A frosty look at David Archibald's latest speculation about global cooling

It was so cold this morning that I had to hop into the fridge to warm up. It's winter, of course, but it got quite cold even for winter in this part of the world - measuring about minus 6.4 Celsius this morning at our place.

Okay, I know for some of you that would be a mild winter's morning. Here it's worth lots of tweets. We're no longer used to having the sort of frosty mornings that were common when I was a child. What used to be the norm has now become a novelty with the world warming up so much.

Figure 1 | Frosty nights in Australia via BoM

Deniers can get all of a twitter when there's a frost. They are scared that it means an ice age is coming. Take David Archibald. He's been predicting an ice age for something like twelve years, ever since (he says) he "started out in climate science". He says his first paper was written just a few months later, but the only place he could publish it was in the denier journal Energy and Environment.

Website feedback

UPDATE:

Thank you for all the help. I've made some more changes as a result of emails and comments here:

• The sidebar is now white. Some of you were finding the dark background hard to read and/or ugly. 
• The font has been made easier to read from what was there at first, and is bigger than the font on the old blog.
• New menu: There's a new menu. Until tomorrow, I'll leave it so it opens when you visit the page. However it's quite intrusive when it's open, so I'll only leave it like that for a short while, so you know it's there.  I hope in time, people will notice the little hamburger icon in the top right hand corner. Click on that and the menu will open and close. Click near the top of the open menu itself (it doesn't have to be right on the spot marked with an X) and it will close.
• Less white space: Not really, though it might seem that way. What I've done is adjusted the page so that on medium and higher resolution screens, such as you'll find on high end notebooks and with larger desktop monitors, the sidebar no longer sits right on the edge. The gap between the sidebar and the main articles is now a bit smaller. Smaller screens and lower resolutions can still enjoy maximum breathable space :)
• I've put the latest comments and the newest articles up the top of the sidebar. Just click on what you want and the panel will open up. It's the same content as it was on the old blog, but should now be easier to get to for most of you. 
• If on your screen the side bar is missing, it probably means you're looking at a very small screen (a small tablet or similar). The content of the sidebar is still there and accessible to you. It's just moved down the page under the main articles. You should be able to get to it easily by scrolling down the page. Or, if you know what you're looking for, use the main menu (click on the hamburger icon on the top right of the page). The sidebar items are listed under Blog Menu (the top item in the menu).

There are a few other things I've done, and I'll continue to make refinements over time, most of which you probably won't notice but I'll feel better for it :)

If there's something bugging you about the site, please let me know either by leaving a comment here, or by sending an email or tweet or even a comment at facebook . (The first three are better options. I don't really use Facebook except to let people know about blog articles).

Time to get back to the business of blogging and other important matters :)

Sou - 11:05 pm + 10 UTC, Thursday 29 June 2017

I'd be glad of any comments on the new website - speed of loading, ease of navigation, readability, colours, fonts, difficulties, complaints whatever.

It's a work in progress. (It's not been possible to test it fully before going live, because it's hosted on Google.) The old site was getting to the end of it's usability from a management perspective, but it did work.

If enough people find this new design doesn't work for them, I'll revert back to the old design. On the other hand, if you prefer this, I'll continue to do my best to overcome any drawbacks.

This is what the website should look like at the moment (I've updated the picture to show the changes as of now, 29 June in Australia). Click to enlarge.

Sou.

Anthony Watts is foxed yet again by temperature anomalies

I read the latest article from Anthony Watts at WUWT. It reminded me that he really is dumb as an ox and blind as a bat.

Now you and I know that temperatures have been going only one way - up. And it's been getting really hot these past few years. Last year was the third year in a row that was the hottest on record. This year is shaping up as possibly the second hottest.

So what does Anthony Watts do? He plunges deep into idiocy with a most ridiculous article today (archived here).

Pat Michaels theorises climate conspiracies, at Judith Curry's place

Judith Curry has posted an article by Patrick J. Michaels from the Cato Institute (archived here).  He is wearing his conspiratorial tendencies on his sleeve, and wants Donald Trump to prevent the publication of a report mandated by the US 1990 Global Change Research Act, the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4). The chapter headings of the new report are listed here.

Pat describes his conspiracy theory in the second paragraph, where he believes that US civil servants "portray global warming as alarming" for money. He wrote:

The Assessment Report will be produced by civil servants in the federal government (mainly unfireable GS15’s reporting to Obama Administration bosses), many of whom handle large amounts of climate research money. It has always been in their interest to portray global warming as alarming, and therefore in need of even more federal research dollars.

I call this projection. Would Pat Michaels retain his own job for the Cato Institute if he started to write about climate science in an objective, factual manner? It seems to me he managed to get a job with them because he was a science disinformer.

Leo Goldstein has an oddly paranoid poke at the IPCC

Some of articles at WUWT are indistinguishable from gibberish. In the past few months, Anthony Watts has taken to publishing articles by a very strange man. He now calls himself Leo Goldstein. When he first wrote articles for WUWT, he wrote as Ari Halperin. He's the chap who came up with the Google conspiracy, and developed a tool to combat it, made by Google :D.

Here's one bit of gobbledegook from Leo today (archived here, latest here). He wrote about equilibrium climate sensitivity and quoted the IPCC's AR5 Working Group 1 report:

The equilibrium climate sensitivity quantifies the response of the climate system to constant radiative forcing on multicentury time scales. It is defined as the change in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium that is caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration.” (p. 16)

That's fine. Thing is, I don't understand what Leo's difficulty is.

Neanderthal Anthony Watts joins the sky dragon slayers

Anthony Watts has joined the sky dragon slayers he used to ban from his blog at WUWT. Well, he used to ban some of them. He's joined forces with Rick "Neanderthal" Perry, the US Secretary of Energy, who rejects climate science outright.

The sky dragon slayers are among the dumbest of the dim deniers, who don't believe the science of climate change. Most of them have spent their retirement years trying in vain to disprove the greenhouse effect. Sky dragon slayers reject the notion that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and is causing global warming. They think our planet stays warm by magic, or from the warm breath of their god, or from pixie dust, or something.

No hiatus (or vacation) from denial - Anthony Watts and Ryan Maue misrepresent a new scientific paper

It looks as if Anthony hasn't yet left on his promised vacation his fans have paid for. Today he copied and pasted an article from, of all places, the Daily Caller (archived here, latest here). Now the Daily Caller is not regarded as a reputable source of scientific information. It's a right wing website from the USA, apparently widely read, particularly by Republicans seeking a daily outrage fix of sensationalised sentiment. (It's owned by a guy called Tucker Carlson, who replaced Bill O'Reilly at Fox. I gather there's not much to distinguish the opinions of the two.)

The shock and awe at WUWT is over a new paper by a team of scientific heavy-weights, led by the world-renowned climate scientist, Dr. Benjamin D. Santer. The paper, published in Nature Geoscience, reports an exploration of the reasons for any differences between modeled and observed temperatures in the upper air (the troposphere). The authors examined data for the satellite era, January 1979 to December 2016, which is when there were more reliable temperature observations of the upper air.

[Note: the paper itself is about troposphere temperatures. The charts I've added are surface temperatures, in part because I'm still short of time, plus I don't have model data for the troposphere to hand (Fig 3).]

The Open Atmospheric Society has disappeared from WUWT

A heads up for everyone who was saving up their pennies to join Anthony Watts' secretive Open Atmospheric Society.

Between the 25 Apr 2017 04:13:51 UTC and 26 Apr 2017 13:21:40 UTC, Anthony Watts quietly removed his plug for people to join the quiescent, dormant, or dead Open Atmospheric Society from the sidebar of his WUWT blog.

Was this action prompted by the end of the US tax reporting year? Was Anthony feeling a rare pang of conscience about taking money from his fans and not delivering the goods?

Or was the disappearance an oversight, a temporary glitch, with the advert about to make a reappearance?

If you are still hoping to join that fake sceptic society, the OAS website is still there, though there is no sign of a board or journal or anything else. In fact, nothing has been added to the website for almost two years.

You can read more about the secretive open society with the help of Google - this is the timeline.

Second hottest May on record

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for May was 0.88 °C, which is 0.05 °C less than the hottest May in 2016, making May 2017 the second hottest May in the record.

Here is a chart of the average of 12 months to May each year. The 12 months to May 2017 averaged 0.91 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.10 °C cooler than the 12 months to May 2016. This makes it the second hottest May to May 12 month period on record.

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

(Google has just made some changes to its charting program, and has yet to iron out some of the kinks. Let me know if you see any problems. I am having trouble seeing the values to the right of the charts. Hopefully it will get fixed soon.)

Hugs to climate scientists wherever you are

Lots of HotWhoppery hugs to all the climate scientists around the world from Antarctica to the Arctic, in Australia and surrounds, Africa, America north and south, Asia, Europe or running a hopeful experiment on Planet B.

First Dog on the Moon sent a reminder that It's Hug a Climate Scientist Day. Just remember: no surprise hugs!

See the full huggy greeting cartoon here at The Guardian.