloid press and the Murdoch empire. I guess that's foolish Lennart's legacy now. Omnologos says:

May 15, 2014 at 4:44 pm
First it was Delingpole. Then the Spectator. Then the Daily Mail. Then The TImes. The important aspect is that this stuff is now entering the journalistic narrative, otherwise dominated by planet-burning deathwishes.

When the floodgates will open, many journalists will suddenly do their coming out as climate skeptics. Just hang on, we aren’t too far from that date.

Bruce Cobb shows his colours as a deluded denier when he says:

May 15, 2014 at 5:13 pm
These are the end times for the Warmist ideology/religion, and they know it. Now is when the Warmanista nastiness will be at its’ height. They will stop at nothing. But, their nasty behavior is there for all to see, and damages their “cause” even further, setting it upon a death spiral.

ossqss wants to sue scientists who maintain their professional integrity and says:

May 16, 2014 at 8:25 am
And the rats begin to scatter and hide, but it is too late. They have already tripped the trap.
Justice for all, not just some, will prevail.

Is it time to crowd source legal action against these defiant bullys?

This type of behavior would not be tolerated anywhere else in society. Why has it been acceptable in the climate community? Why?

JimS is one of the few who accepts the inevitability of global warming :) and says:

May 16, 2014 at 8:50 am
AGW is so entrenched within the scientific community and political sphere, it will not go away. Just watch.

philjourdan roundly criticises Lennart's double standards (at least that's what it looks like) and says:

May 16, 2014 at 9:54 am
It is hard to maintain double standards rationally – even for people who are naturally duplicitous. Their own words are going to haunt them. But they do not have to worry about sycophants coming to their defense. No matter how contorted the justification is.

rogerknights says:

May 16, 2014 at 10:52 am
The most effective counterattack on ERL would be to list and critique the substandard warmist papers it has published. 

So far there is nothing but silence on that score.

The desire to not look stupid is pretty strong...

Noticed at WUWT today (archived here):

I urge others to follow my lead: when ridiculous claims are made in the media, challenge them with supportable facts. You may not get an acknowledgment, but the desire to not look stupid is pretty strong, and will have an effect.

His article was about a big blooper by the Governor of California, talking about LAX being flooded by rising seas, though it's apparently more than 30 metres (100 feet) above sea level. Anthony got up at half past five in the morning to send a missive off to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times to tell him what a duffer he and the Governor were.

This was the second article by Anthony on the subject. In his first article (archived here), Anthony had some big bloopers of his own. So I'll do as he urged and follow his lead and challenge what he wrote with supportable facts.

Anthony's ridiculous claim

Anthony made the ridiculous claim that Suzanne Goldenberg was wrong when she wrote that "The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise". He reckons she meant four feet, not four metres. Anthony was wrong! Suzanne Goldenberg was right.

Challenging Anthony Watts with supportable facts

Anthony copied a quote from a NASA article about the recent paper by Eric Rignot (which I wrote about earlier):

The Amundsen Sea region is only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which if melted completely would raise global sea level by about 16 feet (5 meters).

He followed this up with:

Here is where I think Brown went wrong:

He listened to the Guardian’s Susanne Goldenberg, who conflated 4 feet to 4 METERS (13 feet), which would affect SFO airport, but not LAX.

...And the error is still in her story, a day later. 

This is what Suzanne Goldenberg wrote in the Guardian:

The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet could eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise

Obviously it's Anthony who is wrong.  And this even with him copying Suzanne's comment and highlighting it in yellow. I've remarked before (and Anthony confirmed it) that he doesn't read what he writes about on his blog. In this case he didn't bother reading two pieces of information he selected himself, from different sources.

The melting of western Antarctica would cause a very large rise in sea level. In a 2009 paper in Science, Jerry X. Mitrovica,1 Natalya Gomez,1 Peter U. Clark have estimated the melting of western Antarctica would result in a sea level rise of five metres  - and effectively much more in some parts of the world (and less in others). In another paper in Science in the same year, Jonathan L. Bamber and colleagues estimated a rapid collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheets at 3.3 metres, but 25% higher in some regions, specifically the along the Pacific and Atlantic seaboard of the United States. So that would make it about a four metre rise in those regions. (The latter calculation allows for the fact that not all the ice would go into the sea in a "rapid collapse", among other things.)

Anthony's four foot rise is only 1.2 metres. This is the expected rise in sea level just from the ice sheets of the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE). As explained in Rignot14:

The ASE is a dominant contributor to the mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet at present, with losses driven almost entirely by increases in flow speed (Mouginot et al., 2014). This sector is of global signi cance since it contains enough ice to raise global sea level by 1.2 m (e.g. Rignot, 2008).

Will Anthony change his article so as to not look stupid? I doubt it. No-one else picked him up on his ridiculous claim about the volume of ice in western Antarctica.

From the WUWT comments

ZombieSymmetry says:

May 13, 2014 at 6:56 pm
There isn’t even that much water on the planet, is there? I mean, if all ice, everywhere melted, how high would the sea level go?

NASA says it would rise 75 metres, which is 246 feet. That would put LAX under 45 metres of water (nearly 150 feet of water).


Col Mosby says:

May 13, 2014 at 7:55 pm
Now, irregardless of your beliefs about climate, does anyone out there actually believe we
will still be filling our vehicles with gasoline a hundred years from now? Or burning coal or natural gas to make electricity? These people that predict well into the future always assume things won’t change much in the next hundred years (we’ll be on the iPad CLMXXV by then). That’s the most idiotic assumption I’ve ever heard. Nobody believes that. Not even the alarmists, which is quite illogical considering their beliefs. That’s the strongest argument I can think of for not doing anything.

Steven Mosher is rambling and says:

May 13, 2014 at 10:16 pm
It is 200 ,years worst case and then 1mm would be added per year. So its ,200 ,years until the onset of a ,1mm rise per year. Best case 1000 years until the onset

tty says:

May 14, 2014 at 1:15 am
“There isn’t even that much water on the planet, is there? I mean, if all ice, everywhere melted, how high would the sea level go?”

About 70-80 meters (250 feet). But that won’t happen. Neither the Ellsworth mountains (4900 meters), the Transantarctic mountains (4500 meters), the Executive Committee Range (4300 meters) nor Fimbulheimen (3100 meters) are going to become ice-free until Antarctica moves away from the pole or the sun turns into red giant, whichever comes first.
The Ellsworth and Executive Comittee ranges are in West Antarctica by the way. 

markstoval is a fake sceptic, he doesn't compute that Anthony gets so much wrong and says:

May 15, 2014 at 12:41 am
It is nice to win one once in a while. I am glad that Anthony forced this retraction. (misspoke indeed)

The problem is that the mainstream media is all on-board with alarmist scaremongering and we are fighting people who “buy ink by the barrel” (need an updated saying there I guess). How do we get the facts out while the alarmists spread lies, misinformation, and delusions through a compliant mainstream media? 

Why not finish with a comment by Leo Geiger, who says:

May 15, 2014 at 3:52 am
when ridiculous claims are made in the media, challenge them with supportable facts

Absolutely. Same thing applies to ridiculous claims made in blogs.

---

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

Bamber, Jonathan L., Riccardo EM Riva, Bert LA Vermeersen, and Anne M. LeBrocq. "Reassessment of the potential sea-level rise from a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet." Science 324, no. 5929 (2009): 901-903. DOI: 10.1126/science.1169335 

Mitrovica, Jerry X., Natalya Gomez, and Peter U. Clark. "The sea-level fingerprint of West Antarctic collapse." Science 323, no. 5915 (2009): 753-753. DOI: 10.1126/science.1166510

McCarthyism my foot! Stoat has the story about Lennart Bengtsson and the GWPF...

Update: It gets even sillier!

---

An elderly and decorated meteorologist from Sweden decided to cosy up to Nigel Lawson of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. (h/t Ernest Hurley). No-one is telling exactly why Lennart Bengtsson decided to join in the first place, or if they are I can't be bothered looking it up. Who in their right mind would be associated with the GWPF? Anyway, as Stoat wrote, he only lasted a week or two.

Dr Bengtsson is getting on in years (he's 79) but he is still working and publishing a lot. He has had an impressive enough career and is now a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Reading.

As to why climate scientists might not want to be associated with the GWPF, this is a sample of the sort of nonsense that Nigel Lawson and his organisation are known for. On the IPCC:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which published on Friday the first instalment of its latest report, is a deeply discredited organisation.

Nigel just made that up. The IPCC won a Nobel Peace Prize for heaven's sake! How about this GWPF article - about the man deniers love to hate. (Archived here):

IS MICHAEL MANN DELUSIONAL OR A DELIBERATE LIAR?
Date: 05/12/11
In my Weekly Standard Climategate 2.0 article I refer to Michael “hockey stick” Mann as the Fredo of the climate mafia, because of his endless bluster and the obvious embarrassment he brings to his fellow scientists.

Lennart couldn't take the heat and got out of the GWPF kitchen

Thing is, Lennart Bengtsson, or whoever wrote his letter of resignation, is blaming it on scientists behaving well instead of accepting it's he who behaved badly - or had very poor judgement. He reckons he was pressured to leave and complained the pressure was affecting his health, poor chap. He should try walking a mile in the shoes of Phil Jones or Michael Mann or James Hansen or Ben Santer.  That'd toughen him up. Here's the letter, courtesy Anthony Watts:

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF. I had not expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life. Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.
Under these situation I will be unable to contribute positively to the work of GWPF and consequently therefore I believe it is the best for me to reverse my decision to join its Board at the earliest possible time.”

I think it's great if true. Climate scientists are alert to organisations like the GWPF and their shadowy benefactors.

It also looks like Lennart didn't have the courage of his convictions, whatever they were. Or maybe he was joining the Board for reasons not at all associated with global warming. Maybe he had visions of cigar and port with various privileged aristocracy after a meal in the peers' dining room in the Palace of Westminster. (For that he'd tolerate occasionally crossing paths with a physical trainer and a slightly unhinged economist.)

Most scientists are rather reserved

A scientist wrote to me recently saying (and I agree, with all of it): "most scientists are rather reserved when it comes to making resounding claims about results.  Probably a cause for alarm when a group that is otherwise reticent decides to speak up." And speaking up they are.

Now I don't know if Dr Bengtsson was "pressured" or not. If any of his colleagues did have a quiet word to Lennart, they were doing him a favour.

Deniers fail US modern political history!

Anthony Watts, among others, is up in arms that anyone would "pressure" a scientist! ha ha de ha ha. (If you're new to climate blogs, WUWT exists wholly and solely to pressure and lampoon scientists and reject science and try to delay climate change mitigation and adaption initiatives. Pretty much like the GWPF, but without its clout.)

Anthony has posted one of his longer articles (archived here). As usual it's almost all copy and pastes, since Anthony (wisely) doesn't do "original" very often.  The bits and pieces are from all over the deniosphere. Everyone in denier-ville is up in arms. If scientists voice concerns that a colleague is joining forces with a science denier organisation it's McCarthy-ism (in denier land). If a US Senator says he has a list of scientists that he wants criminally prosecuted it's not McCarthy-ism. (It's Inhofism.)

From the WUWT comments - pillory plus!

Bob Tisdale says:

May 14, 2014 at 6:27 am
Unfortunately, this is typical of the climate-science community. Pillory those who disagree with you.

LewSkannen says:

May 14, 2014 at 6:20 am
It is outrageous that he is under this pressure but I do not agree with surrendering.

jeremyp99 says:

May 14, 2014 at 6:40 am
Why am I not surprised. Any form on non-approved thinking or speaking is now seized upon and pilloried savagely. The end of the Enlightment. Welcome to the Peoples Republic of Climate Science.

thinair says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:13 pm
A mann with his head in the sand, and a wart on science, may he be swept away by the strong tides of freedom.

Peter Stroud says:

August 26, 2013 at 9:13 am
I am sure that no other branch of science has supported so many scoundrels. Mann is one of many. His work has been falsified, but he still defends it. But he is one of quite a few. However, he and his ilk are still winning where it counts. Politicians still trust every word they utter, and go about saying that AGW is the most dangerous threat the world has ever seen. Some say it is more threatening than international terrorism. We sceptics have a long way to go before the governments of the world join us. 

Steven Hill from Ky (the welfare state) says:

August 26, 2013 at 10:25 am
I am so sick of the bunch of liars that get awards for fraud….King Obama, Fat Boy Gore and the Court Jester Mann.

Steve Koch says:

February 23, 2010 at 9:57 am
The next step is to institute a class action suit against the perpetrators of the AGW fraud (i.e. Hansen, Mann, Jones, Pauchari, Gore, etc). The discovery process alone should yield mountains of muck.

Jean Parisot says:

February 23, 2010 at 10:11 am
Has anyone filed an SEC complaint (and/or it’s UK equivalent) with regards to the various AGW alarmists manipulating the market for investment products without proper disclosure of interests? 

High Treason says:

September 19, 2013 at 1:56 pm
We certainly need to continue to kick them while they are down. They must never be allowed to rise again to peddle blatant lies disguised as “science” in the pursuit of hidden political agendas.The Left, who dominate the CAGW agenda will surely rise again to install the ultra green agenda they dare not tell us about. If it were so great, why not tell us all? No, they know the People would not approve, but they do it anyway, because THEY think it is good for us. Yeah, sure. Now is the time to go on the attack and have the warmists fully exposed and their acts of treason adequately punished, and I do not mean the BS of saying “sorry.” “Sorry we lied and subverted science in the quest of destroying society and humanity to install an insane Fabian Utopia with us Lefties as the inheritors of the earth with the rest of you as our slaves.” (sob, sob) Perhaps a vote on the correct punishment as a warning to those that may try this again.I shall start the vote- extreme public torture and stripping of all assets. Big businesses that have been complicit(Bilderburg group, I am writing to you) will have to find new CEOs. Punishment is not so much retribution as a warning to those that may transgress in the future. The issue here is that the crime is the highest category of treason the human race has ever seen thus far. 

Oh, sorry - those last few weren't about Lennart Bengtsson or the GWPF, they were pillories from other articles at WUWT :(


PS There are some comments in this thread, which Ernest Hurley took off topic and which prompted me to write this article.