About increasing winter Antarctic sea ice and decreasing summer Arctic sea ice

Science deniers are making a lot out of the growth in Antarctic sea ice, mostly over winter.  Strangely enough they aren't accusing scientists of fabricating the data, for a change.

Here's a chart from The Cryosphere Today (not, as Anthony's ill-informed "guest" referred to it, Today Cryosphere or maybe just Cryosphere). It's hit a record high for this time of year - ie since 1979.

Source: The Cryosphere Today

The main reasons for the increase in sea ice are described very nicely in this thread on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum (h/t Neven). As AbruptSLR points out:

...on average the Antarctic Sea Ice Area is going up by 0.2% per year, and the average thickness is going up 0.2% per year, resulting in an average sea ice volume increase of 0.4% per year.  However, these numbers are orders of magnitude lower than the corresponding changes taking place to the Arctic Sea Ice.

I did this chart last year (you can read my previous article on the subject here, with some reading material about models not projecting the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice). I combined the Arctic and Antarctic at their respective minima to illustrate the point. That means I've put the September values in the Arctic with the February values for Antarctica. It's missing the latest years. I'll update it after September if I remember to do so. Click to see it larger, as always.

Data source: NSIDC

The big impact on climate is in the summer. It's summer ice cover that affects albedo, not mid-winter ice, when the poles are in darkness. (Not that there's any sea ice at the South Pole.)

As for why the sea ice in the southern oceans is increasing, AbruptSLR has this to say (and a lot more besides):

Denialist should be aware that not only is the average water temperature in the Southern Ocean increasing with time, but also the air temperature above the Southern Ocean is increasing with time, and the following linked research makes it clear that the most significant reason why the Antarctic Sea Ice is increasing is due to the formation of the seasonal Antarctic ozone hole after the mid-1980's created by anthropologically induced chlorides in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica; which in turn caused the circumpolar Antarctic westerly wind velocity to increase (see the following abstract for the influence of this increased wind velocity on the Antarctic Sea Ice); and the linked reference indicates that the intensifying regional winds in Antarctic is one of the most significant factors accounting for the increasing maximum extent of Antarctic sea ice. 

There is a lot of useful information and references to scientific papers in that thread. I don't have time to research and write about this right now. And I doubt I could do it any better than AbruptSLR in any case, and probably a lot worse.

Again, here is a link to the discussion. It's well worth a read, especially for anyone who wants to rebut denialist nonsense on the subject.

As for what's happening in the Arctic, well somewhat surprisingly, the ice extent is dropping quite a bit. It doesn't look as if it will break the 2012 record low though. Neven's blog is the place to go to keep up with what's happening there.

Source: Arctic Sea Ice Monitor

From the WUWT comments

Anthony Watts prefers to focus his readers attention on Antarctica, rather than the Arctic and to spread his usual disinformation about. Here are some of the mindless comments he hoped for and got:

Lucius von Steinkaninchen says:

July 2, 2014 at 11:24 am
* * * It’s getting colder around Antarctica and so the ice is growing * * *
In a world of some fields of Science degenerated enough to forget Occam’s Razor, it is so refreshing to see a simple model tying up cause and effect…

Bob Diaz says:

July 2, 2014 at 11:25 am
It appears that reality does not agree with the computer models.
How could reality be so wrong??? ;-))

Ben Howison says:

July 2, 2014 at 11:27 am
Looks kinda like a hockey stick, doesn’t it? 

Shawn from High River is about the only person who says something sensible, but I doubt he realises it. He says:

July 2, 2014 at 11:29 am
When these pesky facts get in the way of the prevailing theory,they just modify the theory to suit the facts

JimS says:

July 2, 2014 at 11:41 am
It is all so logical, it is astounding that no one can catch onto a very simple principle.
At the north pole, when sea ice trends to diminish, that means it is a sign of global warming.
However, at the south pole, on the opposite side of the earth, sea ice is increasing. But since this is on the opposite end of the earth, increasing sea ice means that is a sign of global warming.
These are opposite poles you see, so the exact opposite trend means the same thing. It is all global warming! 

Sheesh! (/sarc) 

John Schwartz says:

July 2, 2014 at 11:51 am
Just doesn’t fit the narrative, does it…  

Incompetent or deceitful? Anthony Watts is lost for words so substitutes pictures...

Update - see below. Judith Curry has decided to join forces with the loony camp. [Sou: 5:30 pm 2 July 14 AESDT]


This is a follow-up to Anthony Watts idiocy with regard to the US temperature record. You can read about his lead up tantrums here and here.

After all his mistakes of the past few days, topped off by this latest gaffe, Anthony Watts' reputation as far as the US temperature records go should be in tatters. Except he has no reputation with anyone who counts for anything. He's just another denialist blogger.

Lost for words

Today Anthony Watts is lost for words. So lost that when he found out that NCDC/NOAA had responded to a query from Politifact, he just posted the response "without comment" (archived here). The response from NCDC was, unsurprisingly, that their algorithms are working as intended.  You can read it in full in the archived WUWT article. It is just as Nick Stokes and others wrote.

Anthony peevishly wrote "The NCDC has not responded to me personally, I only got this by asking around." Yeah, you'd think that after Anthony's lunatic rantings at all and sundry and misrepresenting the NCDC they'd at least have paid him the courtesy of writing to him, the "bigger than Ben Hur" denier blogger, "personally"!

He stomped about for at least three hours trying to figure out how to get back at the NCDC/NOAA for ignoring him and his anti-science blog. "How could they do that?" He fumed. "I just put in a huge amount of effort telling my readers how bad and unscrupulous and wrong and positively evil the NOAA is and they ignore me."

The fact that it was Anthony who was so dreadfully wrong in almost everything he wrote about the US temperature record would have been beside the point. He wanted to stir up a hornets' nest, but the hornets flew off over his head. He wasn't worth even a little sting.

Anthony Watts takes a swipe at his engineering buddies

After three hours Anthony was still lost for words, but he came up with a sneaky way around this. He decided to say it with pictures. So he put up lots of big photos (archived here). Most of them were of engineering disasters. Given a huge (dis)proportion of Anthony's denier fans are engineers this may not go over well.

Anthony took particular aim at his fellow deniers, the Gang of 49 who are retired space engineers and astronauts. This motley lot pride themselves on rejecting climate science, though they can't do simple arithmetic and know nothing about climate. Anthony doesn't care if he shoots them down. He's prepared to drop a few allies in his quest to prove that all climate science is wrong. Here's a list of his pictures that PROVE the US temperature record is wrong.

• some early NASA rockets - would these have been NASA rockets designed by some of the Gang of 49 who Anthony promotes from time to time?
• the Mariner - that surely would have involved some of the Gang of 49 deniers
• the Mars Climate Orbiter - again, were any of those dismissed engineers close to the Gang of 49?
• the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse - which wouldn't endear him to his engineering buddies, 
• the de Havilland Comet, that's a bit risky. Some of Anthony's engineering fans would be old enough to have played a part in that one.
• the Titanic - that's probably safe enough. The people who designed the Titanic wouldn't be around any more. And I don't know that he has any admirers from the ship-building industry.

Anthony Watts - incompetent or deceitful?

Having listed a few engineering disasters that were not remotely connected to NOAA or NCDC, Anthony finally gets down to brass tacks. He's dug up the fact that on the "Climate at a Glance" website, the record displayed for the month of May for Dallas Texas, between 1970 and 2000, doesn't show a difference between the maximum and minimum temperature and average monthly temperature. Anthony reckons that's a travesty!  Anthony wrote:

While being told that “all is well” and and that “our algorithm is working as designed”, it is easy to discover that if one tries to plot the temperature data for any city in the United States like Dallas Texas for example you get plots for high temperature, low temperature, and average temperature that are identical:

Max/Min data to come at NCDC

So let's look into that, shall we? This is what NCDC had to say about version 1 of the US Climate Division Dataset (my emphasis):

Weaknesses of the U.S. Climate Division Dataset: The U.S. Climate Division Dataset does not contain monthly maximum or minimum temperature or any variables/indices derivable from daily data. Temperature data is adjusted for time of observation bias, however no other adjustments are made for inhomogeneities. These inhomogeneities include changes in instrumentation, observer, and observation practices, station and instrumentation moves, and changes in station composition resulting from stations closing and opening over time within a division.

Does the above apply to what Anthony found? I don't know, perhaps not directly anyway, because Version 1 has been superseded. However it does provide a clue.  A much bigger clue can be found right up the top of the webpage that Anthony himself linked to, where the NCDC has written (my emphasis):

NCDC transitioned to the nClimDiv dataset on Thursday, March 13, 2014. This was coincident with the release of the February 2014 monthly monitoring report. For details on this transition, please visit our public FTP site and our U.S. Climate Divisional Database site.

If you click on the "our public FTP site" link you'll find this, in black and white (my emphasis):

May 13, 2014

NCDC is planning to provide access to nClimDiv maximum and minimum temperature data coincident with the release of the May 2014 climate summary in mid-June.  

These data will be accessible from several of NCDC's products, including Climate at a Glance, and will also reside on our CIRS ftp site:

This isn't clear if it refers to monthly data or annual. On the NCDC charting web page annual data definitely has monthly max and min as well as average. So it may be that monthly data still is not available - or it's two weeks late. In any case, is it worth all the aggro that Anthony dished out? Does Anthony even know that it's ClimDiv data that he's looking at? What's he planning to do with monthly max and min data for Dallas between 1970 and 2000 - which is the chart he got all hot and bothered over? I'd say he could probably use USHCN data if he wanted to. [Para amended slightly a few minutes after posting.]

Shall we put Anthony's flap down to incompetence or is he deliberately leading his readers astray?

I'd say if you want any specialist advice on the US temperature record, avoid WUWT and Anthony Watts!

From the WUWT comments

Rhoda R doesn't know anything about US surface temperature but wants to join in the chorus and says:

July 1, 2014 at 8:19 pm
Did anyone ask what the design goal was that these algorithms were designed to meet?

editstet has nothing to add but adds it anyway and says:

July 1, 2014 at 8:19 pm
Ah, well, that certainly simplifies things.

editstet follows it up with another meaningless one-liner says:

July 1, 2014 at 8:23 pm
Or maybe NOAA scientists took the song Night and Day too literally.

pokerguy has nothing to say but says it anyway:

July 1, 2014 at 8:28 pm
“…working as designed.”
Well that’s a relief.

Rud Istvan is a fake sceptic who says:

July 1, 2014 at 9:08 pm
Anthony, call them on the max min avg mistake. They might respond since obviously and embarassingly wrong.

You just called them on much bigger climate temp issues, and were ‘blown off’. Time to escalate. And not just here. “algorithm does what we intended” is going to be one of those salient moments all round. What a lovely intent statement in any court of law able to convict.

davidmhoffer mistakenly thinks the NCDC has something to do with the Hubble telescope. Either that or he wants Anthony to stick the boot into the Gang of 49 some more, and says:

July 1, 2014 at 9:30 pm
Aw, you left out the Hubble Telescope. I think it a most appropriate example for no other reason that every single component and sub-assembly worked exactly as designed. It was only the fully assembled device that failed to work properly.

i sense the same mind numbing denial of the obvious in this case. The algorithm no doubt did work exactly as designed. That by no means proves that the design achieved an output commensurate with actual results, and, as the trends above show, it is quite possible to have an algorithm that works as designed yet, as part of a larger system, like the Hubble Telescope, produces incorrect information that is wildly and completely obviously wrong. Sadly, a quick look at the original photo from Hubble was enough to convince a rank layman that something was wrong. I don’t think a quick look by the MSM will have the same effect.

Update: Curried potatoes anyone?

Judith Curry has decided to pitch her tent alongside the unsavoury "Steve Goddard" and ignorant Anthony Watts (archived here). As every year passes (and as she herself admits), she shifts further and further into loony land. She's trying to portray absolutely nothing as a "political hot potato", based solely on the ignorant ravings of petulant, thwarted deniers.

No, Anthony Watts, this global warming is not "natural"

They really are a pack of duffers at WUWT, aren't they. Anthony Watts has an article about a doctoral thesis on climate change communication, which was based on farmers in Sweden (archived here). The paper was by Therese Apslund of Linköping University, The Tema Institute, Department of Water and Environmental Studies. Anthony reckons that:

Swedish farmers reject the 97% climate change consensus
...The researcher who discovered the degree of scepticism among farmers was surprised by her findings. Therese Asplund, who led the study, was initially looking into how agricultural magazines covered climate change, but got a lesson in reality from swedish famers [sic].

I looked over the paper and, while many of the farmers involved in the study were questioning whether global warming is anthropogenic in origin or merely some local variability, it's clear it wasn't all farmers in Sweden who doubt climate science. However farmers are a conservative lot in the main. If Swedish farmers are anything like Australian farmers then there will be a large proportion of them who are slow to accept science (including agricultural science). The more progressive the farmer in regard to adopting new farm technology, the more likely she is to accept climate science.

Climate change and agriculture

Here's a short article on some of the downsides of climate change and opportunities that climate change may create for Australian agriculture. And here's a list of just some of the research that is going on in my part of the world, to help farmers adapt. And if you think farmers as a whole are oblivious to the science you'd be wrong. Australia's peak farmer organisation, the National Farmers' Federation has this to say in it's policy statement on climate change:

The changing climate is potentially the biggest issue facing Australian farmers in the future. As a sector so dependent on natural resources, climate change poses a significant challenge to agriculture.

Anyway, the doctoral paper was about communication and framing of information about climate science and its implications. It wasn't an opinion poll of Swedish farmers.

Cyber-clubs for fools

As you know, deniers will turn to anyone to support their rejection of science. They find it reassuring that there are other wilfully ignorant people in the world. That doesn't make the science wrong, it just means that if you reject science (be it evolution, climate, geology, medicine or whatever) you can find like-minded people on blogs created as cyber-clubs for fools - like WUWT.

From the WUWT comments

Jean Parisot says:

June 30, 2014 at 7:07 pm
So the hypothesis that the farmers are right didn’t make it into the study?
God Forbid we listen to people with decades and generations of experience dealing with weather and climate professionally.

earwig42 doesn't realise that consensus is intrinsic to science. There'd be virtually no scientific advances if not for consensus. Researchers would be stuck in a loop forever repeating research from first principles. earwig42 says:

June 30, 2014 at 7:12 pm
Consensus is (or should be) irrelevant in Science. In Politics it is everything.

john piccirilli has a very strange view of scientists who research how the earth works, and says:

June 30, 2014 at 7:16 pm
Who do you believe, a farmer who is out in the weather every day 12hours a day, or some clown
Sitting in an air conditioned cube playing with his computer trying to get grant money? 

Mac the Knife is proud of his scientific illiteracy and says:

June 30, 2014 at 9:19 pm
God Bless the Farmers, every one!
From an old Wisconsin plow boy, bale chucker, and …. manure shoveler,
Mac

ntesdorf mimics john piccirilli says:

June 30, 2014 at 10:16 pm
Farmers around the World are practical people. Their livelihood depends on their having a knowledge of weather that is rather lengthy and rather detailed and which is passed on over the generations. Who would you rather believe on the Climate, a farmer who spends much of his day out in the weather or a government paid scientist who spends his day hunched over his computer, submitting applications for CAGW Grants?

NikFromNYC is a very mixed up chappie. He believes in the "climate science is a hoax" conspiracy but at the same time denounces Tim Ball's idiocy when he says:

June 30, 2014 at 10:54 pm
The full opening sentence is: “Researchers the world over almost unanimously agree that our climate is changing because of the increasing amounts of carbon dioxide humankind pumps into our fragile atmosphere.”

This claim lives on and on as if alarm too is agreed upon and as if mainstream skepticism denies the textbook greenhouse effect. Alas, just enough do in fact loudly deny it to allow this slander to continue. Gee thanks, Tim Ball, a regular writer here, coauthor of the Sky Dragon book. Thankfully Mark Steyn has taken Ball’s ball and run with it with a counter suit against Mann, minus the maverick background. Sure, perhaps the greenhouse effect is lesser than assumed, but it’s self-defeating to promote that idea out of the blue in the face of clear evidence of scientific fraud coupled to highly speculstive amplification of that assumed greenhouse effect. A focus on fraud is now dearly needed, and you can’t cry fraud unless you also utterly and fully distance yourself from mavericks, because it won’t otherwise work, since no layperson will believe you when Al Gore can sincerely point to your association with greenhouse effect denial. 

Mario Lento has no idea that the climate has been relatively stable throughout human civilisation. He's going to be in for a rude shock in coming decades (depending on how old he is):

June 30, 2014 at 10:57 pm
The argument is silly. Climate changing is a given. Otherwise the word climate would have been defined as “homeostasis until the advent of industry.” The real deniers are CAGW believers.

---

Asplund, Therese. "Climate change frames and frame formation: An analysis of climate change communication in the Swedish agricultural sector." (2014). DOI:10.3384/diss.diva-105997

Latest ENSO update - El Niño still on the cards

The Bureau of Meteorology has a new ENSO wrap-up (or click here for the permanent record as a pdf file). There's still a solid chance of an El Niño later in the year:

While the tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperature is currently at levels typically associated with a weak El Niño, waters below the surface have cooled and atmospheric patterns continue to remain neutral.

However, over the past fortnight changes have occurred in the atmosphere that may be a response to the warm surface waters–the Southern Oscillation Index has dropped by over 10 points, and weakened trade winds have re-appeared. These changes would need to persist for several weeks in order for an El Niño to be considered established, and it remains possible they are simply related to shorter term weather variability.

Climate models surveyed by the Bureau continue to indicate that El Niño is likely to develop by spring 2014. The Bureau's ENSO Tracker remains at El Niño ALERT, indicating at least a 70% chance of El Niño developing in 2014.

Here's an animation comparing sub-surface temperatures from January to April this year with those of March to June. Note the two-month overlap.

Dan Satterfield has a short article in which he raises some points worth noting, particularly if you live in the USA.

For other references, I've included some good ones in an article about ENSO, which I wrote some time ago. (Yes, I'm being lazy.)

Ignorant WUWT-ers suffer CO2 phobia going back 900,000 years

Today Anthony Watts (archived here) copied and pasted the press release from a study I wrote about last week. It was about the paper by Leopoldo Pena and Steven Goldstein on what caused the ice ages to change around a million years ago. The paper was presenting an explanation of the 100,000 year glacial cycle. You can read about it here or at ScienceDaily.com.

I was struck by the intense CO2 phobia that commenters at WUWT suffer from. They obviously don't understand the carbon cycle or the role of carbon dioxide in climate. Nor do they understand the CO2/ocean interaction. A lot of them have never heard of Milanković cycles (and extensions to his theory). Not that I claim expertise or specialist knowledge, but the basics of all these are straightforward and not all that difficult to comprehend. (I did a search at WUWT for Milanković cycles and it's pretty clear why the people who don't venture beyond WUWT don't know anything about the subject.)

(If you're on the home page, click "read more" to find out more about the paper and see the reaction at WUWT.)

Tim Ball is busy re-writing science at WUWT (again) and regurgitating his paranoid conspiracies

Anthony Watts is back to the dregs of deniers again with another "essay" by uber-conspiracy theorist Tim Ball (archived here). Tim just recycles his hogwash from previous "essays" as a typical Gish gallop, so there's no need for me to go through this one bit by bit, if I could be bothered. I'll pick up on this sentence though. He wrote:

The 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report included evidence in the form of a “hockey stick” graph, showing that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) did not exist. Less prominent, but just as wrong, was erasure of the Little Ice Age (LIA). 

Tim for some reason has a fixation on the medieval warm anomaly and the Little Ice Age. He probably thinks that if climates changed anywhere in the past without being caused by greenhouse gases, then the current warming can't be caused by greenhouse gases. That's a logical fallacy of course. Just because bushfires get started from lightning strikes doesn't mean that they can't be caused by humans.

Here is the relevant section of the 2001 IPCC report. Both the medieval warm anomaly and the Little Ice Age were real. What Tim is objecting to is that science now shows that neither of them were global in effect. Not everywhere got warm and cold during those periods and those that did didn't get warm and cold all at the same time.

More studies have been done since 2001, not surprisingly. The latest IPCC report has this to say (TS.2.2.1 Surface):

Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multidecadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the mid-20th century and in others as warm as in the late 20th century. With high confidence, these intervals were not as synchronous across seasons and regions as the warming since the mid-20th century. Based on the comparison between reconstructions and simulations, there is high confidence that not only external orbital, solar and volcanic forcing, but also internal variability, contributed substantially to the spatial pattern and timing of surface-temperature changes between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age.

Tim would like science to have stopped short in the 1960s, going by the ancient drawings in his article.  He also thinks that temperatures on an ice sheet on the top of a summit in Greenland make a good proxy for global surface temperatures. He's a real nutter. Nuttier even than Denier Don Easterbrook, who we haven't heard a peep from in ages.

Oh, and in case you think Tim wrote a coherent article, he didn't. As well as the medieval warm anomaly and the Little Ice Age, Tim jumped from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason. I've listed below most of the topics he covered and provided links so that you can compare facts with Tim's paranoid ramblings, if you can stomach them:

• Stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit
• William Connolley
• Realclimate.org
• Andrew Weaver
• Antarctic ice core records
• Holocene climatic optimum
• GISP2 in Greenland
• Rising sea levels
• Hubert Lamb
• The IPCC

If you want to find out more about Tim Ball's "science" and his paranoid conspiracy ideations, you can do so here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Goodness me. Have I really wasted that much cyberspace on that despicable little man? Perhaps in future I'll just link back to here as a ready reckoner.

From the WUWT comments

Tim Ball is an unsavoury character and he tends to bring out the same characterics in others. The more reasonable deniers (if there is such a beast) generally avoid commenting on his articles. It's mainly the weird and wacky who do so. Like knr who says:

June 30, 2014 at 12:58 am
IPCC is a parasitic organisation whose existence relies on AGW , with Mann and his gang are merely parasite facilitators who have done very well out of their ‘work’ , without its ‘host ‘ like any parasite its it would be dead through starvation.

With that in mind, is anyone surprised to find its acts in the way it does?

The saddest part is the very people that should have acted has gate keepers to such behaviour have either played the three wise monkeys or deep their own snouts in bucket of funding slops no matter how much ‘filth’ they had to clog their eyes , ears and mouths with . And for that we may all pay the price as the people start to view all science through the dishonest, hypocritical , poor scientific approaches used by climate ‘science’ .

Bloke down the pub says:

June 30, 2014 at 12:29 am
Maybe one day there’ll be a presidential inquiry into who said what and when, but there again presidents don’t like asking embarrassing questions about previous incumbents, as they don’t want to set a dangerous precedent. 

Nova and Evans present ForceX: "It would be better if there was a known mechanism of course..."

Update: The Notch has passed away, peacefully, in the presence of family and close friends, with little fanfare. RIP. [Sou 1 August 2014]

---

Someone suggested I preserve this for the record. It shows how some deniers will waste an inordinate amount of time and energy in the fruitless pursuit of ABCD (anything but carbon dioxide). From Joanne Nova (Codling) and her partner David "not a rocket scientist" Evans, (h/t John Mashey) - Deniers in Residence, Australia.

This is a record of all their blog posts on the subject so far. I've already written about their Part VIII. In this complete set (so far), they set out why they reckon it's not really CO2 that's causing global warming, it's Force X from the sun. Force X, by a strange coincidence, has about the same radiative forcing as greenhouse gases.

Update: The WUWT article by David "funny sunny" Archibald on this subject has earned 533 comments so far, so here's the archive - latest here, with 638 comments. More than any article for years, I'd say. But it's not listed in as one of the "top four active stories". Wonder why (not)! Watch for the match between Christopher Monckton and Leif Svalgaard and comments by Wondering Willis Eschenbach. Sou 2 July 2014

The mechanism for Force X is not known at this time, we're told. Which they agree is a shame. It could be anything from UV light to puppy dog tails. All they know is that it can't be CO2 and, to prove it, the world is about to get very cold, any day now. David's very meticulous 18-month modeling effort allows him to make this extremely precise, extremely falsifiable prediction:  it will cool by 0.8°C, or maybe 0.6°C, or maybe 0.1°C - next year, or maybe in ten or even twenty years.

Or, if you are David "funny sunny" Archibald, by two degrees:

Data source: Marcott13 and WUWT

If you're on the home page and you want to read about all their zany articles to date, click "read more". If you click on the title to their blog articles, it'll take you to the archived versions complete with comments.

Denier Weirdness: Desperately searching for denialist tidbits at WUWT

Anthony Watts is lashing out at all and sundry. He is desperate to find some remnant from past history that will prove that the world isn't getting hotter (archived here).

Today he's stretching way back to July 1936 in the USA. He's absolutely convinced that July 1936 was the hottest month on record in the contiguous USA. And he may be right. Who knows.

Anthony reckons that back in July 1936 the average temperature for the contiguous USA was 76.8°F. In July 2012 it was only 76.77°F. At least according to the latest NOAA data he found.

Not only that, but he's found proof, PROOF - in black and purple and white - that NOAA adjust past temperatures. Oh, golly gosh. Would you believe they adjust past temperatures downwards. Two years ago it was 77.4°F in July 1936 and now it's only 76.8°F. Not only that but they adjust recent records downwards, too. In July 2012 two years ago it was 77.6°F and now the record shows it as 76.77°F.

If there's one thing that Anthony Watts cannot abide it's change. Especially change to his most treasured possession, the average temperature in the contiguous USA for the month of July 1936. How dare anyone adjust the record. Who cares if there were time of observation corrections to be made. Who cares if someone decided to add some new data unearthed from some old ledger. The record is sacred and must not be touched at penalty of a blog article at WUWT.

Anthony's given up looking for hotter years, now he's down to months. Won't be long before it's weeks, then days, then minutes, then seconds.

Imagine the poor chap fifteen years from now, sweltering in the latest heat wave. He'll be hunched over paper records from the 1930s whimpering, "I know it's here. It's got to be here somewhere. I'm sure that one day in 1936, somewhere in the USA must have been hotter than today." You could almost feel sorry for the man if you didn't know he was such a shady character with a shameful record of unethical behaviour.

This is from the USA records, just in case you thought the USA was getting colder and was heading for an ice age. The average temperature for the entire year (not just one month) in 2012 was higher than any year in the 1930s. It was hotter than the hottest year in the 1930s. I've put a line across for comparison. The hottest year in the 1930s was 1934. But it was hotter again in 1998 and 2006 and much hotter still in 2012.

Data Source: NOAA

But it's not the "hottest" that's so important. It's the overall trend. Look at all those warm years bunched up together to the right of the chart. Keep your eye on that end as time goes by.

There were a few warmer than average years in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA. 1921, 1931 and 1934 stand out as being very warm years by comparison with the rest of the century.  After the 1950s it got colder for a bit, though nearly not as cold as some of the earliest years in the instrumental record. Since the early 1980s it's just kept getting warmer, with only one or two cooler years. The last time there was a year colder than the twentieth century average was almost twenty years ago in 1996. The last couple of decades is almost a solid block of warmer years. Quite different to the twentieth century and earlier.

And while Anthony has his nose buried in the 1930s in the USA, this is what's been happening in the rest of the world.

Data sources: NASA GISTemp, NODC/NOAA Ocean Heat, U Colorado sea level, PIOMAS Arctic Ice

From the WUWT comments

The comments are pretty ordinary. Mostly they are just wailing that raw temperature records are adjusted. It's probably fair to say that most WUWT-ers are conservatives and conservatives don't like change of any kind.

NotAGolfer doesn't know what he's talking about but he's memorised the words of the meme he's meant to parrot and says:

June 29, 2014 at 3:39 pm
Anthony, wake up! It’s intentional. They are trying to make it appear that the warming trend is greater than it is. It’s beyond obvious. Do you still believe Clinton didn’t inhale?

Pamela Gray makes a more sensible comment for a change and says:

June 29, 2014 at 4:50 pm
On the other hand, this is kind of like the TSI/SSN data series. There are, as we have discussed, different reconstructions and observations that differ from one data set to another. The fact that it is being corrected is a matter of scientific correction. Not necessarily evidence of wrong doing.
Could this be a good sign when dealing with a very horrible set of measuring issues?

Lawrie Ayres complains that the keepers of the records are all warmists except for the Russians and Chinese (oh how sentiment has changed since the 1950s):

June 29, 2014 at 5:16 pm
The BoM in Australia has been fiddling the books for ages in order to arrive at “the hottest summer ever” and when an audit was about to take place cancelled that system and started another which was just as fraudulent. We do have a new government with a representative that’s a real scientist. He has been calling for another audit and will probably get it as many Coalition members are skeptics. The whole land based temperature system is in disarray as the keepers of the records all seem to be warmists except for the Russians and Chinese.

Lawrie might be interested in these charts of temperature trends in Russia and China, which aren't immune from warming any more than the rest of the world:

Source: Berkeley Earth

How Anthony Watts mixes up his pipelines

The articles at WUWT have been getting very silly lately. There's another silly one today (archived here). Anthony claims that:

Canada pulls the plug on the U.S. Keystone Pipeline – will send oil to Asia

...Obama’s inability to make a decision on Keystone has finally yielded a result – Canada has made the decision for him.

Breitbart reports Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project – a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil to Asia.

The Canadian oil will still be burnt – in Asia, instead of America.

All the jobs and energy security which Canadian oil could have delivered to America, will instead be delivered to Asia.

Anthony's wrong on more than one count.

1. The decision hasn't been "just approved". The Canadian government announced it nearly two weeks ago, which makes it old news.
2. It's not "either/or". The Enbridge Northern Gateway Project is quite a separate initiative to that of Keystone XL. It was first proposed back in 2006.
3. There are still a lot of hurdles to overcome before it becomes a reality, if it does.

NOAA and temperature data - it must be a conspiracy.

Update: Nick Stokes of Moyhu has written two articles that demonstrate what would happen if Anthony Watts had his way and stations with no data were ignored completely. See here and here. Anthony Watts might change his tune if he read them.

Sou 3:22 pm 1 July 2014 AEST

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This article is about the kerfuffle that erupted between a bunch of science deniers. It all started when Steve Goddard accused NOAA and NASA of "fabricating data" (archived here).  The lie was spread all over the right wing media. Politifact and Climate Crocks among others pointed out he was wrong. Steve didn't explain how the two agencies did this. All he did was put up an animated chart that he claimed showed that the US temperature was warmer in the 1930s than at any time since. He wrote:

Prior to the year 2000, NASA showed US temperatures cooling since the 1930′s, and 1934 much warmer than 1998....Right after the year 2000, NASA and NOAA dramatically altered US climate history, making the past much colder and the present much warmer. The animation below shows how NASA cooled 1934 and warmed 1998, to make 1998 the hottest year in US history instead of 1934. This alteration turned a long term cooling trend since 1930 into a warming trend.

Steve doesn't say what data was "fabricated". Why should he? He's not a fact checker. Quite the opposite. He's in the denial business of making up stuff to stop any action to mitigate global warming.

This article is another one that's too long :( Click read more if you're on the home page.