It is essentially trivial, says Jonathan Jones. Indeed, says Stephan Lewandowsky

Chelsea Harvey at Washington Post has written about a new paper in Global Environmental Change. Her headline is: "Climate change doubters really aren’t going to like this study", and it seems that at least one science denier doesn't like it. The paper is by Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor at the University of Bristol, Timothy Ballard, Klaus Oberauerd and Rasmus Benestad, a climate scientist. It was a research conducted as a blind test of common claims of climate science deniers, comparing them with science reported by climate scientists.

The blind tests were carried out by disguising the data as something else (like agricultural production figures or population or share market prices or similar) and asking statisticians and economists to check the statements against the data for accuracy. Chelsea Harvey gave this example as a simplified illustration of the test:

El Niño to La Niña years

I said a short while ago that I'd look at what has happened in the past when a La Niña followed a strong El Niño. Well, I have, and here is the result. These are all the strong El Niño's that were followed by a La Niña in recent decades. There were only three of them. In two cases, the following La Niña was a multi-year event as shown in the figure below. The surface temperature data is from GISS NASA. The Nino 3.4 sea surface temperature data is from NOAA and the ENSO years are from BoM.

Young earther, Charles Clough, misleads readers @wattsupwiththat about rising sea levels

At WUWT Anthony Watts published an article by Charles Clough (archived here). He was complaining about an article by Justin Gillis in the New York Times last February, which had the title:

Seas Are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries

Here is where the title came from, in the abstract of a paper by Robert E Kopp and colleagues (my emphasis):

GSL [global sea level] rose at 0.1 ± 0.1 mm/y (2σ) over 0–700 CE. A GSL fall of 0.2 ± 0.2 mm/y over 1000–1400 CE is associated with ∼0.2 °C global mean cooling. A significant GSL acceleration began in the 19th century and yielded a 20th century rise that is extremely likely (probability P≥0.95) faster than during any of the previous 27 centuries.

Charles Clough is from the pseudo-religious cult, the Cornwall Alliance. He has signed a "declaration" rejecting climate science, which blatantly and falsely claims in part that "Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history." He's a sworn science denier. Charles is also a young earth creationist as indicated on this YouTube session (the link goes straight to the segment at 21 minutes 18 seconds in. You'll have to skip the advert). Charles Clough thinks the earth was created at the same time as the mythical creation of Adam, 6,000 years ago.

Force X = Force N + Force D, and a Notch (maybe)

Over at Jo Nova's blog, the Rocket Scientist from Luna Park, David Evans, and his long-suffering partner Jo Nova, ran into a spot of bother. They'd written something like 30 articles about Force X and The Notch, promising a big freeze is about to hit the world. Then they hit a brick wall. They couldn't figure out where to go next, how to string things out a bit longer.

David has been looking for a magical mysterious invisible Force X from an imaginary notch he thought he'd found. He's creating this alternative theory of climate for science deniers of the extremely gullible kind. His Force has magical and conflicting properties:

• it's undetectable
• its effect is delayed by the length of the solar cycle that comes after the Force is with us
• it appears as flickers of sunlight
• it comes out of the sun
• it is ten or twenty times stronger than incoming solar radiation
• it controls how much sunlight is reflected to space from earth, without changing the temperature on Earth
• it also controls how much sunlight comes into Earth
• the mechanism could be by UV, magnetic field effects, solar wind, or other form of electrical field.

We will feel the effect as major cooling either in 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 or 2024. The drop in temperature will be 0.3 C, or it will drop to that of the 1950s, or maybe it will drop to that of the 1920s.

The reason we know it's there is because "the dog didn't bark". That is, it's because we can't see it, we can't hear it, we can't smell it, we can't feel it, and we've no way of detecting it, that we know it has to be there.

Shock and furious anger at the vandalism of CSIRO: Larry Marshall wants to tear it down before anyone can stop him

The Australian Government is now in caretaker mode. After declaring an election is to be held on 2 July, the government will not be making any substantive decisions before the election, other than is absolutely necessary. All seats in both houses of Parliament are up for grabs in what is known here as a double dissolution. That sets the scene for who knows what. The current government is probably ahead slightly, but a lot can happen in the next 46 days.

While the government is not around to stop him, the newly appointed CEO of CSIRO is taking the opportunity to wreak havoc. He is ransacking and pillaging our most prestigious national scientific organisation, destroying decades of climate science. He is not tearing it apart to put back together. No. He is tearing it down. He is plundering our single biggest defense against climate change. Australia will soon be dependent on a very small number of remaining staff at CSIRO, plus the science carried out at Universities, and the Bureau of Meteorology. Larry Marshall is aiming to complete his destruction before the Federal election, while no-one in government can act to stop him. (They could, but by convention they probably won't.)

Bob Tisdale's trick of hiding the data, revisited

I've written previously about the trick Bob Tisdale uses to hide the fact that observed temperatures are now very close to modeled projections. He uses the same trick every time he posts his update to global mean surface temperatures (as archived here). It's an obvious trick, which should fool no-one except people who aren't familiar with charts and disinformer tricks, and those who want to deny global warming. I shouldn't need to repeat what he does, but I will, briefly. The wonder is that Bob keeps repeating his trick, even though he knows it's deceptive for two reasons:

1. Firstly it's deceitful because Bob chops off much of the past two and a half years of data, by plotting a 61 month moving average.
2. Secondly it's wrong because he doesn't let his readers know that the CMIP5 data he's using has only estimated forcings since 2005. The actual forcings had a net effect lower than what the CMIP5 models were based on.

Seven in a row: April is the hottest April on record, a 7000 year record?

Yes, it's another hottest on record, this time in April 2016. According to GISS NASA, the average for April was 1.11 °C, which is 0.24 °C above the previous hottest April, in 2010. It's the equal third highest anomaly for any month (with January 2016), the highest being February, which was 1.33 °C.

The average for the four months to the end of April is 1.21 °C, which is 0.38 °C higher than any previous January to April period. The previous highest was last year, which with the latest data had an anomaly of 0.84 °C.

Longest stretch of hottest months in the record

This is the seventh month in a row of "hottest months", all of which had an anomaly more than one degree Celsius above the 1951-1980 mean. This breaks the previous record of six in a row, set last month. (See comment from Sheldon Walker below. There was six month run of "hottest" in 1997/98.)

This hasn't happened before in the record since at least the 1950s. Earlier times probably aren't sufficiently accurate on a month by month basis to say. I didn't check back that far and, in any case, pre-1950s temperatures would probably have been hotter at some time in the last couple of millenia. What that means is that it's probably more than 7,000 years since there was a similar run of hottest months on record. That is, not since the Holocene climatic optimum (and it's probably hotter now than it was back then).

Below is a chart of the month of April only:

Figure 1 | Global mean temperature anomaly - month of April only. Data source: GISS NASA.

CEI and WUWT attack the messengers, and the strange role of Judith Curry and Peter Webster

Deniers get very excited when they get their grubby paws on private emails between scientists. It doesn't matter what is written in those emails. The very fact that academics have been using email to communicate from a time before most people had heard of the Internet is sufficient for them to claim that climate science is a hoax.

Yesterday Anthony Watts posted some emails released through yet another FOI demand by Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) (archived here). They were related to the support from some scientists of a RICO investigation, proposed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, into fossil fuel companies and other organisations who have allegedly "knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change". The emails contain nothing that shows anything more than the very real concern by scientists that there are wicked people who are trying to thwart efforts to mitigate global warming. That there are evil people in the world who have been knowingly working to deceive the public by by saying that global warming either doesn't exist or is not dangerous. They've even got some people believing that climate science is a hoax.

Anthony Watts of WUWT is one of the low-level tools used by anti-mitigation activist organisations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, that wish harm on the world.

In Eric Worrall's logically fallacious opinion - aerosols and climate change

Some science deniers do not understand science. Some of them have made it their life's mission to not understand it. Others devote their retirement to writing nonsense on climate conspiracy blogs such as WUWT. One feature that's shared almost universally among climate conspiracy theorists is they excel at logical fallacies.

Figure 1 | Aerospan sun photometry station, Birdsville Australia. Credit: CSIRO

Take Eric Worrall at WUWT. In recent months Anthony Watts has been using Eric to write most of his very silly blog articles. Eric takes pride in his inability to reason. Today (archived here) he's written about a letter from a senior NASA scientist Brent Holben to Alex Wonhas, a senior CSIRO executive of CSIRO, which was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.  Dr Holben was requesting that CSIRO not stop its important work in researching aerosols.

OMG it's horsepower!

Anthony Watts is once again scraping the bottom of the barrel. This time he scraped up some horse manure (archived here). He resurrected an old article from the Washington Times, from way back in 2012. It featured in one of the very first articles here at HotWhopper.

Deniers are seriously weird at times. If you subscribe to the weirdness of thinking that a bunch of people standing on a pier changed the sea level in Atlantic City, you'll have given them super-powers. That's because they also must have changed the sea level up and down the entire east coast of North America, as Tamino showed way back in 2012.