What you are witnessing @wattsupwiththat is denialism in action, with Tom Sheahen

Anthony Watts has now written not one, not two, not three, not four but at least five articles protesting the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. I've commented on two of those, here and here.

His latest is from a chap called Tom Sheahen, who rejects science because of his politics. He signs every denier manifesto he can lay his hand on. Yes, he's one of the 100 people who signed a CATO document formally rejecting science. Tom's also signed his name to other utter nuttery, telling the US Supreme Court that:

CO2 is not in any sense an unwanted by-product of the production of useful energy. Rather, the combustion of carbon based fuels to produce CO2, and the capture of the energy released by that process, is the whole idea....

Tom Sheahen gives a lesson in denier-speak

Tom's article is mainly one in which he translates normal language into "denier-speak". It's mostly a lot of vague arm-waving gobbledygook, though not as gobbledy or gooky as one of Anthony Watts' other darlings, Tim Ball. After explaining what people really mean in denier-speak, at one stage Tom writes:

Elected officials striving to be responsive to their constituents’ concerns are often pressured by advocacy groups who have latched onto an incorrect interpretation of words. Scientists are sometimes guilty of riding a bandwagon that formed when the public misunderstood and exaggerated their original meaning; perhaps it’s convenient, prestigious and financially advantageous to let that confusion continue uncorrected. The effect snowballs and leads to new laws being passed, with expensive new regulations. Years later, with nothing accomplished, people ask “Oh, is that what you really meant?” Then the blame game begins, after much taxpayer money went down the drain unnecessarily.

That's not a bad lesson in denier speak. It's got just the right tinge of conspiracy ideation and nefarious intent. Tom doesn't give any examples of new laws and expensive new regulations that have sent money down the drain unnecessarily, needless to say. It's all denier theatre.

The above paragraph, you'll have noticed, embodies the unwritten assumption that all deniers are so stupid that they don't understand the purpose of particular laws and regulations. In fact Tom makes that assumption (that deniers are stupid) more than once. Elsewhere he writes:

• The word “average” is easily misunderstood. 
• In the absence of quotation marks, italics or capitals, ordinary citizens have no idea that the controversy is rooted in radically different meanings of the same words.

I expect now Anthony Watts will try to remember to put all controversial phrases in italics or between inverted commas, like Christopher Monckton does, so his dumb deniers will be know they must be translated into denier-speak. Will he be more precise in his use of "average" I wonder and specify whether he is referring to the mean or the mode or the median?

Tom Sheahen takes his deniers to Antarctica

Given that Tom's formally declared his allegiance to science denial it's a bit odd that he writes about geology - and then goes on to write about Antarctic ice. (Tom's name is also spelt as Tom Sheahan or Tom Sheehan in different places but it's the same chap AFAIK.)

What Tom's doing is having another shot at soothing the scaredy cats at WUWT. He's carefully explaining to them that terms used by geologists may have a different meaning to those same words used in general conversation.  The words he picks are time-related.

This is what Tom wrote:

Q. On TV I saw that the ice in Antarctica is collapsing, and that will raise sea level and inundate cities. Others reports say this will take thousands of years. How serious is the problem?

What you are witnessing here is a result of confusion between the public perception of the ordinary meaning of words, and the very special definitions used in scientific discourse.

Geologists deal with changes in the earth that occur over epochs of millions of years. Anything that happens in less than 10,000 years is “sudden,” and something happening in only 1,000 years is “instantaneous.” To geologists, the word “collapse” is appropriate for a 10,000 year process.

Tom apparently rejects the recent science that shows that parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) are slipping into the sea very quickly. He claims:

A hot-topic in the media these days has to do with the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS), a region comprising about 8% of the ice covering Antarctica. Within that region, there are two glaciers that are sliding down to the sea at a steady pace, as glaciers always do. They comprise about 10% of the WAIS, less than 1% of Antarctic ice. This descent has been in progress for several thousand years, and is neither new nor man-caused. It will go on for a few thousand more, after which they’ll be gone. In the parlance of geology, those two glaciers are collapsing.
If that doesn’t sound to you like your usual meaning of the word “collapse,” you’re absolutely right. It’s a specialized geological term.

Unfortunately, the major media overlook the distinction of meanings, and then make the further generalization from two specific glaciers to the entire WAIS, and moreover to Antarctica in general. Scientists who point out the small actual glacier size (and volume of ice) are brushed aside in the rush to get a headline or a flamboyant sound byte that will keep the viewers tuned in. Words like unavoidable collapse carry a sense of foreboding.

There is so much wrong with what Tom wrote that I won't bother with a listed rebuttal. Instead I'll point out that the melt of West Antarctica is happening. Not at a steady pace but at an accelerating pace. Not over 10,000 years but right now. And the West Antarctic ice sheet will add up to four metres (or more) to sea level when it's melted. The glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea alone will add a metre to sea level worldwide.

The groundline is moving back at nearly 2 km a year. Yes, that's right. Eric Rignot and colleagues have reported 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.

I haven't yet written about the other paper that hit the headlines at the same time as the Rignot paper. The second paper is by Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith and Brooke Medley and was published in Science last week (16 May). Like Rignot14, they were studying the ice sheet in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, in particular the Thwaites and Haynes Glaciers. Here is a map, courtesy of AntarcticGlaciers.org . If you click to enlarge the image, you can see Thwaites next to Pine Island on the Amundsen Sea.

 

Credit: AntarcticGlaciers.org

What the scientists found was that the collapse of WAIS has already begun. In the paper, when they refer to Thwaites Glacier they are also including Haynes Glacier and together they contribute almost half the ice losses to the Amundsen Sea (52 Gt/year of the 105Gt/year measured as at 2007).

The thing is that once Thwaites goes, so does most of the West Antarctic ice sheet from that area, which will eventually raise sea levels by anything up to four metres or so.

As reported in ScienceDaily.com:

The good news is that while the word "collapse" implies a sudden change, the fastest scenario is 200 years, and the longest is more than 1,000 years. The bad news is that such a collapse may be inevitable.

"Previously, when we saw thinning we didn't necessarily know whether the glacier could slow down later, spontaneously or through some feedback," Joughin said. "In our model simulations it looks like all the feedbacks tend to point toward it actually accelerating over time; there's no real stabilizing mechanism we can see."

What is apparently happening is that the warmer Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) is thinning the ice that's on the continental shelf around Antarctica, which means that the glaciers aren't being held back to the same extent any more. From the paper:

Currently, elevated melt rates on the Amundsen Coast are largely driven by increased transport of warm CDW onto the continental shelf rather than by direct warming of the CDW (6). If the conditions responsible for this transport abate, melting should lessen. Thus, we simulated 100 years of high melt (m = 3 and 4) followed by reduced melt (m = 1) for the remainder of the simulation (Fig. 3B). Although the reduction in melt slowed the rate of loss, at the end of these 250-year simulations, losses were substantially greater relative to the sustained m = 1 simulation.

Eric Rignot explains this in an article in The Guardian (well worth reading - h/t idunno):

...Ocean heat is pushed by the westerly winds and the westerlies have changed around Antarctica in response to climate warming and the depletion of the ozone. The stronger winds are caused by a world warming faster than a cooling Antarctica. Stronger westerlies push more subsurface warm waters poleward to melt the glaciers, and push surface waters northward.

The rapid collapse threshold - 1 mm/year of sea level rise

On the issue of how long this will take, the research suggests it could happen after a couple of centuries and probably in less than a thousand years. Which isn't all that long even on human time scales. And once she goes, she goes quickly. From the paper:

When simulated losses exceed 1 mm/year of sle [sea level equivalent], much greater losses generally follow within a few years. Using our basin-scale model, however, such rapid collapse is difficult to model, especially because interaction with other basins becomes increasingly important. Thus, we take 1 mm/year of sle to be a threshold that, once crossed, marks the onset of rapid (decades) collapse as the grounding line reaches the deepest regions of the marine basin. In our 250-year simulations, only the highest-melt, weak-margin simulation reaches this critical threshold. Therefore, we have extended the remaining simulations to determine when this threshold is reached (fig. S2 and Table 1). For all but the lowest-melt simulations (m = 0.5), the onset of rapid collapse begins within a millennium. 

So what we need to watch for is the amount of loss a year. That's not all. The paper has some provisos.

An important feature of our numerical simulations is that they reveal a strong sensitivity to mechanical and/or rheological weakening of the margins, which can accelerate the rate of collapse by decades to centuries. Thus, future models will require careful treatment of shear margins to accurately project sea-level rise. Our simulations also assume that there is no retreat of the ice-shelf front. Full or partial ice-shelf collapse should produce more rapid retreat than we have simulated. In addition, we have not modeled ocean-driven melt that extends immediately upstream of the grounding line, which could also accelerate retreat.

That means, the ice could melt sooner rather than later.  I'm thinking that it will be very important to keep a close watch on what is happening in West Antarctica over coming decades (and centuries).

There's 7 metres more waiting in East Antarctica

Eric Rignot warns that it's not just West Antarctica that's going to hit us with all this extra seawater. There's a marine glacier, Totten Glacier, in East Antarctica that will add seven metres (23 feet) to global sea level. He doesn't give a time frame but writes:

There is also a bigger picture than West Antarctica. The Amundsen sea sector is not the only vulnerable part of the continent. East Antarctica includes marine-based sectors that hold more ice. One of them, Totten glacier, holds the equivalent of seven metres of global sea level.

Controlling climate warming may ultimately make a difference not only about how fast West Antarctic ice will melt to sea, but also whether other parts of Antarctica will take their turn. Several "candidates" are lined up, and we seem to have figured a way to push them out of equilibrium even before warming of air temperature is strong enough to melt snow and ice at the surface.

Unabated climate warming of several degrees over the next century is likely to speed up the collapse of West Antarctica, but it could also trigger irreversible retreat of marine-based sectors of East Antarctica. Whether we should do something about it is simply a matter of common sense. And the time to act is now; Antarctica is not waiting for us.

What is the threshold for denialism?

One thing that I wonder, when I read papers like these two (Rignot14 and Joughin14) and then go across to WUWT to read how strongly they protest the facts, is why? Why do they pretend that ice doesn't melt as it warms? I mean, given all the caveats, this could mean a rapid rise in sea level within their lifetime, and easily within their children's lifetime. They can't all be 90 years old and childless. They can't all care so little about the future of human society. What is it that drives them to such an imbecilic reaction to strong warnings? There must come a day when deniers reach a threshold of fact that will be impossible to reject (leaving aside the certifiable nutters).

From the WUWT comments

emsnews is an ice age comether and he's wrong. Even a grand minimum won't stop global warming. emsnews says:

May 21, 2014 at 4:14 pm
Except if this is the beginning of another Maunder Minimum due to the sun, those glaciers won’t be suddenly or slowly melting into the ocean. Quite the opposite.

cnxtim copies and pastes the usual irrelevant, meaningless denier slogans and says:

May 21, 2014 at 4:53 pm
All this scaremongering is inexorably delivering the CAGW flock into the “chicken little idiot’ brigade in the eyes of the GP – and good riddance to them and their public purse budgets.

Frank K. is scared shitless but not about global warming or rising seas. He's a denier of the paranoid conspiracy persuasion and says:

May 21, 2014 at 5:02 pm
To add to what others have said, it is quite clear to me that the misuse of scientific press releases for political gain is deliberate. Global warming (or climate change, disruption, …whatever) has NEVER been about science, but rather a means to fundamentally change (and destroy) our ways of life. And the left wing, progressive zealots will not cease until their mission is acomplished. 

george e. conant is overwhelmed by Tom's generosity in telling him not to be scared by Yahoo News items about hottest Aprils and global warming and rising seas, so much so that he can't help shouting:

May 21, 2014 at 5:11 pm
This may be off topic a wee bit BUT, I just scrolled through the Yahoo News Feed… OH MY GAWD, one article after another about Global Warming , all bad, all catastrophic , some already mentioned in these comments … I am seeing a ramping up of the Alarmism to levels just unbelievable. David Suzuki now demanding that politicians who are Climate Deniers should be (need to be) LOCKED UP… The Antarctic collapsing, Hottest April Globally , on and on …. WOW. And Thank you Dr. Sheahen, excellent article. 

LogosWrench is another one who proves Tom's assumption about deniers and says:

May 21, 2014 at 5:19 pm
Now add to that our intellectual waste lands known as universities that teach words have no meaning apart from what the hearer desires. So there you go. Cooling is caused by warming and other such nonsense.

noloctd is a nasty as well as stupid denier who laughs aloud at the difficult legacy he's leaving his (presumably) nephew and says:

May 21, 2014 at 5:49 pm
A liberal family member has assured me that a Maunder Minimum like event will have NO effect this time because there is 400 PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere. He’s a soon to be grad student in something social sciency, but insists that he knows all about geology and the other sciences. He is convinced to the point of obsessive worry that humans are the cause of all climate change and that Antarctica will melt in his lifetime and innundate a good portion of the dry land, not just the coasts.

Alas, I can’t laugh too loudly as he’s family after all. 

Oh, a real live normal rational person slipped in a comment. Chris says:

May 21, 2014 at 7:31 pm
Dr. Sheahen said” Within that region, there are two glaciers that are sliding down to the sea at a steady pace, as glaciers always do.

The “steady” pace has doubled from the 80 billion tons/year in the 2005-2010 time period to 160 billion tons/year during the latest measurements. I wouldn’t call that a steady pace, I’d call it a rapidly increasing pace. 

The deniers did have a bit of trouble with the meaning of the word "average". So Tom's assumption about deniers was proven again. There were several comments, with various people explaining what different "averages" mean, for example, swifty is correct when saying:

May 21, 2014 at 9:27 pm
The midpoint of a range, when listed in ascending or descending order, yes, it is called the median. 

I suppose since they are still debating grade school arithmetic, there isn't much reason to hope deniers will understand the intricacies of a melting cryosphere.

---

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

Joughin, Ian, Benjamin E. Smith, and Brooke Medley. "Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica." Science 344, no. 6185 (2014): 735-738. DOI: 10.1126/science.1249055

Judith Curry admits she gets her science from (denier interpretations of?) stolen emails

Apparently Judith Curry took a trip to Australia recently. I guess it was for personal/family reasons because all I know of it is from an interview she gave to a science denying "literary" magazine, Quadrant.

Anthony Watts has copied and pasted excerpts (archived here). I've archived the report of the interview, which was suitably in the "opinion" not fact section of Quadrant Online.  She admits to the interviewer, Tony Thomas, that she's now a dyed in the wool denier, saying:

TONY THOMAS: If the skeptic/orthodox spectrum is a range from 1 (intense skeptic) to 10 (intensely IPCC orthodox), where on the scale would you put yourself
(a) as at 2009
(b) as at 2014,
and why has there been a shift (if any)?

JUDITH CURRY: In early 2009, I would have rated myself as 7; at this point I would rate myself as a 3.  Climategate and the weak response of the IPCC and other scientists triggered a massive re-examination of my support of the IPCC, and made me look at the science much more sceptically.

As you can see, she admits that rather than basing her opinions about climate science on research, she bases it on disinformation about snippets of stolen emails. And rather than being "sceptical", Judith has moved further and further into the fake sceptic camp as time goes by.

I'm not sure that she's being strictly honest even then. Although I agree that the evidence suggests she's become more of a fake sceptic over the years, I suspect it had more to do with her ideology overwhelming her reason than anything to do with "science by hacking" (her choosing to accept disinformation about stolen emails) or climate science.  Remember that Judith only applies her "do nothing it's all too uncertain" notion to mitigation of global warming, which is so "virtually certain" you can regard it as immutable fact. When it comes to matters that affect her directly and immediately, she'll urge action even when the likelihood is only 30%.

Here's a graphic of Judith's confessed transition to denialism, according to herself.

Her transition is well supported by the evidence she's provided over the years. Every now and then we see a glimpse of her former scientific self but those glimpses are becoming more rare.

Judith opts for "it's the sun, stupid"!

As if it wasn't enough her admitting she's moved well into science denying territory, in the interview Judith tosses in an "it's the sun" type of comment.

THOMAS:  Are you supportive of the line that the ‘quiet sun’ presages an era of global cooling in the next few decades?

CURRY: One of the unfortunate consequences of the focus on anthropogenic forcing of climate is that solar effects on climate have been largely neglected.  I think that solar effects, combined with the large scale ocean-circulation regimes, presage continued stagnation in global temperatures for the next two decades.

All that comment shows (apart from giving a boost to Marcia Wyatt's stadium wave hypothesis) is that Judith probably doesn't read much scientific literature these days (like this). Recent research (here) shows that even a grand minimum would only set back the trend of global warming by a few years at most.

What motivates a (former?) climate scientist to accept denier disinformation about stolen email snippets and reject climate science from the experts?

Yes, I know a lot of readers object to speculation about motivation. However there has been relevant research on the topic of motivated reasoning.

Dan Kahan did some research and postulated that:

...the study found that ideologically motivated reasoning is not a consequence of over-reliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning generally. On the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These findings corroborated an alternative hypothesis, which identifies ideologically motivated cognition as a form of information processing that promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important affinity groups.

I expect Judith would argue that she would score high in cognitive reflection. It doesn't take any cognitive reflection to keep shouting "wicked" and "uncertain" over and over without any cognition or analysis.

There's a paper here about party politics and motivated reasoning, which looks to be an interesting analysis. At one stage it notes how people motivated by self-interest become more polarised as new information emerges (even when that new information contradicts their opinion), whereas other people will moderate their opinion in response to new information:

Leeper (2013) shows that individuals motivated – through primed self-interest – to defend their prior attitudes polarize over-time in response to new issue-relevant information. By contrast, individuals primed to have weaker issue attitudes moderate in response to new information, ultimately holding opinions that reflect the consideration of contradictory evidence. The selection of highly contentious issues on which individuals have strong attitudes (see, for example, Taber and Lodge 2006) might bias research toward findings evidence of strong directional motivations and their effects. Thus, the operation of motivated reasoning will look differently for individuals depending on what issues are at stake and how intensely they need to defend their prior attitudes or identities.

Most climate blog readers will be familiar with Lewandowsky13, the "moon landing" study, which found that right wing ideology was a predictor of the rejection of climate science.

Another recent paper found that motivated reasoning was a big factor where people were more engaged in thinking about climate change, and personal experience was the larger factor influencing the opinions of those who didn't know or think much about the subject. From the abstract (my paras):

We use data from a nationally representative sample of Americans surveyed first in 2008 and again in 2011; these longitudinal data allow us to evaluate the causal relationships between belief certainty and perceived experience, assessing the impact of each on the other over time.

Among the full survey sample, we found that both processes occurred: ‘experiential learning’, where perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty, and ‘motivated reasoning’, where high belief certainty influenced perceptions of personal experience. 

We then tested and confirmed the hypothesis that motivated reasoning occurs primarily among people who are already highly engaged in the issue whereas experiential learning occurs primarily among people who are less engaged in the issue, which is particularly important given that approximately 75% of American adults currently have low levels of engagement.

It could well be that Judith has indeed looked at research and realised that people's opinion could be pulled out of shape by misrepresentation of snippets of stolen emails, provided they'd heard about it and weren't familiar with climate science itself (and were predisposed to reject science). This was the finding described in another paper. Although the authors did point out that shrieking "climategate" only really works when preaching to the denier choir:

We also found that the loss of trust in scientists among those Americans who followed the Climategate scandal was primarily among Americans already predisposed, for ideological or cultural worldview reasons, to disbelieve climate science. 

From the WUWT comments

Judith is an occasional hero of deniers, although they don't much like it on the rare occasions when she admits that the greenhouse effect is real. Today they've forgiven her that crime and the choir of deniers are singing her praises.

Orson points out that Judith's transition to denial has been known for some time and says:

May 21, 2014 at 1:13 am
WOW.
Her regular readers will not be terribly surprised to read this.
Still – it is bracing to remember Professor Curry’s recent years of rethinking. And “rethinking the science” is something absent from worthy, accomplished scientists like Susan Solomon, or the less worthy Sir John Houghton. Their youtube presentations on global warming show really none at all through the years. 

Martin A will be disappointed, given that Judith doesn't seem to be doing any research of her own these days - she only publishes as a co-author on her underlings papers:

May 21, 2014 at 1:30 am
Climate science needs to be re-done, essentially from scratch. Professor Curry is one of the few existing climate scientists I’d wish to see involved in the task.

Tom Bowden wishes that Judith would give up emails and read (or do) some real science (isn't that what Tom's saying?) and says:

May 21, 2014 at 2:14 am
Although I am not a Keynesian by any stretch, I’ve always liked this quote: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Seems to capture the point nicely. 

xanonymousblog doesn't agree with Judith's "it's the sun" argument and says (excerpt):

May 21, 2014 at 3:08 am
...When even Lindzen (who is, by the way, the best) doesn’t buy into the solar argument, I think it’s fair to say he and I both deny solar influence, and unashamedly so, since the argument is so poor in the first place. To be sure, the question can be asked “what are we denying?”
Same goes for CO2 (although the argument here is stronger)… 

---

Schurer, Andrew P., Simon FB Tett, and Gabriele C. Hegerl. "Small influence of solar variability on climate over the past millennium." Nature Geoscience 7, no. 2 (2014): 104-108. doi:10.1038/ngeo2040

Meehl, Gerald A., Julie M. Arblaster, and Daniel R. Marsh. "Could a future “Grand Solar Minimum” like the Maunder Minimum stop global warming?." Geophysical Research Letters 40, no. 9 (2013): 1789-1793.  DOI: 10.1002/grl.50361

Kahan, Dan M. "Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection." Judgment & Decision Making 8, no. 4 (2013).

Leeper, Thomas J., and Rune Slothuus. "Political Parties, Motivated Reasoning, and Public Opinion Formation." Political Psychology 35, no. S1 (2014): 129-156.

Lewandowsky, Stephan, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles E. Gignac. "NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore,(Climate) Science Is a Hoax An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science." Psychological science 24, no. 5 (2013): 622-633.

Myers, Teresa A., Edward W. Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, Karen Akerlof, and Anthony A. Leiserowitz. "The relationship between personal experience and belief in the reality of global warming." Nature Climate Change 3, no. 4 (2013): 343-347. DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1754

Leiserowitz, Anthony A., Edward W. Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, Nicholas Smith, and Erica Dawson. "Climategate, public opinion, and the loss of trust." American behavioral scientist 57, no. 6 (2013): 818-837. doi: 10.1177/0002764212458272

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).

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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