Is Anthony Watts denying the flooding in Phoenix?

Is Anthony Watts denying the record rain and flash floods in Phoenix yesterday? (It's yesterday here, but it's probably still today in Phoenix.) Or is he denying something else that he's just made up.

He has a very odd article at WUWT (archived here). First of all he has a headline:

Phoenix flooding – not due to ‘climate change’, extreme rainfall events are not on the increase

I can write suggestive headlines too :)

He's wrong about the second part, but we'll get to that later. In the first part of his headline, he seems very certain about the cause of yesterday's Phoenix flooding.

Now that's got to be the fastest attribution study on record, if that's what Anthony has done.  But has he? Apparently not. He has no data to support his claim that climate change did not cause the Phoenix flash flood. Nor does he point to any claim that yesterday's flood was caused by climate change.

Is it a strawman? It would seem so. Nowhere does Anthony quote anyone claiming that the flash flood was caused by climate change. Which isn't surprising, since it's virtually impossible to single out a single flash flood and work out how much of it (or if it) could have occurred if the world was as cold as it was in, say the 1850s (or even the 1950s). Extreme events are rare. If they weren't rare they wouldn't be classed as extreme, they'd be classed as normal. The very rarity makes it difficult to attribute them to climate change - though not impossible.

Anthony wrote:

Ah the alarmists are out in full force today over a rainstorm. The Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix reported 2.96 inches of rain before 8:30 a.m. local time, beating the old record of 2.91 inches on Sept. 4, 1939. Parts of Interstate 10 were flooded, with the morning rush hour just beginning. Schools closed for the day, and police asked people to stay off the roads. At least 13,000 homes and businesses lost power.

Read that again. The alarmists in this case, according to Anthony, are apparently:

• The Sky Harbor Airport for reporting the record rainfall
• The school authorities for making the decision to close the schools because of flooding
• The police for asking people to stay off the roads
• The people who lost power.

Not one mention of anyone claiming that this particular event was caused by climate change.

The next thing he wrote was a tweet from NOAA's Northwest Weather Service:

IT'S A RECORD!!! Phoenix Sky Harbor 2.96 in. of rain breaks the all-time calendar day record total previously 2.91/1933. #flood #azwx
— NWS Phoenix (@NWSPhoenix) September 8, 2014

Not a mention of climate change in the tweet. So far the only person who has mentioned climate change is Anthony Watts.

Finally, right down the bottom of his article Anthony finds someone who juxtaposed the words climate change and the Phoenix floods - in a tweet. It was Roger Pielke Jr.  Roger, who tweeted:

Phoenix floods, climate change!...

But Roger isn't claiming the record event was because of climate change. He's just tweeted an irrelevancy. He's combined all the rain events over the USA together - the wetter north east of the USA and the drier south west - and claimed - well he didn't claim anything one way or another. He just tweeted an irrelevant chart.

Phoenix floods, climate change! http://t.co/7sxzzvhIM4 Figure below from USNCA shows trends in 1&5 day extreme precip pic.twitter.com/5ZYaaMks8Y
— Roger Pielke Jr. (@RogerPielkeJr) September 8, 2014

Anthony explains that:

The USNCA he refers to is the National Climate Assessment report from NOAA/NCDC. 

He didn't provide a link, so I will:

http://www.globalchange.gov/nca3-downloads-materials

Heavy downpours are increasing nationally...

I came across this chart in the US climate assessment report that Anthony and Roger referred to. I wondered why neither Anthony nor Roger saw fit to include it. It's much more informative than combining regions that are getting less heavy rain with those getting more heavy rain and shouting "look ma, no change!":

Figure 32. Heavy downpours are increasing nationally, with especially large increases in the Midwest and Northeast.99 Despite considerable decadal-scale natural variability, indices such as this one based on 2-day precipitation totals exceeding a threshold for a 1-in-5-year occurrence exhibit a greater than normal occurrence of extreme events since 1991 in all U.S. regions except Alaska and Hawai‘i. Each bar represents that decade’s average, while the far right bar in each graph represents the average for the 12-year period of 2001-2012. Analysis is based on 726 long-term, quality-controlled station records. This figure is a regional expansion of the national index in Figure 2.16 of Chapter 2. (Figure source: updated from Kunkel et al. 201399).

Note the first sentence in the caption. It starts with: "Heavy downpours are increasing nationally..."


Finally, Anthony Watts seems to like the IPCC extreme events report from 2011. The following sentence is from the SREX Summary for Policymakers:

There is medium confidence that anthropogenic influences have contributed to intensification of extreme precipitation on the global scale.

And there's more from the same report:

There have been statistically significant trends in the number of heavy precipitation events in some regions. It is likely that more of these regions have experienced increases than decreases, although there are strong regional and subregional variations in these trends.

So Anthony has run out of legs to stand on. And I can write a suggestive headline just like Anthony Watts!


Let's recap:

• Anthony Watts claims that alarmists are claiming something but provided not one bit of evidence that they claimed what he claims that they claimed.
• That leads one to surmise that he was referring to the record rain in Phoenix and claiming it didn't happen, despite all the evidence that it did
• Anthony claims that extreme rainfall events are not on the increase - but the evidence shows that they are - in some regions of the USA as well as in many parts of the world.
• Anthony refers his readers to a publication that has lots of mentions of extreme precipitation increasing in different parts of the USA.

From the WUWT comments

mark l  eggs Anthony Watts on and supports his using the opportunity to make up stuff and reject climate science:

September 8, 2014 at 10:58 am
Never let a good disaster go to waste.

Although 83 mm of rain in a day isn't the greatest by world-wide standards, when the previous record was 74 mm and that was set 83 years ago, and the city is on the edge of a desert, it can't expect the storm water infrastructure to cope.  I wonder does Olaf Koenders think in a similar way about the heat waves in the USA in the 1930s? I wonder if his arithmetic is as bad as his denial of climate science? (3.29-2.91=0.38 inches) [Edit: Ramiro pointed out that Olaf was referring to the number in the NOAA tweet. I missed that. My number came from Roger Pielke's reference. Sou.]

September 8, 2014 at 4:48 pm
Prognostications of disaster. A measly record broken by a mere 0.05 inches. Seems like someone stopped the car to go pee.

Peter Dunford thinks that climate change may have played a part in the record rainfall, but he's not impressed.

September 8, 2014 at 11:00 am
What was causing such extreme rainfall in 1934?
So 100 parts per million of CO2 added to the atmosphere adds 5 1/100th of an inch to extreme weather events. Yawn.

Oldseadog is a bit simple. His mind cannot grasp that climate change changes drought as well as precipitation. Message to Oldseadog - increasing atmospheric CO2 does a lot more besides. It causes global warming and climate change. It melts ice. It raises seas. It acidifies the oceans. It even makes plants grow more.

September 8, 2014 at 11:05 am
But … but … I thought they were blaming the drought on CAGW.
C’mon, they can’t have it both ways. 

Dave The Engineer isn't the brightest spark either, but he knows his denialist mantras.

September 8, 2014 at 11:14 am
Oldseadog said: “C’mon, they can’t have it both ways.”

Sure they can, it is a cult, reality has nothing to do with it. Eventually to deal with the conflict they will bring out the tubs of “koolaid”. To relieve the pain. Looking forward to it. 

bernie1815  thinks the flash floods in Phoenix Arizona will make up for the extreme drought in California. He's not very good at geography.

September 8, 2014 at 11:10 am
Isn’t this good news with all the drought issues, etc?
If you want gentle rain move to the West of Ireland or the West of Scotland where it rains a bit almost every day. 

Luke Warmist says it rained 4 inches where he was. And he's "pretty sure" that the record will be reported as a "new norm in a warming world".  Funny what deniers are sure about compared to what they don't know.

September 8, 2014 at 1:36 pm
I live about 12 miles southeast of sky harbor where the record resides. We got right at 4 inches, which I’m fairley certain ABC national news will report as the new norm in a warming world. They’ve done it before, and I just can’t see them passing this one by.

nutso fasst is a rare breed at WUWT. He actually heard what climate scientists have been saying.

September 8, 2014 at 2:14 pm
Last I heard, climate models showed wet areas getting wetter and dry areas getting dryer–the latter being specifically projected for the Southwest U.S.

---

Melillo, Jerry M., Terese (T.C.) Richmond, and Gary W. Yohe, Eds., 2014: Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment. U.S. Global Change Research Program, 841 pp. doi:10.7930/J0Z31WJ2. 

Field, Christopher B., ed. Managing the risks of extreme events and disasters to advance climate change adaptation: Special report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, 2012. (link)

Anthony Watts fails to save face, pretending not to be excited

Remember a couple of days ago how Anthony Watts was itching to "sue the pants off" skeptical science? How he just knew that they were up to something nefarious. How he figured that John Cook and his team were going to defame deniers? (Would that even be possible?)

He was wrong.

To hedge his bets Anthony later added that perhaps they were going to say something about science itself but if they were, they'd do it in Monty Python style like the 10 out of 10 video that some group came up with (not SkepticalScience), which deniers pretend "shock horror" about. He was wrong about that, too.

A failure to predict - and more

In a pathetic attempt to save face, today he wrote:

The latest propaganda stunt from the Skeptical Science Kidz is underway and it is about as exciting as it is predictable. 

If it was as exciting as it was predictable by Anthony, then he's saying he failed to find it exciting just as he failed dismally in his attempt to predict it.

At least he's owning up to his failure to predict. Or did he make another gaffe and was wanting to make out that he did predict it, when he didn't, but messed up and said it was very exciting.

The SkepticalScience initiative was exciting enough for Anthony to write two articles about it, wasn't it.

What other dismal failures does he achieve in his delayed reaction to 97 hours?

Anthony Watts mistakes Greenland for the entire world - and gets even Greenland wrong

Anthony probably likes to think he deceives his readers well. Perhaps he does, but that's because his readers are only too willing to be deceived not because Anthony is any good at deception.

His deception today is that he presents the ice sheet way up on a freezing cold summit in central Greenland as a good proxy for the entire world.  That's as ridiculous as presenting the Simpson Desert as a proxy for the entire world.

Anthony put up a chart of GISP2 temperatures and couldn't even get that right, labeling it as stopping in 2000, when in fact it stopped in 1950 and shows the temperature up to 95 years before 1950. In other words, it doesn't show any temperatures past 1855.

Flawed chart from WUWT, annoted by HotWhopper

See if you can spot other things wrong with the chart. I mean the chart itself, not just the fact that the average global temperature on earth is quite a bit higher than minus 30 degrees Celsius. Or the fact that temperatures in any one spot on land will fluctuate more than the average temperature over the entire earth.

Anthony Watts thinks weather happens by magic

Then Anthony disputes the fact that all weather now is affected by the amount of energy in the system. He seems to think that physics doesn't apply with some weather. Quoting climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, Anthony wrote:

“all weather is now connected to climate change” – Yikes, every cloud is hiding a climate change boogie man now?

Yes, Anthony. If there was less energy in the system then weather would be different. What do you think. Is some weather governed by magic?

Anthony knows he's a loser, so invokes Godwin's Law

Then he sees a Nazi salute in a friendly wave. He wrote:

I had to chuckle though, because the SkS kids went to all this trouble to make this page where when you mouse over one of the cartoon character climate scientists, their arm goes up in the air to say “hey, I’m part of the consensus!”. That sort of high salute reminds me of the Nazi dress up photos we found last year on the Skeptical Science website. 

Can you believe that Anthony sees a Nazi salute in this sort of pose? What a warped mind he must have.

Professor J Marshall Shepherd. Credit: SkepticalScience

The dress up photos he refers to are about how some people at SkepticalScience coped with Anthony Watts and other lowlifes calling them Nazis in the past. Instead of letting it get to them they made light of the disgusting name-calling. In private. On a private website. Then the images were stolen.


Oh, and it looks as if HotWhopper is getting to Anthony too. Excellent!


PS While I was writing this article, readers were commenting about Anthony's recent effort and picked out other points of interest.

From the WUWT comments

biff33 thinks it was predictable. Maybe, but Anthony failed to predict it.

September 8, 2014 at 3:21 am
Don’t you mean as boring as it is predictable?

Kit Carruthers wonders what goes on in Anthony's twisted mind when he sees children waving.

September 8, 2014 at 3:44 am
Anthony, so do school kids remind you of Nazis? They put their hands up too!

knr decides to act the fool and writes:

September 8, 2014 at 3:56 am
Trenberth ‘missing heat ‘ is a result of poor science not of good theory.
For if temperatures had increased in the way they said they would, STELLED SCIENCE, with increases in CO2 , then there would be no need for any ‘missing heat ‘ in the first place . The fact he cannot justify or even remotely prove his ‘missing heat’ idea is the reason why he tried to reverse the null hypothesise in the first place. And approach which results in a total fail for any undergraduate handing in an essay, would seem to be an acceptable standard with climate ‘science’ professionals . And they wonder why they consider a joke. 

Oatley finds it rather odd that Anthony Watts claims the average global temperature of earth is around minus 30 degrees Celsius, and asks:

September 8, 2014 at 4:05 am
Help me understand the RH scale on the graph…

jmrSudbury doesn't comment on Anthony's major mistake, but answers Oatley's question:

September 8, 2014 at 4:50 am
The air temperature of Greenland averages near -30 C. — John M Reynolds

richard verney looks again at Anthony's chart and wonders how the settlers survived in ancient Greenland:

September 8, 2014 at 6:03 am
I do not disagree with your summary of the charts, but is the reconstruction of the past temperatures accurate?

How could the Vikings with their primitive technology (and no mechanical aids such as mini diggers and tractors) have farmed Greenland for a couple of hundred years if the temperatures were only about 1 or so degrees warmer than today? That is the question that should be asked when tuning the proxies.

Where they were located (and I accept that their settlements were not spread right accross Greenland), it must have been about 4 degrees (and possibly more) warmer than it is today, if not just 1 or 2 harsh winter would have wiped them out.

Greg is a bit worried that Anthony Watts is giving publicity to proper science communicators (instead of the usual WUWT fare of paranoid conspiracy theories):

September 8, 2014 at 4:54 am
This is too feeble to even bother trying to counter it.
Don’t flatter thier sorry efforts by reading and commenting on them. 

JLC is baffled that anyone would be interested in what climate scientists have to say about climate. It just goes to show how out of touch with reality are deniers. JLC - most people aren't very interested in the pseudo-science quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, which is the normal fare at WUWT.

September 8, 2014 at 5:30 am
This baffles me. It might increase the number of hits on their website and entertain the true believers but I can’t see that it would achieve anything else. 

Prof Michael Mann heralds 97 hours of climate scientists

The mystery of the silhouettes has been revealed. SkepticalScience.com has come up with a fun way to tell people about climate science via the scientists themselves.

The first scientist to appear is Michael Mann:

From skepticalscience.com:

Climate scientists from across the globe feature in our 97 Hours of Consensus campaign addressing one of the most significant and harmful myths about climate change. Each hour, beginning at 9am Sunday EST, September 7th, we'll publish a statement and playful, hand-drawn caricature of a leading climate scientist. Each caricature lists the scientists’ name, title, expertise and academic institution.

To translate the time, it's probably referring to eastern time in the USA, which was 11:00 pm in Australia and 1:00 pm Greenwich Mean Time or Universal Coordinated Time for all you modern young things :)

You can check out the unveiling of a new scientist on the hour every hour for the next 96 hours at the cute website created by a computer wizz at SkS. Or read about it at SkepticalScience.com and in an article by Dana Nuccitelli at the UK Guardian.


Anthony Watts will be mortified. Not only was he woefully wrong. Not only will he not have any grounds for "suing the pants off" SkepticalScience.com.  Dumb denier blogs like his won't rate a mention. This is about climate science and real live scientists, not wacky conspiracy bloggers who dwell in the dark fringes of cyberspace.

Denier Drumbeat: Eric Worrall on Democracy in Australia and the Climate Crisis

The tendency of Anthony Watts to conspiracy theories of the wacky kind increases week by week and year by year. What is harder to figure is whether he believes his nuttery or whether he just likes to sit back and watch his readers fall head over heels for his latest bit of paranoid thinking.

This week we saw Anthony Watts imply that John Kerry didn't condemn the barbaric group of thugs from ISIS, for murders and other atrocities, when he did. And in much stronger terms than Anthony Watts ever could (Anthony doesn't have the linguistic capability).

Anthony distorted a speech to get his audience fired up. To get the lynch mob going. Is it laziness, incompetence or deliberate deception on the part of Anthony that leads him to twist facts to suit his agenda?

Today he's done the same (archived here). He's published a couple of paragraphs written by one of his latest adopted strays, Eric Worrall. Eric is about as straight as a corkscrew, but he doesn't much like it when he's caught out. Not that there's much chance of that happening at WUWT.

Any notion more complex than "it's all a hoax" addles the brain of the average WUWT-er. Tell them black is white and they'll agree. Tell them up is down and they'll come back for more. Tell them hot is cold and an ice age cometh, and you'll have the denier hordes clamouring and swearing eternal allegiance to their heros.

Ask them to think about something as complex as the nature of democracy and they fall in a heap.

So when you combine a philosophical discussion about the nature of democracy with a misrepresentation of an article, you've won the dismal deniers for another day (or whatever brief span of time a WUWT reader can give their attention.)

Here is a summary of what Eric managed in his very short guest blog. It's probably approaching a record for the most things wrong and/or weird in the fewest words.

• He misrepresented the ABC itself
• He misrepresented the nature of The Drum on the ABC website
• He misrepresented an article in the Drum on the ABC website
• He is against any public discussion about democracy
• He is against any action to protect the environment
• He misrepresented the position held by the author of the article
• He misrepresented the argument of the author of the article.

Conspiracy theorist Anthony Watts counting down to "sue the pants off" SkepticalScience

Update - see below- Anthony's had second thoughts and has now decided to hedge his bets. Then he had a third thought. Wonder of wonders - so many thoughts in his little head all at the same time, competing for his attention. (An observed trait of conspiracy theorists is that they can hold conflicting ideas simultaneously.)

---

Oh my. Anthony Watts is letting his paranoia (and narcissism) show (archived here). He's noticed something in the sidebar at SkepticalScience.com and has decided that it signals nefarious intent.

Here's the link to the home page at SkepticalScience.com. What Anthony wrote about is in the sidebar on the right. It's time bound, so if you are reading this at a later time it will probably look different. To capture how it looks now, here is a screen grab with my arrow pointing to the SkepticalScience teaser:

If you click on the link on the SkS image, you get to another page.

What can it be? Anthony Watts hasn't a clue (a normal state of affairs), but in true conspiracy theory style, has pretty well decided whatever it can be is "no good". He wrote a headline:

The ‘Skeptical Science’ kidz are up to no good again

In the WUWT article underneath Anthony let his paranoia run rampant, writing:

...All of the silhouettes are greyed out now, but one can rest assured they be filled in with cartoonish caricatures once the countdown clock on the lower right reaches zero.

My guess? John Cook has likely put his failed cartooning talents back to work again. Given the juvenile fascination former cartoonist turned amateur psychologist and numbers bookie for the 97% John Cook has with smearing climate skeptics, this will reveal itself as some sort of interactive “name and shame” application for the top 100 climate skeptics worldwide.

I hope it does, because if so, and if it turns out to be as libelous as I think it will be, it will give a whole bunch of people a reason to sue the pants off that whole team of creepy playtime Nazi cross dressers. Bring it.

Notice how Anthony adds some unsubstantiated statements. SkepticalScience is very proper and neither SkepticalScience nor John Cook gets into muckraking. They don't "smear climate sceptics". They don't need to. Fake sceptics condemn themselves by their own words. And why do you think Anthony doesn't give any examples of his allegations? It's because he can't. SkepticalScience is about reporting the science and showing why denier memes are wrong.

Still, we'll have to wait another day and seven hours or so to see if he's right and if SkepticalScience has changed tack. I'd be very surprised if it has. It's committed to reporting climate science. It doesn't even allow ad homs, let alone defamation.

While we're waiting, perhaps someone will deliver a message to Anthony Watts.

Message to Anthony Watts: Anthony, it's some science deniers who are prone to skating too close to defamation. Not so much people who accept mainstream science.

Update

Anthony Watts has had second thoughts, probably after reading the WUWT comments - or maybe HotWhopper -  and has decided to hedge his bets. He's added some more words to the bottom of his original article:

Of course it could also be a rah-rah application, where each of the silhouettes is a “real climate scientist”, and the popup text message is all about how they “feel” about climate change…like these clowns.

"These clowns" being scientists who were describing how they feel about global warming. Anthony is a tough antihero for whom feelings are a sign of weakness. Except when he's feeling brave but trepidatious and when he doesn't like feeling ignored.

Anthony doesn't want to look like a wimp, so he belatedly back-backtracked and added this further bit of speculation:

Whatever it is, it will likely be the caliber of sort of lowbrow stuff we’ve seen before, like the “designed to be funny but actually horrifying” 10:10 video which blows up children who don’t want to go along with climate change in school.

The ugly denier: a real, clear and present danger

Denialism is ugly. At its heart is an abdication of responsibility. Denialism goes hand in hand with bigotry and worse. Today there's an example of that at WUWT.

Anthony Watts claims (archived here) that John Kerry is mentally ill because of a speech he gave at a ceremony "in Honor of Special Representative to Muslim Communities Shaarik Zafar". It is part of the role of the Secretary of State to give speeches at ceremonies like this. It is also part of their role to reach out and speak out in times of crisis and difficulty. In particular, to remind everyone that that people of all faiths and no faith can live in harmony, despite what is happening elsewhere in the world. You can read the speech here.

John Kerry doesn't avoid reference to the ugly events by a radical political group that pretends to be Islamic. He faces it head on. He also makes the point that those actions are not the face of Islam.

Anthony Watts on the other hand is a muckraker who not only wants to destroy the planet by preventing any action to mitigate global warming, he now comes out as a warmonger. An ugly bigot inciting hatred. He's shown his sociopathic tendencies before in other ways. Now he's combining his determination to destroy the planet by warming with his desire to destroy the planet by inciting hatred of Muslims.

I don't know if all climate science deniers are bigots, racist and sexist or not. Probably not. But evidence suggests that they are more likely to be so than the general population.

Let me illustrate. Anthony Watts under a headline: "Is John Kerry mentally ill? ‘Scriptures Commands America To Protect Muslims From Global Warming ‘, quoted this part of the speech in support of his claim that John Kerry is mentally ill:

Our faiths are inextricably linked on any number of things that we must confront and deal with in policy concepts today. Our faiths are inextricably linked on the environment. For many of us, respect for God’s creation also translates into a duty to protect and sustain his first creation, Earth, the planet,

Confronting climate change is, in the long run, one of the greatest challenges that we face, and you can see this duty or responsibility laid out in Scriptures clearly, beginning in Genesis. And Muslim-majority countries are among the most vulnerable. Our response to this challenge ought to be rooted in a sense of stewardship of Earth, and for me and for many of us here today, that responsibility comes from God.

Anthony followed it up by writing this, to stir up the bigotry and lynch mob mentality of his rabble:

I do hope Mr. Kerry travels to the heart of an ISIS stronghold to deliver this message personally. Maybe then he’ll gain a sense of priority and perhaps, some sanity when he realizes his epic mistake. 

What Anthony chose not to quote was any of the rest of the speech. For example, this was what immediately followed the above:

We also know that a cadre of extremists – nihilists, people like ISIL – are just waiting to seduce these people into accepting the dead end. And when people don’t have a job, when they can’t get an education, when their voices are silenced by draconian laws or by violence or oppression, we’ve all witnessed the instability that follows from that, from the lack of dignity and respect for the human person. To meet the demands of these populations for dignity and opportunity, frankly, requires new and creative partnerships. That’s why Shaun is here. That’s why we’re here today. We need to reach beyond government to include religious leaders and faith communities, entrepreneurs, civil society groups, all of them working together to invest in a future that embraces tolerance and understanding, and yes, even love.

Anthony Watts is very lucky he lives in a democracy where he probably won't be punished for inciting hatred like he has. He has the freedom to belong to a cadre of WUWT extemists, nihilists, deniers. He is free to seduce his followers into accepting a dead end. He doesn't have the excuse of not being able to get an education. His voice is not silenced by draconian laws or by violence or by oppression. Anthony Watts has no excuse for his lack of dignity, for inciting hatred. Anthony Watts doesn't want to reach out or work together with others to make the world a better place. He is free to do all this, just as I am free to be disgusted by his behaviour.

Usually there is something to ridicule at WUWT.  This WUWT article is beyond ridicule. It is a reminder that deniers at WUWT aren't just depressingly ugly, they are a real, clear and present danger.

Only at WUWT: California's water scarcity is "amusing"

This time it's not so much that Anthony Watts of WUWT doubts the findings (the word "claim" doesn't appear in the headline), it's that he is amused by the notion that there's yet another pressure on water availability in his part of the USA. Yes, he thinks it's humorous. (Archived here.)

A new paper was reported in a press release from UC Irvine, which said in part:

Freshwater runoff from the Sierra Nevada may decrease by as much as one-quarter by 2100 due to climate warming on the high slopes, according to scientists at UC Irvine and UC Merced.

Accelerated plant growth at higher elevations caused by increasing temperatures would trigger more water absorption and evaporation, accounting for the projected runoff declines, the researchers add.

A diminished river flow will only add to the burden of providing resources to the thirsty farms and homes that rely on it. The state is currently experiencing a severe drought, and some reservoirs and groundwater levels are at all-time lows.

The study findings appear this week in the early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You can read the full press release here. The research was done by Michael L. Goulden and Roger C. Bales. I couldn't find the study at PNAS early edition. I expect it will be posted online shortly.

At WUWT the paper was treated with a mix of disdain, disinterest, disbelief from commenters, and "amusement" from Anthony Watts himself. He wrote:

From the University of California – Irvine and the “Environmentalists are never happy” department comes this amusing quandary.

The cause? Increased high-elevation plant growth fueled by climate warming

I don't think too many people in California and neighbouring states would be amused. California is suffering extreme drought at the moment, according to the US Drought Monitor:

Source: US Drought Monitor

The ultimate cherry pick - or how not to interpret a temperature chart, courtesy WUWT

They say a picture tells a thousand words. Is this the ultimate cherry pick?

19 years of pause and 17 years of rapid warming.
Data source: Wood for Trees Charts: WUWT and HotWhopper

Some context

Anthony Watts wrote about a paper by Ross McKitrick (whose name Anthony mis-spelled). It was published in some obscure statistics journal (with zero impact factor), in which Ross set out to "prove" that global warming "paused" 19 years ago. To illustrate, Anthony put up the above chart.

No, not both of them.  Guess which one was Anthony's :)  And I can cherry-pick too, can't I?

He said that Ross McKitrick didn't help him. Anthony Watts was able to come up with that chart all by himself. It's ironic that the abstract that Anthony posted included this sentence about cherry-picking endpoints:

Here, I propose a method for estimating the duration of the hiatus that is robust to unknown forms of heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation (HAC) in the temperature series and to cherry-picking of endpoints.

If you need it, here's a link explaining heteroskedasticity and Tamino discussing autocorrelation, plus more here.

Here's another chart, this time of GISTemp looking at global surface temperatures over the past few decades.

Data source: NASA GISTemp

I wonder if Tamino will bother to take on Ross McKitrick's latest effort?

From the WUWT comments

This first one is priceless. I'm guessing that it's a dig at Anthony's effort, but you can never tell. Lucius von Steinkaninchen  wrote:

September 1, 2014 at 10:26 am
Perhaps eventually we will reach the conclusion that “the pause” extends to the 70s and “global warming” never existed to begin with.

The stats is beyond me, however it mightn't be beyond Greg who says:

September 1, 2014 at 11:23 am
So he uses a method that requires that the data be trend stationary to show that the trend is not statationary but is lower during the 19y ‘pause’.
Seems to have lost something in translation. :?

Tony Brown prefers the word "plateau". climatereason wrote:

September 1, 2014 at 11:56 am
Its an ‘averaged’ pause as clearly the temperatures have moved both ways during the period so ‘pause’ is perhaps not a worthwhile matrix. . Eyeballing it I would say the first 10 years of the 19 year graph is rather variable whilst the second 9 year period is much more constant and would surely merit the term ‘plateau’
tonyb

Denierism of the week: What is increasing the overall cooling rate? Global warming, of course!

Seen at WUWT today, in comments under an article by Bob Tisdale. He was writing about August sea surface temperatures reaching an all time monthly high, for any month in the record (archived here).

A C Osborn  September 1, 2014 at 6:46 am (excerpt)

...this warmth in the sea surface will not take long to disappear in to space, thus increasing the overall cooling rate....

Credit: Plognark

.Bonus quote just seen from pochas  September 1, 2014 at 8:41 am

Is this how a glaciation gets started?

Deluded deniers: Will WUWT correct all its errors about National Geographic?

This is an example of denier weirdness and denier obstinacy and deniers not keeping up. Anthony Watts wrote:

Geoff Sherrington writes: National Geographic Magazine had a Global Warming issue in September 2004. New instruments have given new data. By planning now, NatGeo can make a revised issue 10 years later, in September 2014.

Does Anthony ever write anything himself you might ask? Rarely. And when he does he gets is hilariously wrong, like:

• claiming Russian Steampipes are causing global warming
• claiming an airport suddenly had a one-day bout of UHI disease
• claiming a single pump could have stopped all of the massive floods in England
• claiming a sparsely populated area of China is suffering UHI disease.

The pot calling snow black 

WUWT continues to amaze. Being a site that specialises in disinformation and the stupid, how can anyone there have the cheek to ask someone else to correct something? It's not just pot and kettle. More often it's just pot, with the pot being WUWT. As often as not there is no kettle. When WUWT alleged someone else made a mistake, they are often (usually) wrong.

What Geoff Sherrington wants changed from 2004

Geoff Sherrington wants National Geographic to "correct" articles it published in its September 2004 issue on global warming. Yes, that's right. September 2004.

Let's go through all the hundreds and thousands of errors that Geoff Sherrington wants to "correct". Geoff has gone back to 2004. Why not 1934 or 1974 or 1994? You may well ask. I expect there are things written way back when that could be "corrected".

I'll leave you to wonder about that. In the meantime, let's get on with it. There aren't hundreds and thousands after all, there are only 22 phrases or sentences he wants to change. Geoff said:

The 2014 edition should aim to correct what is now known to be wrong or questionable in the 2004 edition. We can help. Here are some quotes that need attention. The first three have some commentary, as is suggested for the remainder.

Ummm - okay. Magazines should of course check every edition every ten years and publish errata editions. They would probably sell like hot cakes. But just how many "corrections" are needed? Hardly any, and most of those are about things that have got worse in the meantime. As usual Anthony Watts and his deluded deniers have the wrong end of the stick.