Will the real Richard Tol please stand up?

At the Carbon Brief, there's a full transcript of an interview of Richard Tol by Roger Harrabin of the BBC. Readers of HotWhopper won't recognise him. The Richard Tol who was interviewed by Roger Harrabin is a completely different man to the person who has behaved in an unhinged obsessive manner when he has visited HotWhopper in the past (see below). He is quite a different person to the man who for more than two years has been obsessed with fatigued abstracts, date stamps and 97 per cents, trying to find flaws in the research study by Cook et al, and failing.

Adverse effects of climate change are about to outweigh any benefits

The newly emerged Richard Tol says things like adverse affects of climate change will very soon outweigh any benefits of warming (within months, not years):

• According to my latest calculations, it’s sort of around 1.1 degrees of warming relative to pre-industrial, so that’s … referring to the boundary between net positive benefits from warming, and negatives, which means we are at the boundary.

Laid bare: the sociopathology of climate science denial

Within minutes of the terrorist killings in Paris last night, there was a WUWT blog article, plus numerous tweets and retweets. Anthony Watts milked the horror of the terrorist attacks in Paris for all he could get out of it (archived here and here). Several hours later he added a French flag and the word "solidarité" to his blog header (archived here), perhaps in an attempt to soften his crass opportunism, or perhaps make more mileage.

This episode demonstrates again what Anthony and his followers at wattsupwiththat.com (WUWT) are really like underneath their charade of climate science denial. It's not the first time Anthony Watts has shown he has no class and is incapable of empathy. In the past he has seized on a disastrous tragedy, Haiyan, and used it as an opportunity for another attack on science. And if you decide to read the WUWT comments, you'll see that denial goes hand in hand with the bigotry of some deniers.

Shame on them.

Update: Dr Roy Spencer PhD tops the efforts of Anthony Watts and most of the deniers at WUWT. See the comments below for details, or read what he wrote on his Facebook page.

Sou 11:15 am 15 November 2015

[Note: Out of respect for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris, and their families, and all of France, I postponed the publication of this article for a few hours. If you do comment, I know you'll remember that this blog is viewed by people from around the world, and will respect those who've been touched by the horrific events in Paris.]

Denier whines of censorship: Why won't they let me say the Earth is flat?

Anthony Watts has really, really, really got his nose out of joint. What caused his nose to become disjointed was a UK newspaper, The Independent. It has modernised its website and poor little Anthony can no longer find a minor article from March 2000 - more than 15 years ago.

It's a conspiracy, he moans. It's all a plot to hide bad headlines. He wrote (archived here, cached here):

In light of what happened yesterday with The Independent apparently disappearing a famous climate prediction blunder article while leaving an article critical of its use intact, this opinion piece by Joe Wallach seemed pertinent -Anthony

Sheesh. He doesn't mind hiding his own inconvenient articles, does he? Try to find this one at WUWT: "An interesting issue with ice core data". Here's the link:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/03/an-interesting-issue-with-ice-core-data/

What? It's disappeared? Along with all the 83 comments? Okay then, here's the archived version: http://www.webcitation.org/6H83F9g4X

Credit: XKCD

A rare and exciting event at WUWT

A rare and exciting event has occurred at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT. He can't find one of what he calls his failed climate predictions. The rarity isn't that he couldn't find it, it's that he actually looked for the source! As you know, in deniersville, a climate prediction can fail as long as it hasn't happened yet. It doesn't have to be a near time prediction, it could be a prediction for the years well into the future. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a prediction to be a failed prediction. In deniersville, if a newspaper reporter (or occasionally a scientist) says anything about the future, and even if they don't, it can be added to one of those silly denier lists that float around cyberspace.

I don't know why Anthony Watts is so upset. He doesn't usually bother linking to original sources when he posts a list of so-called "failed predictions" that he filches from some denier website or other. In deniers' minds it doesn't matter if there never was a prediction in the first place. or if there was it doesn't matter who made it.

I once tried to source some of the supposed "predictions" he posted back in 2014, but mostly all I found was a copy of his denier list, not an original source for the quote. In other words, most of the so-called predictions are probably just made up out of thin air. At best, some might be quote-mined from newspaper articles. Very few are scientific predictions. Only eight of the 107 so-called "predictions" had a live link to any source, none of which was a "failed prediction"!

Denier weirdness: No pennies have dropped for Bob Tisdale at WUWT

Some deniers at WUWT seem to think that Bob Tisdale has a wonderful intellect. If he does he hides it very well. I've already written about his conspiracy theorising fantasies from his new "book". Well, he's at it again at WUWT.

He wrote a very silly article (archived here), full of meaningless charts. He was, I think, making the point that it can get warm in the day and cool at night in Central England. And in that part of the world, it's warmer in summer than it is in winter, surprise, surprise. Does he think that nobody knew that? Where I live it doesn't usually get quite as cold but it can get a lot hotter, so I'd say we experience seasonal and diurnal differences in temperature that might not be that different, just shifted up a bit on the chart.

The point Bob was trying to make is so puerile that I'm wondering if I've got it wrong. Maybe he was trying to write about some other great breakthrough. If he was he didn't explain it well.

Eric Worrall and WUWT with telltale techniques - No. 3: Impossible expectations No: 2 Logical Fallacy

The third of five telltale techniques of climate science denial is that of setting impossible expectations. The second is logical fallacies. Today Anthony Watts has put up another article by Eric Worrall (archived here). His article has both featured, and more. This article is about a special report of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS): Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective.

The report itself, like the ones about extreme events in 2011, 2012 and 2013, describes a number of extreme weather events from around the world in the context of human-caused climate change. There's a short explanation on the contents web page, my paras, dot points and emphasis:

Some history that led to Judith Curry hunkering down in the NOAA conspiracy theorists' bunker

The last couple of days has seen ex-scientist Judith Curry hunkering down in the conspiracy theorists' bunker. She is suggesting that the scientists at NOAA are "biasing and spinning climate science to support a political agenda".

If that's what they were doing (it isn't, as climate researcher Peter Thorne explains), they were not doing it at all well. For one thing, they've published papers describing their work in considerable detail, and the data is freely available (here and here and here) for anyone to check. Judith has no expertise in putting together surface temperature records (if you can't tell from reading her articles), so she wouldn't know what to do with the NOAA data any more than Lamar Smith does. (Judith dropped off the Berkeley Earth project team at an early stage, without making any substantive contribution.)

She does know how to insinuate and spread nasty smear campaigns, however. Over the years she's honed that art to a reasonable, if patently transparent, level.

Anthony Watts opens mouth, places foot firmly - in the weakening Walker Circulation

As if one foot in mouth wasn't enough for the day, Anthony Watts does it again (archived here, cached here). Maybe he wanted to give both his clodhoppers a turn. Whatever - he posted one of his "claim" articles, which was about a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters. The paper, by Katinka Bellomo and Amy C. Clement from the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, was describing evidence of the expected slowdown in the Walker Circulation. Beneath his "claim" headline Anthony wrote:

From the UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI ROSENSTIEL SCHOOL OF MARINE & ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE and the “correlation is not causation department” comes this paper that suggests GHG’s decrease the Walker Circulation. Only one problem. They don’t give a clear cut mechanism, only tenuous linkage. I suspect Willis will have a thing or two to say about this paper.

Only one problem, the scientists did give a clear cut mechanism. (Actually, they referred to more than one mechanism, although they emphasised the one proposed by Isaac Held and Brian Soden.) As the authors explained right at the very beginning of their paper:

More snow won't stop the West Antarctic ice sheet from collapsing

Anthony Watts reappears in a frenzy of excitement (archived here and cached here). He's discovered a press release about a new paper by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey Expedition, but didn't take the time to read it or the paper. Because of that, he's made a complete ass of himself as he almost always does whenever he writes something on his blog. (Which is probably why he appears so rarely these days. He can't hack the guffaws from onlookers.)

Anthony's headline is wrong. It reads: "Yet another study shows Antarctica gaining ice mass – snowfall accumulation ‘highest we have seen in the last 300 years’". Then, that blogger who rejects out of hand almost every scientific paper he comes across, bemoans the fact that an article at Media Matters tells how a scientist, Jay Zwally, knew that deniers would twist his recent paper.

OCO-2 baffles deniers at WUWT and prompts more conspiracy theories

The OCO-2 project at NASA has a video showing the changes in atmospheric CO2 over a year or so, as measured by the OCO-2 satellite, which was launched last year. NASA put out a press release a few days ago:

"We can already clearly see patterns of seasonal change and variations in carbon dioxide around the globe," said Annmarie Eldering, OCO-2 deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Far more subtle features are expected to emerge over time."...

...Through most of OCO-2's first year in space, the mission team was busy calibrating its science instrument, learning how to process its massive amount of data, and delivering data products to NASA's Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES-DISC) in Greenbelt, Maryland, for distribution to the world’s science community.

Scientists are comparing OCO-2 data to ground-based measurements to validate the satellite data and tie it to internationally accepted standards for accuracy and precision. 

CO2 is a well-mixed greenhouse gas. Notice the legend - it spans just 15 parts per million by volume, from 390 to 405 ppmv. And I don't think the colours hit the extremes at any point during the year (you can check for yourself). It gets drawn down into plants on land and in the ocean and then released again as the seasons change.