Another "ice age" fear for England - only at WUWT

Anthony Watts has posted another alarmist article, this time about how England might suffer from an ice age some time soon. The guest opinion was penned by John Hardy (UK), and was posted under a painting by Abraham Hondius: “The Frozen Thames” 1677 (during the Maunder minimum) (archived here).

One of the important messages from this article is that one would be very unwise to pay any attention to anything written at WUWT. I don't know why deniers have such an aversion to learning about climate. Nor do I know why they are so shameless about showing their ignorance. Nor why they are apparently unwilling or unable to do basic fact-checking or research.

Persil-brains: with James Inhofe, Eric Worrall, Andy May and WUWT

There used to be a laundry detergent called Persil, that advertised "whiter than white". I thought of it when I saw more evidence that climate science deniers have an strange aversion to washing. First it was whitewashing, now it's brainwashing that sends them into a spin cycle. Seems as if a lot of climate conspiracy theories revolve around washing, or should I say complaints about washing.

Washing Inhofe's Brain

I'd say that Senator James "snowball" Inhofe's brain would benefit from a thorough cleaning to get rid of all the rubbish floating about in there. Eric Worrall has written about the latest bit of idiocy being circulated (archived here). Senator Inhofe, a committed science denier in the USA, talked about his grand-daughter asking him why he doesn't understand global warming. Eric copied part of an article from the Washington Post:

Even if we stopped adding CO2 today*, we'd have to prepare for more hot!

In Nature's open access journal Scientific Reports there's a paper just out by Chris Huntingford and Lina M. Mercado about how much more warming to expect. Scientists report that even if we didn't add any more CO2 to the air *kept CO2 at current levels in the atmosphere (around 400 ppm), temperatures over a lot of land regions would eventually increase by more than 1.5°C. (*See comment by ATTP below.) There are two main reasons for this:

1. until we reach equilibrium, with as much radiation leaving the planet as comes in from the sun, the earth will continue to warm;
2. the land surface warm is a lot more quickly than the ocean surface and will continue to do so until the new equilibrium higher temperatures are reached.

The water vapour penny precipitates, almost, for Willis Eschenbach at WUWT

There's a new article at WUWT by Willis Eschenbach (archived here, latest here). It took him almost twenty years, but he's finally found the RSS total precipitable water (TPW) record. For years Willis has been arguing that Earth's climate can't change much because of thunderstorms. It seems that he may have finally woken up to the fact that there is more water vapour in a warmer atmosphere than in a cooler one and that this is contributing to the greenhouse effect. He wrote (about the dataset that was reported 20 years ago in 1996): "One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset."

I've been meaning to write about global warming, water vapour and precipitation for some time. There have been several papers on the subject (see below). What's happening is:

• the amount of water in the air is increasing as the world warms,
• the water cycle is intensifying,
• therefore there is more rain (and snow), and
• more greenhouse warming because water vapour is a strong greenhouse gas.

Warning: This is a rather long article, with no apologies :)

Explaining different results for climate sensitivity and the low bias

This was a month late at WUWT but better late than never I suppose.  WUWT's current leading blog writer, Eric Worrall, has written about a paper published last month in Nature Climate Change (archived here). The authors, Mark Richardson, Kevin Cowtan, Ed Hawkins and Martin B. Stolpe, had a look at how temperature records are sampled. They found that slower warming regions are preferentially sampled, which means that observations are biased low.

The authors reported that after adjusting for biases, and using observations, the transient climate response (TCR) is 1.66 °C with a 5% to 95% range of 1.0 to 3.3 °C. This is consistent with that derived from climate models considered in the AR5 IPCC report.

Christopher Monckton and fraud - fact check of @wattsupwiththat

Christopher Monckton is at it again, spreading climate disinformation. Today he's taking on Reuters and the World Meteorological Organisation and losing - badly (archived here, latest here). Anthony Watts had a brave headline accusing Reuters of fraud. It's not Reuters or the World Meteorological Organisation that is committing fraud. It's Anthony Watts and Christopher Monckton who are deliberately deceiving the public and publishing false information. They are the anti-science brigade who want the world to burn.

Ari Halperin falsely claims forgery by AAAS, with a whopper of a conspiracy theory @wattsupwiththat

Today Ari Halperin wrote an article that was posted at Anthony Watts' WUWT. It was about the recent letter to the US policymakers signed by the AAAS and 30 other leaders of science societies. Ari Halperin wrote to scientific societies to see if they supported the recent letter to the US Congress. All the replies that he got confirmed support.

Ari didn't get any reply from most of the 30 societies (he said nine of the 30 replied to him confirming their support for the letter), which prompted him to falsely allege in his headline that "Ooops! Not all 31 scientific societies actually signed the AAAS ‘consensus’ letter". In other words, his evidence is absent. Non-existent. He just made that up.

Why wouldn't they support the letter? It was clear and simple and non-controversial. Here's an excerpt:

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring, and rigorous scientific research concludes that the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary driver. This conclusion is based on multiple independent lines of evidence and the vast body of peer-reviewed science.

Hottest June on record - global surface temperature with year to date

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for June was 0.79 °C, which just pipped June 2015 (0.78 C) and June 1998 (0.77 °C). Last month is only the second time in nine months that the GISTemp monthly anomaly is less than one degree Celsius above the average from 1951-1980. It probably won't be the last, now that El Nino is over.

The average for the six months to the end of June is 1.09 °C, which is 0.28 °C higher than any previous January to June period. The previous highest was last year, which with the latest data had an anomaly of 0.81 °C.

There are now nine in a row of "hottest months" from October 2015 to June 2016 (that is, hottest October, hottest November etc). If we could look back over the entire Holocene, 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 (it's probably hotter now than it was back then).

Each of the previous months except May and June this year (that is, from October to April inclusive) had an anomaly more than one degree Celsius above the 1951-1980 mean. All of the previous months had an anomaly higher than any month outside of that October to April period.

Below is a chart of the month of June only. Hover over the chart to see the anomaly in any June:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the month of June only. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Tropical cyclones and aerosols, with Breitbart's Steven Capozzola at WUWT

Anthony Watts has posted an article by Steven Capozzola, who seems to be presenting himself as some sort of authority on hurricanes or climate (archived here, latest here). I checked him out. Is he any kind of expert on tropical cyclones? No. Has he even the most basic understanding of climate? No. Yet he pits himself against experts as if he knows something they don't.

Steven Capozzola claims to be "Media consultant. CEO of CAP Media LLC. Advocate for U.S. manufacturing & affordable power" - not affordable, but expensive and dirty power. He's a denier for hire.

At WUWT today, Steve is writing how he doesn't think that the USA will ever get a hurricane landing on its shores again. Well, not quite that. He wrote:

The New York Times ran an op-ed today by Adam Sobel, an “atmospheric scientist at Columbia.”  The gist of Sobel’s article: Since 2005, the United States has been experiencing a hurricane “drought” (I.e. no major hurricane has made landfall in the time. We are currently at 3918 days, over a decade.)  But don’t worry, Sobel says, there will be more hurricanes soon, and the fact that they will be coming is proof of man-made climate change.
Yes, that’s what he’s saying.

The question is whether Sobel is writing the op-ed to buck himself up, and the rest of the alarmist crowd. 

No, that wasn't exactly what Adam Sobel was saying, as you've probably guessed.

The ice age wolf is lurking at WUWT, with Rod Martin Jr

Anthony Watts is not deluded. He's a science disinformer. Okay, his intellect isn't the greatest but that doesn't mean he doesn't know how to feed his fans the sort of nonsense they want to read. Today he's got another "ice age cometh" article (archived here). It's written at a level suitable for his fans. The reading level is for seven-year-olds, while the content is not suited to any outlet other than a climate conspiracy blog like WUWT.

Anthony's guest, Rod Martin Jr, starts off with a synopsis of the tale about the boy who cried wolf. So what does he do? He cries "wolf" even though there's virtually no chance of his wolf appearing inside of the next 50,000 years at least. Rod wrote: