Pat'n Chip float by WUWT on a cloud of aerosols

Patrick J Michaels and Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger have discovered a new blog article about aerosols. The article is by Dr Nicolas Bellouin from the University of Reading, who specialises in studying aerosols. He wrote about a preliminary estimate of aerosol-cloud forcing of -0.6 W m^-2, which is lower than the estimate in the latest IPCC report, of -0.9 W m^-2, but well within the range in the IPCC report, which is quite wide - from -1.9 to -0.1 W m^-2.

Pat'n Chip grabbed hold of the blog article as though it were precious gold, and published at WUWT (archived here).  Deniers haven't got much to grab hold of right now, so a blog article about a blog article will have to do. The first blog article is not yet a paper. That's promised for August this year. In fact, at the bottom of his article, Dr Bellouin wrote:

I thank Graham Feingold, Johannes Quaas, Annica Ekman, Leo Donner, and Ilan Koren for interesting discussions on current understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions. Note that they do not all agree that aerosol-cloud radiative forcing is weak: some argue that a value of up to −1.2 W m^-2 remains consistent with scientific understanding.

That value of −1.2 W m^-2 is higher than the lower end referred to in the IPCC report (−1.9 W m^-2), so it could be that the range has been better defined in the three years since the AR5 IPCC report.

Troposphere temperatures for May 2016

The troposphere temperatures are out for May 2016. The lower troposphere as UAH v6 beta 5 and RSS TLT v3.3. As last month, this report also covers RSS TTT for the troposphere.

In all records, the May global anomaly dropped again, as El Nino dissipated. In the lower troposphere (UAH beta v6.05) and the troposphere (RSS TTT) the May anomaly is lower than it was in 1998.

Troposphere temperature (RSS TTT v4) chart

First here is RSS TTT with the latest dataset, version 4. TTT seems to be measure more of the troposphere than TLT (that is, it has a greater vertical profile) with less of the stratosphere than the mid-troposphere data (TMT). It shows a higher rate of warming than RSS v3.3 and higher than UAH.

Hover the cursor (arrow) over the plots to see the data points, trend etc.

The chart below is the average of the 12 months to May, from June 1979 to May 1980, through to June 2015 to May 2016.

Figure 1 | Troposphere temperature for 12 months to May (TTT). Anomaly is from the 1979-1998 mean. Data source: RSS

Open thread

It'll probably be another couple of days before getting back to daily blogging. In the meantime, feel free to comment about anything.

Australia is shocked that Greg Hunt, whose department got the UN to rid a report of the Barrier Reef, is claiming credit for keeping the Great Barrier Reef off the endangered list for a bit longer. That's during the worst coral bleaching event in modern times. UNESCO is going to keep an eye on it for a while, even if Greg Hunt isn't.

Over at WUWT, the audience has been reduced to a joke. I know it's not the done thing to call people stupid, but how would you describe these comments?

The vandalism of CSIRO continues.

Another wrong headline at WUWT about CERN and related cloud experiments

It's happened again. Anthony has written another misleading headline (archived here), this time about the cloud experiments at CERN and related research. There were three papers this week from the same group of people, discussing aspects relating to clouds with and without cosmic rays. Anthony's headline was "CERN’s CLOUD experiment results suggests industrial revolution reduced cloud cover, cosmic rays have an impact too". Well, no. The papers didn't say that the industrial revolution reduced cloud cover. I don't know how he got that idea. The papers were about ionisation, and volatile emissions from plants - both from cloud chamber experiments, plus a paper on research conducted at high altitude fairly free of anthropogenic aerosols, looking at new particle formation as a precursor to clouds.

Another misleading WUWT headline, this one about wildfire

This is about another misleading headline at WUWT (archived here). Anthony Watts wrote about a paper in a special edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B about wildfire. His headline was "New study shows no wildfire increases due to global warming, slight decline in recent decades noted". Anthony took it on himself to add the part about global warming. That wasn't in either the press release or the abstract, and I doubt it was in the paper itself, which is paywalled.

Larry Hamlin @wattsupwiththat reframes a small win in climate mitigation

As you probably know, when right wing extremists talk about problems that were averted, they often claim there was never a problem to begin with. That applies to lots of things, for example:

• smog, where right wingers would claim that clean air regulations aren't necessary because the smog has disappeared all by itself.
• population, right wingers would claim that family planning education programs and contraceptive devices and hormone pills aren't necessary, because the human population is "only" 7.4 billion, not 12 billion (yet)
• Y2K bug, right wingers would claim there weren't any problems (that they know of), so all the efforts to prevent the problem weren't necessary
• and more, which you can add yourself :)

Many deniers blame "the government" for water shortages from droughts and damage from floods and wildfires, not climate change or human activity. Right wing extremists are loathe to accept any blame themselves. Most will blame government for everything they see as wrong with the world, and take credit for every problem that has been fixed, or falsely claim there was never a problem to begin with.

Heaven forbid a denier giving the US government any credit for the recent dip in carbon emissions from energy use.

Climate disinformers Willie Soon and István Markó caught out again

Talking of paid disinformers, Willie Soon has penned an article for Breitbart, some of which Anthony Watts copied and pasted at WUWT (archived here). He's written it with another disinformer called István Markó. The article is full to the brim with disinformation and logical fallacies and denier memes, typical of WUWT. The person they chose to target is Bill Nye, a US television personality who has a science show. The pair of disinformers went through "science is settled", "CO2 is plant food", and they gave Anthony Watts' climate conspiracy blog a plug, too.

Denier weirdness: Eric Worrall fights against the fight against poverty

Deniers really are weird. On the one hand extreme right wingers are against government funding and will fight tooth and nail for small government. Some of them claim to be against poverty, too, so it's not that often you'll find a denier admitting that they are fighting against efforts to reduce poverty. One such example is at WUWT today (archived here). Eric Worrall is up in arms about an initiative from the Rockefeller Foundation as part of its 100 Resilient Cities program. I'm guessing that the reason he is against it is because it mentions the word "climate". Or maybe he thinks that if some people become less poor, he will become less rich. And we can't have that!

Leopards and spots - a warning to climate scientists

A short while ago, Reginal Perrin commented about Anthony Watts moderating out a fairly ordinary conspiracy theory as far as WUWT goes. The theory put forward by WUWT regular Charles Nelson, and embellished by dbstealey (aka ex-WUWT moderator Smokey, dbs, DBoehm etc) was that scientists are fraudulently changing data to suit some agenda of the US government. That's a theory that Anthony Watts has posited in the past himself, so it raises the question of why he decided to moderate out and delete these comments.

There are three possibilities I can think of. One is that Anthony is getting a bit twitchy because denier antics are under the spotlight. Anthony Watts might be afraid of repercussions from the war he's been waging against science and scientists for the past several years. On the one hand he is posting a lot of "breaking news" about CEI and the preliminary investigation in ExxonMobil and how CEI is being prevented from speaking freely (as if). At the same time he is posting "breaking news" about CEI's FOI campaigns against scientists, trying to stop them from "speaking freely". Anthony might be worried that he'll get hauled into court himself.

Denier weirdness: Eric Worrall on putting scientists in charge...

At WUWT today Eric Worrall has mixed up politics and science into a logical fallacy (archived here). He is complaining about the US President suggesting that political leaders take heed of climate science experts, rather than spout nonsense from charlatans and science deniers. Eric implied that Obama was saying that climate scientists should be "running the country". Yes, deniers are weird.

Eric wrote an article under the headline: "Why don’t we put Climate Scientists in Charge of the Country?". Underneath he wrote:

President Obama recently gave a speech, in which he seemed to suggest that politicians should subordinate their decisions to the opinions of scientists. My question – why don’t we cut out the middleman, and put the scientists directly in charge?

No. That wasn't what Obama was suggesting. What he was saying was that political leaders should not spread lies and make up stuff to deceive the public about climate science. They should not cavalierly dismiss the findings of experts in any field.