Alec Rawls uncovers an Eemian climate conspiracy @wattsupwiththat

An infrequent guest at Anthony Watts climate conspiracy blog is a bloke called Alec Rawls. He's a climate conspiracy theorist and, going by his articles, he's quite possibly a general conspiracy theorist too. He sees nefarious intent in every bit of science.

Muddled denier thinking

If you've ever visited a denier blog (like WUWT), one thing you may have noticed is that some science deniers call on science to prove that the science they call on is "wrong". Yes, if that's confusing so are deniers. Conspiracy theorising science deniers will often do the same thing. They'll say that the scientists are hiding something, then "prove" it by referring to science, showing that scientists do in fact say what they claim scientists do not say.

Still confused?

Communicating climate change risk

You know how some deniers beat up uncertainty every time climate change is mentioned. Well, there's a new booklet that's just been published, which will give you a heap of good tips on how to deal with the subject.

The tips are organised under 12 headings:

1. Manage your audience’s expectations
2. Start with what you know, not what you don’t know
3. Be clear about the scientific consensus
4. Shift from ‘uncertainty’ to ‘risk’
5. Be clear about the type of uncertainty you are talking about
6. Understand what is driving people’s views about climate change
7. The most important question for climate impacts is ‘when’, not ‘if’
8. Communicate through images and stories
9. Highlight the ‘positives’ of uncertainty
10. Communicate effectively about climate impacts
11. Have a conversation, not an argument
12. Tell a human story not a scientific one.

Managing expectations is about pointing out stuff like the fallacy that because something is not known for certain doesn't mean that nothing is known. For example, it is known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and more of it heats up the planet.

Starting with what you know means starting out with facts like the world is warming and climates are changing. And that heat waves and deluges are getting worse. Rather than starting out with whether or not the planet will heat up by 4C or more or whether we'll act and keep it to 3C or less.

Being clear about the consensus is this:

Shift from ‘uncertainty’ to ‘risk’ because most people don't understand what is meant by uncertainty when used in science. Most people know a bit about risk, though. People typically pay hundreds of dollars a year on insurance against events that have a much lower risk than climate change.

You can read more examples in an article by one of the authors, Adam Corner, at Shaping Tomorrow's World. And the link to the handbook is below.

Reference

Adam Corner, Stephan Lewandowsky, Mary Phillips and Olga Roberts (2015) The Uncertainty Handbook. Bristol: University of Bristol - download here.

Why @wattsupwiththat has been so dull lately - it's the weather

At WUWT the mood is sombre and dull and boring. There has been nothing of note for a while. You'd never know that Anthony Watts claims he is a "former AMS certified (Seal 676 retired) television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air". He doesn't blog about weather these days. Instead there's the usual from the resident conspiracy theorist, Tim Ball (of One World Guvmint/New World Order nonsense), and various articles about why the Pope is wrong to accept science. These latter are a bit mixed up, with some saying that the Catholic Church should do a Galileo and reject science, and others complaining that he wants to rob the poor, and others saying he is a marxist and wanting to make the poor people of the world better off (horrors of horrors!) and one comment even claiming Pope Francis is a KGB sleeper agent.

At one point recently, Anthony branched out into national security and went all alarmist. He warned his readers to watch out for terrorist attacks on the Independence Day weekend, so quite a few of them unholstered their guns. This was the result. (Only a couple of readers said his article was crap.)

I think I've figured out what the problem is. Every time Anthony puts on his weather announcer's hat he quickly takes it off again. This is some of what he doesn't want his readers to read:

Christopher Monckton mixes things up @wattsupwiththat - the carbon budget

On WUWT there is an article by Christopher Monckton (archived here). It's a short article (for him), in which he fudges numbers and mixes up concepts. Anthony wrote what Roy Spencer excitedly thinks is a very clever headline: 2°C or not 2°C–that is the question. Is it the question or is the question something else? It turns out the question was something else - and the answer at WUWT was wrong as usual.

The article starts with a graphic from an old slideshare presentation from Jonathon Kooney. A slide which Mr Kooney dropped from his later presentations on climate change, possibly because it was hard to make sense of it. The slide was based on the 2009 paper by Malte Meinshausen and co: "Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C".

Oceans could not be more important, and time is running out

The new paper that was published in Science this week will, hopefully, be a wake up call that it's not just global warming that is of great concern, it's the changes in the oceans. When people talk about the ocean and CO2, mostly it's in terms of ocean acidification. However the changes we are causing to the oceans go way beyond changes in pH. It's not just shellfish and other pH sensitive species that are affected by the changes we are bringing about. The oceans are crucial to climate (think ENSO), to our food supply, and to biodiversity.

The paper was from a large international team of scientists led by Jean-Pierre Gattuso of the Observatoire Océanologique de Villefranche-sur-Mer. It concludes by summarising four critical messages - the main one being that we must immediately make substantial reductions to CO2 emissions (my emphasis):

1. The ocean strongly influences the climate system and provides important services to humans. 
2. Impacts on key marine and coastal organisms, ecosystems, and services from anthropogenic CO2 emissions are already detectable, and several will face high risk of impacts well before 2100, even with the stringent CO2 emissions scenario (RCP2.6). These impacts are occurring across all latitudes and have become a global concern that spans the traditional north/south divide. 
3. The analysis shows that immediate and substantial reduction of CO2 emissions is required in order to prevent the massive and effectively irreversible impacts on ocean ecosystems and their services that are projected with emissions scenarios more severe than RCP2.6. Limiting emissions to below this level is necessary to meet UNFCCC's stated objectives. Management options that overlook CO2, such as solar radiation management and control of methane emission, will only minimize impacts of ocean warming and not those of ocean acidification. 
4. As CO2 increases, the protection, adaptation, and repair options for the ocean become fewer and less effective.

Judith Curry's solution to extreme heat

Judith Curry has a solution to the extreme heat that lots of people are suffering right now. And the even more extreme heat that we'll be suffering as global warming gets worse.

Burn more fossil fuels and speed up global warming.

That's right. Judith wrote - let them buy air conditioners. Much as Pat'n Chip and Anthony Watts have advocated in the past. What she actually wrote was:

Does it make more sense to provide air conditioning or to limit CO2 emissions.  I vote for more air conditioning in these susceptible regions.

Good luck with that when the power gets rationed or quits completely from excess demand.

Good luck with finding an air-conditioner for your home that's rated for much above 43°C (110°F). You might get lucky and get one rated to 46°C (115°F). Or you might be out of luck.

Good luck with the even greater global warming as all that extra CO2 is spewed into the air making it even hotter.

And I agree with Greg Laden. If you're going to be utterly insensitive to people's suffering, the least you can do is wait a decent interval until the suffering is behind them.

Deluding the majority on denier blogs like @wattsupwiththat

You'll often see comments like these at WUWT, suggesting that people think that everyone just knows that climate science is a scam or a fraud or a hoax or global cooling is about to start. Many deniers are under the illusion that fake sceptics constitute the majority. They are wrong. There is a phenomenon that might go part way to explaining the delusions of deniers. (The comments below are all from just one article at WUWT):

Chris Marlowe says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:29 am
The smartest of these guys will be looking for an exit strategy and will eventually look the other way if anyone suggests they were once on the bandwagon beating the drum.

Stephen Richards says:

January 16, 2014 at 4:36 am
What I don’t want is for these guys to remain in place when this whole scam is exposed. Like Erlich they will just keep coming back with another scare for money scheme.

Henry Galt. says:

January 16, 2014 at 5:05 am
The Cl(imate/imatology)(P/C)ause.
My take on “The Clause”:
CS due to 2xCO² is ≤ 0.000°K à la Ferenc Miskolczi.
Back-pedalling grant seekers are barfing up lower and lower guesswork for CS as time passes, we get colder and the 0.000°K part becomes increasingly obvious.

How delusions spread

There's a new paper lodged at arXiv.org, which may help explain the apparent delusion of some climate science deniers. Those who wrongly think that they are in a majority, when the reality is that it's a minority of people who reject climate science. The paper is also discussed in the MIT Technology Review from a marketer's perspective.

Eric Worrall mistakes native cattle breeds for mutants @wattsupwiththat

Eric Worrall is someone who Anthony Watts uses to fill his daily quota of denier nonsense at WUWT. Mostly his "guest articles" are short and silly. Take today for example. Eric is equating two cattle breeds from India with deliberately bred featherless chickens (archived here). I expect cattle breeds is a topic dear to the heart of Eric "eugenics" Worrall.

Eric knows which buttons to press to get the WUWT-ers all a go - mix guvmint with money and CO2 and scientists and Paris and toss in a mutant and Bob's your uncle:

It's getting mighty hot in places, plus a rare tropical cyclone

Here's a short article about weather, the sort you won't read at denier blogs like WUWT.

London has just had it's hottest July day on record - with the Guardian reporting 36.7°C (98.1°F) at Heathrow. Wimbledon, where play more commonly stops because of rain, shut the centre court roof to keep out the heat instead. There was a warning that train lines may buckle because of the heat.

Western Europe is even hotter, with 39C in Paris and almost 44C  in Cordoba.

Closer to home there is a cyclone, TC Raquel, south of the equator - in July! That's never been recorded in that area at this time of the year since satellite monitoring began. Here's an image from Earth wind map, showing Tropical Cyclone Raquel and Tropical Storm Chan-Hom to the north of it.

Elegant Terns move house when it gets too hot, and Bob Tisdale tries to cover it up @wattsupwiththat

If you mention global warming in a press release, deniers will be all over you. If seas are sometimes getting much hotter much more often, don't think for a minute it might possibly be part of a world-wide trend. Not even in the context of this:

Data source: UK Met Office Hadley Centre