Dark days ahead - rise above despair

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My first reaction on hearing of Donald Trump's probably victory was an emotional jolt, accompanied by the physical sensation of nausea. This is despite the fact that I was partly prepared. I was at a meeting in a tiny town in rural New South Wales, with a number of other people from various walks of life.

Internet reception was patchy (very poor Optus coverage) and I had to take the laptop outside to learn what was happening. When I came back to the meeting and told everyone that Trump was the likely next US President, people were shocked and dismayed. There were comments about Nazi Germany, melting away of life savings, and concerns about how the Putin-Trump relationship would adversely affect global stability, particularly in regard to China. (Australia's security and place in the world is now under threat, and we will need to adapt and find new allies.)

It's a climate conspiracy on a unbelievable scale, says Malcolm Roberts and his fan Graham Lloyd at The Australian

Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts grandstanded at Parliament House this morning to show how he is wasting taxpayers' funds since he was appointed to the Senate. He is now being paid by Australians to continue his conspiracy theorising. He presented a 42-page document which can be paraphrased as "climate science is a hoax".

Malcolm has changed from being an anti-government "sovereign citizen" to being a member of the Australian Senate, after getting a whole 77 primary votes! (He only snuck in by being on Pauline Hanson's One Nation ticket.)

Here is a copy from his tweet about the grand announcement - referring to "Major Pauline Hanson" (who is not a "major" or major):

Troposphere temperatures for October 2016 - another hottest on record

The troposphere temperatures for October 2016 have been released. The lower troposphere is recorded in UAH v6 beta 5 and RSS TLT v3.3. This report also covers RSS TTT for the troposphere (without the "lower") and follows pretty much the same format as previous monthly updates.

For RSS TTT (troposphere), last month was the hottest October on record. For 2016 to be colder than the previous hottest year (1998), the troposphere would have to average a negative anomaly:- less than -0.41 °C for the remaining months.

The lower troposphere (UAH beta v6.05) was the equal hottest October on record with 2015. For 1998 to remain the hottest year in the UAH lower troposphere record, the average for the next two months would need to be below 0.21 °C.

Anthony Watts is hustling off to #AGU16 to stalk scientists, and speculates about Superwoman Sou

For a break from the mass insanity that's taken hold in the USA, here's a short article about some insanity in climate conspiracy land.

Anthony Watts seems to be having some trouble getting enough people to pay him to go to this year's AGU Fall Meeting.  He begged his readers to dip into their pocket again not once, but twice now. Other years he's got people giving him big amounts, but not so much this year when the average gift is around $20. (If you want to help him out you can donate by PayPal.)

As in other years, Anthony says he's going to stalk real scientists while he's there. He's added John Cook to the people he's said (in prior years - here and here) that he's creepily stalking (Peter Gleick and Michael Mann).

Where are the clowns?

There is not a lot to report from denialists this week. Their repetitive denial is boring. Judith Curry is not very busy, merely posting things that caught her eye to give voice to her Trump fans (politics), her core anti-science brigade (science), and her luddites (energy and policy), interspersed with silly guest articles by deniers. She's given up on science altogether and is now a hard core climate science disinformer.

At WUWT, Anthony Watts has been posting articles saying the reason no debates had a climate question was because no-one in the USA is interested in climate change. Given that Anthony touts his blog as "the world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change", this raises the question of whether he is rethinking the point of his anti-science efforts of the past nine years or so.

Hottest September on record

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for September was 0.91 °C, which is just 0.01 °C higher than the previous hottest September in 2014.


The average for the eight months to the end of September is 1.03 °C, which is 0.23 °C higher than the previous hottest January to September period in 2015, which with the latest data had an anomaly of 0.80 °C.

There are now twelve in a row of "hottest months" from October 2015 to September 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).

Update: It's just been pointed out to me that the latest revisions put June 16 temperature (0.75 C) below that of June 98 and June 15 (equal 0.78 C). That means that there were now eight months in a row of "hottest" - from October to May inclusive. Then another three hottest months from July to September.

Sou 10:54 am AEDT 18 October 2016

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to September each year. The 12 months to September 2016 averaged 1.03 °C above the 1951-1980 mean and was 0.23 °C hotter than the 12 months to September 2015:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature anomaly for the 12 months to September each year. The base period is 1951-1980. Data source: GISS NASA

Important climate milestones

While the Trump farce is entertaining, shocking and scaring people in the USA and around the world, there have been some important achievements on the climate front, not all of them reasons for celebration.

Here are some of them:

US soap opera intermission and Trump conspiracies

I'm sorry for the gap in articles. I've been sidetracked by real life. Also WUWT seems tame compared to the soap opera that is taking place in the US election.

The Trump Conspiracy Theorists

In case you missed it, this from twitter. First of all, Donald Trump Jr, who gets his soundbites from the uber-conspiracy blog Prison Planet:

Anthony Watts makes a huge fuss about miniscule changes in atmospheric temperature data

A few days ago an astute reader wrote to me, asking if I knew why the RSS historical temperatures for the lower atmosphere varied month to month. I in turn asked Dr Carl Mears, who is the scientist behind the RSS temperature analysis (among other things).

To see what changes month to month, compare the charts for RSS TLT v3.3, which is just of the lower troposphere. The data is from that provided in November 2013, March 2016, July 2016 and October 2016:

Figure 1 | Lower troposphere temperature RSS v3.3. The chart shows data as reported in November 2013, March 2016, July 2016 and October 2016. Source: RSS

Do you see the big changes? No? So what is all the fuss about at WUWT (archived here) you might wonder.

Uncritical thinking about climate change, from Andy May and WUWT fans

As you probably know by now, climate science deniers are generally incapable of critical thinking. At WUWT yesterday, there was an example of this from Andy May (archived here). He wrote about an article in the Economist, and started with this:

I found a very annoying article in the October 1, 2016 issue. The title and link are “Notes from the undergrowth.” It starts out with a false assertion that is easily debunked, but often stated:

Media myth #1
“DESPITE deluges in the South, droughts in the West and fires throughout national forests this year, the words “climate” and “change” have seldom been uttered together on the campaign trail.”

Instead of putting up some evidence that the words "climate" and "change" have often been uttered together on the campaign trail (because they haven't), he wandered off into something quite different.