BUSTED: How Ridiculous Richard Tol makes myriad bloopers and a big fool of himself and proves the 97% consensus

Update - see below.


Anthony Watts is all excited (archived here, latest here) because economist Richard Tol finally found a journal to publish a paper he's been trying to get someone to publish for nearly a year.  Anthony wrote, mischievously and wrongly a headline and opening comment:

BUSTED: Tol takes on Cook’s ’97% consensus’ claim with a re-analysis, showing the claim is ‘unfounded’

A new paper by Dr. Richard Tol published today in ScienceDirect, journal of Energy Policy, shows that the Cook et al. paper claiming that there is a 97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process. The full paper is available below.

Anthony Watts is wrong, and wrong and wrong again - he's busted!

Firstly, Richard Tol didn't do any reanalysis. He didn't categorise all the abstracts himself. He just did some wonky sums and got the wrong answer, based on flawed assumptions and more. And he threw in a large number of unfounded speculative statements. Not only did Richard not show the claim was "unfounded", he wrote that he accepts the main finding of Cook13.

Secondly, thirdly and fourthly etc, John Cook isn't withholding any data. He provided more than just all the data anyone would need to repeat the analysis (here and here), he even provided a web tool to help people who wanted to to categorise abstracts for themselves. John Cook provided all the data needed to reproduce the analysis. Richard Tol didn't even try to do so. As for the quality of the data - it's a complete set of around 12,000 abstracts returned using a Web of Science search of key terms. So I don't know if Anthony is trying to say that Web of Science isn't any good.  Anthony probably doesn't know either. He just likes blowing hot air.

Anthony's wrong on another point, too. The full paper isn't available at the site Anthony linked to unless you're a paid up subscriber or are willing to pay for the privilege.  (You can read one of Richard's earlier rejected versions here, which I got from Richard's own blog. It's not much different to the final paper.)

This is a very long article, although it barely scratches the surface in the myriad flaws in Ridiculous Richard's paper. If you're on the home page, click here for more.

Anthony Watts promoting conspiracy theorist Tim Ball's Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense - again!

WUWT is coming up with some real gems. Hot on the heels of "CO2 is animal food" comes uber-conspiracy theorist Tim Ball, writing about his mixed up conspiracy theories (archived here). In one spot he wrote, regarding the shift away from fossil fuels:

It’s only valid if science supports the claim that CO2, because of human production, is causing warming or climate change. It doesn’t, so there is no scientific need to replace fossil fuels.

Yes, we've known for a long time that Anthony Watts really does favour some sky dragon slayers (ie greenhouse effect deniers) even while claiming to have banned them from the comments.

On the subject of magic sky dragons, Eli Rabett wrote some lyrics - but the internet has a very - long - memory. On the subject of Tim Ball and his one time "lawyer" John O'Sullivan, read the comments below Eli's ditty.

"Expert" David Legates tells US Senate Committee that CO2 is animal food

This'll tickle your funny bone. Anthony Watts has been privileged with an advance copy of testimony to a US Senate Committee (archived here, with the pdf file of the testimony copied here). It probably makes him feel so important to have a copy before it's presented. (Surely that's frowned upon.) Some members of the US Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works obviously wanted to have a little fun at the expense of the US taxpayers, so they called up a chap by the name of David Legates to testify.

David has impressive credentials. He says:

I am a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and I served as the Delaware State Climatologist from 2005 to 2011. I also am an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Agricultural Economics & Statistics and the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering Program. I received a B.A. in Mathematics and Geography, a M.S. in Geography, and a Ph.D. in Climatology, all from the University of Delaware

I checked because I found it almost impossible to credit that a university would employ a ratbag like David Legates. It does - but he doesn't have any profile there :(

CO2 is animal food!

I started reading his testimony but had to stop on page two when I got to this bit:

Considering that CO2 is food for plants and animals...

Yep, you read that right. Here it is in black and white and grey - see page two:

David Legates isn't just running the normal denier spiel that "CO2 is plant food". Now it's animal food, too. Do you reckon he feeds his livestock CO2? Would he feed it to them frozen, you know, slabs of dry ice which would look just like salt licks? Surely not. Do their tongues stick to the CO2 when they try to lick it?

David Legates might call himself a climatologist, but he's a science denying climatologist. He has graced this blog before - here and here. Oh, and he's a member of the Cornwall Alliance cult.

Pity David's animals. Pity the poor Delawarians :(

Dennis T. Avery cycles toward an ice age; Anthony Watts senselessly ignores the ice @wattsupwiththat

They do have some funny ones at the Heartland Institute and doesn't Anthony Watts love 'em. This one's called Dennis T. Avery and apparently he's been an ice age comether for some time. He even scored a Wikipedia entry to prove it :)

Not only that, but he scored a ClimateProgress post all to himself when he couldn't tell the difference between growth and growth rate. And a SourceWatch entry. Now he's really hit the bigtime with a HotWhopper entry - but it's not all for himself. Ice age comethers are a dime a dozen at WUWT.

Dennis used to work for the government - the US Department of Agriculture. (Deniers forgive him because he's one of them.) I wonder how it feels to be a laughing stock among his former colleagues. It's easy to infer from his WUWT "guest essay" (archived here) that he doesn't accept the greenhouse effect. He was writing about an article by Geoffrey Parker in the NY Times. The article itself was about how climate change contributed to wars and social unrest in the past and postulated that it may well do the same as the world warms and food production is affected.  Dennis wasn't buying it. I think he figured that droughts only happen when there's a cold spell or something like that. He wrote:

Almost all past agricultural and cultural collapses occurred during “little ice ages,” not during our many global warm periods. 

Now I don't know if that's right or wrong but I do know that the way things are going, humans will never have experienced a global warm period like the one we're heading towards. The blue line in the chart below covers the period since civilisation. The red line is what's projected over the next few decades. Probably before this century is out.

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

Dennis doesn't accept that we're warming the world. People in the future will probably feel heat like humans have never felt before. Ever. Not in all the time since we evolved. Dennis wrote:

The danger is the cold, chaotic weather of the “little ice ages” themselves. That will shrink agricultural zones and shorten growing seasons. Another such icy period is inevitably coming, though not likely in the next two centuries, if past cycles are an accurate guide.

Regardless, for the next 20-25 years, humanity will likely be in another cooling period, caused by the sun’s reduced energy output and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. We are about 150 years into the modern warming. Since the shortest of these warm periods during the Halocene was 350 years, and they generally last 350 to 800 years, it is unlikely that we will enter another Little Ice Age for a couple more centuries. 

That's it. He's doing climate by numbers - and not very useful numbers at that. He thinks that there are some sort of long term cycles lasting between 350 and 800 years - which is a nice wide margin for him, isn't it. He offers no evidence for his claim and it's not one I've ever come across before.

He's wrong of course. We aren't due for a major glaciation for around 50,000 years and as for mini ice ages, only if there's a few supervolcanic eruptions or an all-out nuclear war.

Anthony thinks that ice doesn't melt in the heat - again

Meanwhile, Anthony Watts has written another silly article (archived here) about how ice doesn't melt when it gets hot. Oh, he doesn't say so in so many words. What he does is claim that seas won't rise over the coming decades, or not by much. He reckons that the rate of sea level rise is currently linear (he's wrong) and that it won't change as West Antarctic ice slips into the ocean.  Anthony decided on the following senseless headline:

Making sense of senseless sea level scares in Norfolk Virginia – 60% of the rise is from subsidence, the remainder from landfill settling

It was Anthony's own article that was senseless, not the fact that seas are going to rise quite a lot. He didn't manage to make much sense, as usual. I've written enough about his fantasies on that score already (such as here and here and here and here) so I'll send you over to Tamino's excellent take down.

Before you go - or afterwards, if you want to see a couple of very good videos about sea level, try these two.

From the WUWT comments

Just a small selection today. First Goldie discusses the impending ice age that won't cometh for a very long time and says:

June 2, 2014 at 12:22 am
That sounds about right. But at the moment we have a group of people who are determined to blame everything on too much Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. I suspect the North Atlantic will freeze over and this group will still be trying to assign it to Carbon Dioxide. The reality is of course that these people belong to an interesting cabal who are anti any form of carbon based energy and instead would prefer to have half the population of the planet freeze to death whilst trying to use so called renewables. Indeed their thinking is so odd that they would probably prefer it if half of the population froze to death. 

ffohnad is writing about sea level rises and says:

June 1, 2014 at 8:46 pm
Do these people actually believe the ice caps could melt while the temperature remains far below freezing even with the 3 degree worst case projection ? It appears that only the dumbest portion of our population are hired by the media. 

Daniel Botkin obediently tells denier Republicans what they want to hear, but who is he?

There's not much at WUWT the past couple of days.

In the USA one of the House Committees had another hearing. The Republicans wanted to get a few deniers on record trashing climate science. This time they were wanting to try to discredit the IPCC so they got three people they thought would do the job for them and allowed one person to be nominated by the Democrats. The four people were:

• Dr. Richard S.J. Tol, Professor of Economics, University of Sussex
• Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University
• Dr. Daniel Botkin, Professor Emeritus, Department of  Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., Senior Research Scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University

If you know anything about the parlous state of the Republican Party these days then you should be able to guess which was the Democrats' nominee.

The world domination ultra-paranoid conspiracy theory at WUWT

Anthony Watts has posted another "world domination" conspiracy theory at WUWT (archived here, latest here). This time it's not been written by the uber-conspiracy nutter Tim Ball or the paranoid conspiracy theorist Alec Rawls. This one is by the potty peer and birther conspiracy theorist, Christopher Monckton.

Christopher Monckton is attacking Prince Charles for suggesting that, in preparation for the UN climate summit in Paris to be held in December 2015:

"Over the next 18 months, and bearing in mind the urgency of the situation confronting us, the world faces what is probably the last effective window of opportunity to vacate the insidious lure of the 'last chance saloon' in order to agree an ambitious, equitable and far-sighted multilateral settlement in the context of the post-2015 sustainable development goals and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change," he said.

Notice Charles' words - agreement, multi-lateral and sustainable development. He isn't talking about anyone taking over the world. He is saying that all 193 UN member nations have to work together to resolve a global problem. They have to put aside political differences and come up with a workable solution to mitigate global warming.

Christopher probably thinks he's on a winner attacking Prince Charles, who has some nutty ideas of his own. Which is nuttier - Christopher's "cure for AIDS" or Charles' homeopathy? Christopher's "birtherism" and "hitler" accusations or Charles' proposing we act on scientific advice?

If you're on the home page, click here to read on...

Allies in Denial: Roy Spencer joins the Heartland mob at WUWT

Roy Spencer has joined the Heartland mob rejecting scientific evidence. He's written an article with Joe Bast of all people (archived here). I wonder what's in it for him? Remember when he called his fellow scientists Nazis? Now he's joined up with the denier crowd who compared everyone who accepts mainstream science with mass murderers.  That's the same mob who upset the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

What a nong! Thing is, he and his mate Joe list a number of papers that have shown that the overwhelming proportion of scientific papers that attribute a cause to global warming show that it's being caused by humans. To counteract proper science, he wheels out a dumb paper coauthored by the potty peer as "evidence".

Do you want to know how many scientific papers attribute global warming to causes other than humans? Well, in the past 20 years or so, the Cook study showed that of the 11,944 papers published between 1991 and 2011 there were 4014 that expressed a position on global warming.  Of these 4014, 3896 papers or 97.1% endorsed human-caused global warming, 78 or 1.9% disputed it and 40 or 1.0% indicated the cause was 'uncertain'.

You wouldn't know that if you only read WUWT. But then if you only read WUWT you'd probably think that global warming is caused by Russian steampipes and that the world is about to plunge into an ice age and that killing off mammals would be a good solution to stopping the global warming, which isn't happening but if it is it's caused by insects.

How long will it be before Roy Spencer starts arguing that burning fossil fuels doesn't release carbon dioxide? He's already explained how he fudged the charts he fudged, now he's snuggling up to Heartland, it's no big step to greenhouse effect denial.

From the WUWT comments

Latitude is typical of denier illogic and wants to be able to reject science in peace, without anyone pointing out the overwhelming consensus - and says:

May 30, 2014 at 2:18 pm
What amazes me the most…..is that most people don’t think claiming something like that….is as lame as I think it is

If the science was “robust”…they wouldn’t have to claim anything….and they wouldn’t

Latitude probably thinks that pointing out that mainstream science shows that evolution is real only prove it's a myth.

From Anthony Watts, alarmist

Anthony Watts added his two bobs worth of alarmism, writing that shifting to clean energy will "cripple our economy". It's much more likely climate change will do that if we don't start shifting to clean energy in earnest soon:

There’s just one problem – aside from the fact that this assertion [Sou: that most scientists accept mainstream climate science] is being used to help justify policies and regulations that are closing down fossil fuel power plants and crippling our economy. The claim is completely bogus. As Heartland Institute president Joe Bast and climate scientist Roy Spencer make clear in this article, the papers used to create and perpetuate the 97% claim are seriously and fundamentally flawed. The alleged consensus simply does not exist; much less does it represent anything remotely approaching 97%.

Ha ha ha. Anthony thinks that most climate scientists don't accept climate science. He puts his faith in an anti-science lobby group and a wacky scientist who reckons his god will save him from all natural disasters (but not economic failures). Anthony reckons it's "bogus" to say that scientists accept science. What a nutter! I wonder what proportion of climate scientists he thinks do accept climate science? What does he think the rest of them do - dog astrology?

---

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

Australia caused a mass extinction...

History has a habit of repeating itself. Today Australia continues to burn coal like it was going out of fashion and it digs it all up and ships it off so that other countries can do the same. However this isn't the first time Australia has contributed to a mass extinction.

I came across an article in ScienceDaily.com about a new paper in the journal Geology that shows that Australia caused a mass extinction in the past. The long ago past. Around five hundred and ten million years ago if you want to be precise - or as precise as one can be when talking about events as long ago as that.

From the press release:

A Curtin University researcher has shown that ancient volcanic eruptions in Australia 510 million years ago significantly affected the climate, causing the first known mass extinction in the history of complex life.

Published in the journal Geology, Associate Professor Fred Jourdan from Curtin's Department of Applied Geology, along with colleagues from several Australian and international institutions, used radioactive dating techniques to precisely measure the age of the eruptions of the Kalkarindji volcanic province -- where lavas covered an area of more than 2 million square kilometres in the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

Dr Jourdan and his team were able to prove the volcanic province occurred at the same time as the Early-Middle Cambrian extinction from 510-511 million years ago -- the first extinction to wipe out complex multicellular life.

Earth was a bit different back then.  At that time Australia would have been part of Gondwana and there wasn't anyone around to take notes. The messages about what happened were written into the landscape by the events themselves. If you want to visualise the size of two million square kilometres, think Western Australia, which is 2.5 million square km. Or think three times the size of Texas, which is nearly 0.7 million square km. That was some volcanic complex.

What happened was that the climate oscillated a lot, cooling with all the sulphur dioxide and warming with all the CO2 and CH4. Lots of species disappeared never to be seen again, except maybe in fossils.

More from sciencedaily.com:

"We calculated a near perfect chronological correlation between large volcanic province eruptions, climate shifts and mass extinctions over the history of life during the last 550 million years, with only one chance over 20 billion that this correlation is just a coincidence," Dr Jourdan said.

Dr Jourdan said the rapid oscillations of the climate produced by volcanic eruptions made it difficult for various species to adapt, ultimately resulting in their demise. He also stressed the importance of this research to better understand our current environment.

"To comprehend the long-term climatic and biological effects of the massive injections of gas in the atmosphere by modern society, we need to recognise how climate, oceans and ecosytems were affected in the past," he said.

About the Kalkarindji continental flood basalt province

I came across this earlier paper by Linda Glass and David Phillips, that looks as if they named the Kalkarindji province and also made the link with the Early Cambrian extinction event. It was published in 2006 in the same journal. (David Phillips was a coauthor of the new paper, too.) Here is the abstract:

Extensive basaltic volcanism (>10⁶ km²) occurred across northern and western-central Australia during Cambrian time. The basalts are geochemically distinctive, having unusually uniform elevated incompatible element signatures (high Th/U, La/Sm, Rb/Ba) that are atypical of most other continental flood basalt provinces. Individual volcanic and intrusive suites previously assigned to local stratigraphic units are shown to share a common parental magma.

This vast Cambrian igneous province is here named the Kalkarindji continental flood basalt province, Australia's oldest and largest Phanerozoic large igneous province. High-precision ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar analyses of plagioclase feldspar separates from basalt flows yield ages of 508 ± 2 Ma and 505 ± 2 Ma (2σ), indistinguishable from previous U-Pb zircon ages for related dolerites.

These ages indicate that basaltic volcanism coincided with the Early-Middle Cambrian boundary and suggest a temporal link between eruption of the Kalkarindji basalts and the end-Early Cambrian (early Toyonian) faunal mass extinction event.

There aren't any comments from WUWT because the news article hasn't appeared there - or not yet anyway.  Anthony's too busy reblogging denier nonsense.  More on that later. I figured it might be nice to write about science for a change.

---

F. Jourdan, K. Hodges, B. Sell, U. Schaltegger, M. T. D. Wingate, L. Z. Evins, U. Soderlund, P. W. Haines, D. Phillips, T. Blenkinsop. "High-precision dating of the Kalkarindji large igneous province, Australia, and synchrony with the Early-Middle Cambrian (Stage 4-5) extinction." Geology, 2014; 42 (6): 543 DOI: 10.1130/G35434.1

Glass, Linda M., and David Phillips. "The Kalkarindji continental flood basalt province: A new Cambrian large igneous province in Australia with possible links to faunal extinctions." Geology 34, no. 6 (2006): 461-464. doi: 10.1130/G22122.1.

The peers at WUWT give a guest the thumbs down

Sheesh, Anthony's gone into book publishing at WUWT. He's posted up a Frankenstein of an article by William McClenney (archived here). It starts with an abstract unlike any you'll read in a scientific journal, but fits with the mould of denier blogs:

Abstract: I used to think there was only one known substitute for intelligence – stupidity. I have since realized that I left out evil (see Hitler et al). I have also come to the conclusion that the difference between confidence and arrogance is competence. Keep those thoughts in mind as we take a tour de force through the peer-reviewed literature regarding the climatic “madhouse” also known as glacial inception. It would be one thing if we were to become concerned about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), say in the middle of an interglacial. It’s quite another altogether to get all worked-up over it at a probable end extreme interglacial.

William follows this with an "author's note" in which he tells his readers that before they ask any questions relating to his latest monstrosity, they need to read three other WUWT monstrosities he's written, dating back over four years or so (to 2010).

William punishes WUWT readers with 16,457 words interspersed with multiple unreadable jpeg files of other documents each having lots more words and a few charts, plus he treats WUWT with a zillion hyperlinks, bold italics and underlines.

The number of words above this paragraph is 224, so William's "guest essay" is more than 73 times longer than the above. It's equivalent to more than 30 pages of a Microsoft Word document in Times Roman font size 12. And that's without all his jpeg files and hyperlinked articles. Add in the other three articles that William mandates as pre-reading and you've got 52 pages and 25,585 words plus multiple jpeg files with lots more words and charts. That would make William's required reading in total well over 100 times longer than this article. Not a bad effort for Anthony's pseudo-science blog.

It's only another "ice age" article

Did I read William's four articles? Good lord no. It was much more illuminating to do a word count:) I agree with Alan Robertson (see below).  I barely skimmed one or two sentences. I got more from the comments. I gather that William took an inordinate amount of words to speculate something quite simple and quite wrong, namely that CO2 emissions are staving off an imminent ice age. (The world isn't due to ice up for around 50,000 years even without global warming.)

Thumbs down!

A lot of WUWT readers gave William's abomination the thumbs down. What it goes to show is that some WUWT deniers are a bit smarter than some of the guest essayists at WUWT.  Which is not really something worth boasting about.

From the WUWT comments

Gary says:

May 29, 2014 at 11:59 am
The “abstract” is not one. This could use a real summary of the main points and conclusions right up front that encourages me to read this mile long piece.

Alan Robertson says:

May 29, 2014 at 12:16 pm
Life’s too short… 

lsvalgaard says:

May 29, 2014 at 12:49 pm
The piece fails the ‘elevator test’. What is the bottom line? [you have 10 seconds to explain it]

milodonharlani says:

May 29, 2014 at 1:08 pm
I too would welcome a brief summary of the points the author hopes to make & support by his citations. 

Bob says:

May 29, 2014 at 1:17 pm
I have a headache. Maybe I will read this another day. 

Henry Bowman says:

May 29, 2014 at 2:50 pm
It is a real travesty that the author goes to the trouble to write this essay, but chooses to use absolutely horrible and virtually unreadable graphic illustrations, all due to the use of the of (low-quality) jpeg image format. Why bother postig the images at all if they are unreadable? Please learn to use PNG format for images that are not continuous-tone. jpeg format is designed for photographs are works nicely for such. The use of jpeg format for line drawings seems to be a particular problem with WUWT, for whatever reason. 

Jimbo says:

May 29, 2014 at 2:51 pm
Loooong pieces like this need a proper
Abstract
Conclusion 

M Simon says:

May 29, 2014 at 4:10 pm
Too long? Well, I got about half way through it. 

Michael Moon says (excerpt):

May 29, 2014 at 4:31 pm
Anthony,
When did you become a book publisher?

[REPLY: No idea what you are talking about -A] 

 u.k.(us) says:

May 29, 2014 at 5:13 pm
Maybe it’s just me, but when Godwin’s law is proven in the second sentence……
……..I only scrolled through the rest, looking for the conclusion.
All I got was a bunch of quotes.
Stupid is a strong word, use it sparingly.

RoHa says:

May 29, 2014 at 6:07 pm
Gah!
My brain hurts, Brian. Lots of wriggly lines. Lots of hard words. Lots of sciencey stuff.
But no answer to the key question.
Are we doomed from fire or ice? 

John Andrews says:

May 29, 2014 at 8:50 pm
Too long. 

A few people made an attempt to wade through. Mark and two Cats got as far as the "abstract" and, quoting some passages, says:

May 29, 2014 at 12:18 pm
“I used to think there was only one known substitute for intelligence – stupidity. I have since realized that left out evil (see Hitler et al).”
————
Evil is a substitute for intelligence? Does that mean that morality is too?
Also, it seems to me that evil does not preclude intelligence. Lotsa evil-cum-intelligent people throughout history.

“I have also come to the conclusion that the difference between confidence and arrogance is competence. ”
————
I have know people who are both competent and arrogant. Competence does not automatically confer humility. 

Denier dolts at WUWT with the meme: "It's happened before..."

There are not many denier memes (it takes more than conspiracy ideation and stunted world view for a fertile imagination). One of them is the "it's happened before" meme.

This is a strange one for deniers to adopt for themselves when you think about it. The fact that events may have happened in the past under a given set of circumstances provides rich clues about what we can expect in the future under not dissimilar circumstances.

Today Anthony Watts has copied and pasted a press release about carbon buried under loess in soils in parts of the USA. Anthony wrote:

The next time somebody says wildfires in the USA are “unprecedented” show them this. Buried fossil soils found to be awash in carbon

I'm yet to hear someone say that wildfires in the USA are unprecedented in the sense that they've only been known to occur in recent times. Are they becoming more common?   Though it's likely, that's probably still an open question.  Wildfires have multiple causes and analysis is confounded by changes to fire management as well as all the changes we've made to our environment, particularly these past several decades. Is the risk getting greater with global warming? Indubitably. Especially in fire-prone states as temperatures rise. Where I live we are likely to get more frequent catastrophic fire danger days as time goes on and that is the case these past few years.

Abrupt climate change and the consequences

The paper itself is by Erika Marin-Spiotta and colleagues and has been published in Nature Climate Change. It's about how deep soils contain bands of carbon-heavy layers. These have been attributed to wildfires burning in times past when there was rapid warming. Hence the irony of deniers pointing to the paper as if to say there's nothing to worry about.  These carbon layers were often buried under huge amounts of loess, which is dust that got deposited, largely from ground up rocks etc after deglaciation. From the press release and the abstract, it looks as if there was a time when there were lots of awful dust storms plus massive wildfires all happening around the same time - over centuries or decades rather than over millenia. That wouldn't be something to look forward to at all.

This is from the abstract:

Buried soils contain large reservoirs of organic carbon at depths that are not typically included in regional and global soil carbon inventories1. One such palaeosol, the Brady soil of southwestern Nebraska, USA, is buried under six metres of loess. The Brady soil developed at the land surface on the late-Pleistocene-aged Peoria Loess in a period of warmth and wetness during which dunefields and dust sources across the region were stabilized. Abrupt climate change in the early Holocene led to increased loess deposition that buried the soil. 

Here's an extract from sciencedaily.com about the paper:

"There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring," says Erika Marin-Spiotta, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of geography and the lead author of the new study. "It was assumed that there was little carbon in deeper soils. Most studies are done in only the top 30 centimeters. Our study is showing that we are potentially grossly underestimating carbon in soils."

The soil studied by Marin-Spiotta and her colleagues, known as the Brady soil, formed between 15,000 and 13,500 years ago in what is now Nebraska, Kansas and other parts of the Great Plains. It lies up to six-and-a- half meters below the present-day surface and was buried by a vast accumulation of windborne dust known as loess beginning about 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers that covered much of North America began to retreat.

The region where the Brady soil formed was not glaciated, but underwent radical change as the Northern Hemisphere's retreating glaciers sparked an abrupt shift in climate, including changes in vegetation and a regime of wildfire that contributed to carbon sequestration as the soil was rapidly buried by accumulating loess.

...The deeply buried soil studied by Marin-Spiotta, Mason and their colleagues, a one-meter-thick ribbon of dark soil far below the modern surface, is a time capsule of a past environment, the researchers explain. It provides a snapshot of an environment undergoing significant change due to a shifting climate. The retreat of the glaciers signaled a warming world, and likely contributed to a changing environment by setting the stage for an increased regime of wildfire.

"The world was getting warmer during the time the Brady soil formed," says Mason. "Warm-season prairie grasses were increasing and their expansion on the landscape was almost certainly related to rising temperatures."

The retreat of the glaciers also set in motion an era when loess began to cover large swaths of the ancient landscape. Essentially dust, loess deposits can be thick -- more than 50 meters deep in parts of the Midwestern United States and areas of China. It blankets large areas, covering hundreds of square kilometers in meters of sediment.

From the WUWT comments

Despite being primed by Anthony Watts to respond along the lines of "it's happened before", the WUWT-ers weren't all obedient and responded with various different denierisms.

cnxtim doesn't bother with the article at all and simply spouts denier drivel and says:

May 27, 2014 at 3:07 pm
This scientific research is the stuff that is expected of all Universes. And of course there is a cost associated with keeping these institutions open for business. However, the ridiculously excessive funding of CAGW scare mongers has to be stopped before it destroys the very society it is designed to improve.

MJPenny is maybe not aware of just how much carbon is in the biosphere and says:

May 27, 2014 at 3:51 pm
So if the Brady soil formed 13,500 to 15,000 years ago and this sequestered a significnt amount of carbon, what were the atmospheric CO2 concentrations before and after this period? If there was no significant drop in CO2 then the carbon sequestered is insignificant and this study is just for additional CAGW hype. 

Scarface is a denier of the fearful paranoid conspiracy theorising kind and says:

May 27, 2014 at 4:07 pm
Could or couldn’t, that’s the question! Could or will, might or should, may or doesn’t, who knows! Settled science, yet no answers, only questions and suggestions. Meanwhile nothing happens, maybe it’s time to move on to some real problems, like hunger, malaria, childlabour, poverty.
But who am I kidding, this whole scam is about fear and control. Let’s burn the food, let’s ruin the economies, let’s make everybodies life as miserable as possible, while people believe it’s for their own good. What a world.

Philip Bradley decides that the scientists got things topsy turvy and it looks as if he thinks that more fires started all by themselves in the absence of climate change, but at least he's thinking about the complexity of interactions and feedbacks when he says:

May 27, 2014 at 4:15 pm
The retreat of the glaciers signaled a warming world, and likely contributed to a changing environment by setting the stage for an increased regime of wildfire.
“The world was getting warmer during the time the Brady soil formed,” says Mason. “Warm-season prairie grasses were increasing and their expansion on the landscape was almost certainly related to rising temperatures.”

I think the cause and effect were the other way around. Increasing fires (particularly peat fires which can burn for years) deposited black carbon on the glaciers, reducing albedo and triggering net melt. Falling sea levels from ice accumulation dried out coastal swamps sufficiently that fires could take hold. 

Louis decides to extrapolate way beyond what any of the researchers said or implied. He is attempting reductio ad absurdum but instead builds a strawman:

May 27, 2014 at 4:56 pm
Oh no! Fossil organic carbon could be a potential contributor to climate change “as humans increasingly disturb landscapes through a variety of activities…”
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In other words humans, you must stop all activities that might disturb landscapes – no farming, no mining, no drilling, no new housing developments, and certainly no underground atomic bomb testing. I assume they will want us all to crowd into existing urban areas and leave all other landscapes untouched. But if the countryside is not being farmed, how will the urban areas get food, by eating their dead? Perhaps, that’s also part of the plan. If most of us starve to death, all the better because there will be less stress on mother Gaia.

Gary Pearse is another signed up member of the scientific illiterati, preferring to mock rather than learn and says:

May 27, 2014 at 6:01 pm
So changing climate was a feature of 13 millennia ago. Let’s see, what is the real take home here? Ah yes, wildfires sequester carbon for thousands of years and we get double the bang for the buck because new greenery has to grow using up more carbon. Let ‘er burn baby burn and then grow baby grow. Gee we got to get those Nebraska farmers to stop planting grain down 50 meters. It could disturb the sequestered carbon. 

Joel O'Bryan confuses coal seams from a hundred million years ago or more, with much younger carbon layers from 13,000 or so years ago. and says:

May 27, 2014 at 7:05 pm
Rich sources of carbon deeply buried… who knew?
Tell that to a coal miner, the laughter might temporarily make him forget about the unemployment line Obama wants to put him in.

pyromancer76 is another avowed member of the illiterati and says:

May 27, 2014 at 7:06 pm
Anthony, I don’t know if I want to continue reading. These ridiculous studies that put forth such little science — is it worth it? I don’t know. This is the first time I quit and said to myself this article is not worth my time. Is it worth yours? Of course, I can’t answer that and I know that holding these ridiculous studies (using my/yours/our tax-payer dollars to do so) up to ridicule is probably important…..but…..I’ve had it. I want science, or the hard work to follow a hypothesis, or, I don’t know. I DON’T WANT THIS. I will quit reading. Thanks. Just letting you know.

Let's finish with Anthony Watts himself declaring his membership of the scientific illiterati. I figure he's disappointed that more people didn't toe the line with his "it's happened before" meme and instead branched of in different denier directions. Anthony Watts says:

May 27, 2014 at 7:18 pm
Yes I know, its like reading “science for dolts”. OTOH, if I (and readers like you) don’t point out how absurd some of these things are, who will?

I published this one because it actually showed that large wildfires are not uncommon. In the age of fire suppression, we’ve built a cocoon of inexperience. – Anthony 

I wrote the main article before reading this comment of Anthony's. He has confirmed what I wrote. He was writing it as a denier meme "it's happened before". The bonus is that his comment shows that he is himself a fully paid up member of the scientific illiterati.  It's sometimes hard to know if he's just plain dumb or if he's pandering to the stupid in his readers. From what I've seen over the past year or so it's a bit of both.

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Erika Marin-Spiotta, Nina T. Chaopricha, Alain F. Plante, Aaron F. Diefendorf, Carsten W. Mueller, A. Stuart Grandy, Joseph A. Mason. "Long-term stabilization of deep soil carbon by fire and burial during early Holocene climate change". Nature Geoscience, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2169

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