Anthony Watts and his pseudo-science from the Heartland Institute

I've already commented on the ridiculous "Not the IPCC" report with it's "CO2 is plant food" and other tired denier memes.  Anthony Watts is pushing it again today in an article on his denier blog, WUWT, written by four of the more vocal science rejectors: Fred Singer, Bob Carter, Willie Soon and Craig Idso.

Remember those names if you've never heard them before and triple check anything they say before accepting it.  They are all science disinformers.  It's what they do.

I don't have time to go through all their long article and it's too long for HotWhopper in any case.  Suffice to say that despite the title Anthony Watts gave it, it's neither scientific nor a logical critique.  If you put on your critical thinking cap you can see for yourself just how dumb this foursome thinks WUWT readers are. (Archived here.)

Here are a couple of examples under their heading of "IPCC retreats".  The IPCC extracts are in italics, the science deniers' words are not.  Bolding and italics is mine.

The Medieval Climate Anomaly was regional not global

2. “Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century” (SPM-4).

What the Heartland Institute science deniers wrote: IPCC-related scientists have previously argued that the magnitude of the late twentieth century global warming exceeded that of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The notorious “hockey stick” featured in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, and still visible in the Fourth Assessment Report, appeared to erase the MWP from the historical temperature record by showing little temperature change for thousands of years followed by a sharp rise in the twentieth century.

Climate scientists know that the Medieval Climate Anomaly was regional in nature.  The IPCC statement is not in any way a contradiction of previous work.  Science rejectors are assuming that their readers will miss the words "in some regions".  Since the only people who take any notice of these ratbags are other people who reject science, they are probably correct in their assumption.   BTW I've discussed the Medieval Climate Anomaly a few times, for example here.

"It's the sun" is wrong, but the sun can affect climate

6. “The reduced trend in radiative forcing (between 1998 and 2012) is primarily due to volcanic eruptions and the timing of the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle” (SPM-10).

What the Heartland Institute science deniers wrote: This statement marks the first time the IPCC has acknowledged that solar factors may play a determinative role in short-term climate variability.

This is a critically important concession to the views of the many independent scientists who have concluded that solar effects play a bigger role in controlling climate than does CO2 (NIPCC, Chapter 3).

The claim of the disinformers that the IPCC hasn't discussed solar radiation before is ridiculously wrong and so easy to check.  Just do a word search for the word "solar" in any of the past reports and you'll see that these disinformers are telling a bald-faced lie when they write:  This statement marks the first time the IPCC has acknowledged that solar factors may play a determinative role in short-term climate variability.

There is no "concession".  These disinformers are making up stuff.  All IPCC reports discuss the role of solar radiation on climate.  How do these so-called scientists think the greenhouse effect works? Magic?

There's a good article on realclimate.org about attribution, which includes charts from previous reports so you can see for yourself about what is attributed to solar radiation.  Here's an animation of charts from the 1995 SAR and the 2001 TAR reports:

Source: RealClimate.org / IPCC

Below is just one example of what these pseudo-science quacks have described as "misleading or untrue" statements from the IPCC.

Many observed changes since the 1950s are unprecedented in decades to millenia

2. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s many of the observed changes are unprecedented” (SPM-3).

What the Heartland Institute science deniers wrote: This statement is doubly untrue. The post-1950 warming shown by the Hadley record is of about the same magnitude and rate as the known natural warming between 1910 and 1940, and is therefore not unprecedented.

Here's the full statement in the Summary for Policy Makers (page SPM-3).

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased (see Figures SPM.1, SPM.2, SPM.3 and SPM.4). {2.2, 2.4, 3.2, 3.7, 4.2–4.7, 5.2, 5.3, 5.5–5.6, 6.2, 13.2}

The IPCC report states that many of the observed changes are unprecedented - and note what the Heartland Institute employees left out.  The lying foursome say that's a lie because they reckon that they've found one thing that isn't unprecedented.  A prime example of a logical fallacy, which I'm sure HotWhopper readers, even some of the science deniers among you, will recognise.

The IPCC listed some specific observed changes that are unprecedented over decades to millenia.  And they've provided some figures to illustrate this as well as referred readers to the relevant sections of the reports. Here's just one example: it's hotter than ever in the modern record:

Data source: NASA

The denier foursome have cherry picked some changes that they argue are not unprecedented as if that negates the observed changes that are unprecedented.  They reckon there were some parts of the world that didn't warm as much as others.  Well, whoopy doo.  That doesn't mean that GLOBAL warming isn't happening.  I wouldn't mind betting they got a lot wrong even with their examples, but I can't be bothered checking because it's irrelevant.

Enough is enough

I've wasted enough time on these nincompoops.  If you want to see how much more idiotic twaddle they write, check out my take down of their ridiculous Executive Summary of their latest effort for the Heartland Institute's Not the IPCC report, or read this archived WUWT article and check their silly claims for yourself.

The Evangelical Science Denier and the Alarmist Fundamentalist Religious Cult: The Cornwall Alliance

I wrote an article on David Legates' denial of science a few hours ago.  I've been told that David rejects science on quasi-religious grounds.  He is a member of a cult called the Cornwall Alliance.

David Legates apparently rejects even more aspects of climate science than does Roy Spencer.  Based on his article from yesterday, David rejects the greenhouse effect.  The things they have in common are that they are both employed as climate scientists and are both members of an evangelical quasi-religious cult in the USA called the Cornwall Alliance.  Based on their published material, this cult is a mixture of fundamentalist christianity, alarmist economics, pseudo-science, opposition to mainstream climate science and more than a hint of sexism (and suggestive of more deviant thinking).  It assumes male supremacy and that men were put on earth to plunder as they please.  Only in the USA, home of the weird and wacky.

A Mission to Reject Science

These chaps on their evangelical mission are not shy about using their "god" to distort and misrepresent the science.  It appears to be the very reason they formed their cult.  To promote disinformation about climate science and oppose any attempts to mitigate global warming. They are up front in their rejection of climate science.  They have an Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming which states in part:

We deny that Earth and its ecosystems are the fragile and unstable products of chance, and particularly that Earth’s climate system is vulnerable to dangerous alteration because of minuscule changes in atmospheric chemistry. 

Now I've got no beef with anyone who wants to go to their temple or church or mosque or synagogue or wherever on whatever day of the week.  I do have a beef with people who create a false god so they can hide behind "him" (their image of god has to be male) and use that false image of a god to spread lies about important matters of science and  economics.  I also have a real beef with people who fake concern for "poor" people in less developed countries as an excuse for their evangelism.

The "holier than thou" attitude expressed in the cult's writings comes across to me as a sickening perversion.  Their quasi-religion smacks of "world view" and christian fundamentalism of the worst kind.  It's not about charity or hope.  It's about preserving their own personal status quo.  It is raw hypocrisy.

Alarmists of the Cornwall Alliance

Here are some examples of the alarmist ideas that these guys (and they are all men) promote.  They "believe" that progressively shifting to a clean energy economy over the next few decades will:

• destroy millions of jobs.
• cost trillions of dollars in lost economic production.
• slow, stop, or reverse economic growth.
• reduce the standard of living for all but the elite few who are well positioned to benefit from laws that unfairly advantage them at the expense of most businesses and all consumers.
• endanger liberty by putting vast new powers over private, social, and market life in the hands of national and international governments.
• condemn the world’s poor to generations of continued misery characterized by rampant disease and premature death.

How's that for alarmism.  Not only do they provide no evidence but they hold on fast to these convictions in the face of evidence to the contrary. 

World view drives their rejection of science and alarmist economics

These evangelists are up front that they reject science and promote alarmist economics because of their world view and religion.  It's got nothing to do with scientific facts or real world economics.  They state quite openly that:

Our examination of theology, worldview, and ethics (Chapter One) finds that global warming alarmism wrongly views the Earth and its ecosystems as the fragile product of chance, not the robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting product of God’s wise design and powerful sustaining. 

They reckon they can do whatever they like and their god will save them.  Fundamentalism in its pure form.

The fact that they refer to mainstream science, such as the greenhouse effect, as "global warming alarmism" puts them in the 8% Dismissives category of the Yale Project.  On the other hand, the fact that some of this motley lot of evangelicals have managed to wangle their way into positions where they have some influence, where they can chew the ear of politicians of dubious character, makes them not far removed from the description of "scumbucket" authority figures of Robert Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarians. ("Scumbuckets" take on the role of authority figures that Right Wing Authoritarians follow for support against their perceived persecution by formal authority, such as government.)

Anthony Watts is one of the people who promotes disinformation from these evangelical religious science deniers.  The Auditor, Steve McIntyre, who obsesses about things of which he has little understanding and no experience, has partnered with Ross McKitrick, a member of the Cornwall Alliance.  (One of Anthony Watts' attack dogs, Rev Richard S Courtney aka richardscourtney, is also a member of the Cornwall Alliance.)

The type of evangelism practiced by this crowd is typical US-style christian fundamentalism.  It places man (not woman) as second only to their god in the order of things and talks of subduing everything to "man's" desires.  It is sybaritic in nature.  The world is there for "man" to plunder.  In case any one of them feels a twinge of remorse for their greed and selfishness, they hide behind their god, telling themselves that's why their god created them.  They wrote their own rules to justify their crusade of disinformation.  The words peppered throughout their quasi-religious texts are highly suggestive, like "subdue" and "rule".  For example:

Human beings have the divine mandate to multiply and to fill, subdue, and rule the Earth, transforming it from wilderness into garden. They act as stewards under God to cultivate and guard what they subdue and rule. 

Yes, it's hard to believe this is the twenty first century.  It sounds like something from one of the less enlightened ages in the distant past.  One can imagine them burning witches and riding off to the crusades.  Actually, while I can imagine them burning witches I think they'd be the ones sending foot soldiers to battle rather than going off to fight in the trenches themselves.  Their writing smacks of elitism and a sense of righteous authority.  It's right up there with the McCarthyism of the 1950s and more recently, Inhofe and Cuccinelli wanting to prosecute scientists, viewing them as criminals.

I'm tolerant of people having their own religious beliefs and practicing whatever rituals makes them feel good.  I prefer they do it privately but I'm not intolerant of public displays or missions, provided they stick to their god thing and spirituality or peering into crystals or tarot cards or whatever.

What I'm much less tolerant of is people using their religion to mess with politics, education and science.

What I have no tolerance for is people who make up a false image of a god as an excuse for their crusade to spread disinformation.  Who hide behind their made-up god and make emotive appeals to the worst side of human nature (greed, selfishness, envy) or prey on the innate good in people (think of the starving millions) to promote their lies about straightforward mainstream science and economics.

Climatology Professor, David Legates, fails Climatology 101 at WUWT

It's odd how fake sceptics complain when research shows that conspiracy ideation is a predictor of science denial, albeit not as strong a predictor as more extreme free market ideology.  Anthony Watts protests quite loudly and at the same time posts articles that are rife with conspiracy ideation and right wing alarmism.

Today it's an article at WUWT by Dennis M. Mitchell and David R. Legates (archived here).  Their protest at climate science comprises the following:

Constructing a conspiracy theory of deception and incompetence

...climate alarmists are now scrambling to find new shelter from the stress coming from a public that increasingly realizes their doom-and-gloom predictions of climate chaos are based on shoddy data, faulty computer models and perhaps outright deception. The alarmist scientists have put themselves in a climate cataclysm box, and are desperate to protect their reputations, predictions and funding.

It's not uncommon for fake sceptics when faced with the evidence to say the evidence must be wrong.  Thing is though, it presupposes that all the scientists throughout the world who research anything relating to climate and earth systems are conspiring.  Otherwise how could all the evidence point to the same thing:-  that CO2 is increasing and the world is warming.  Never mind the fact that shipping companies must be involved in the conspiracy, pretending that they've been cutting across the Arctic in summer.  Photographers and news outlets must be in on the scam, too. Not to mention the birds and the bees who've shifted their domain, the glaciers and ice sheets and fish in the oceans.

The world is heating up

This dubious pair, we shall see, are knowingly engaged in disinformation.  Or at least one of them is doing it knowingly.

Disinformation

Despite the absence of warming in actual measured temperature records over the last 16 years, and near-record lows in hurricane and tornado activity, they still cry “wolf” repeatedly and try to connect every unusual or “extreme” weather event to human emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide. (Actually, people account for only 4% of all the CO2 that enters Earth’s atmosphere each year.)

There is no "absence of warming" over the last 16 years.  Take a look for yourself:

And that's just the surface temperature.  93% of heat is accumulating in the oceans.  Fake sceptics deny this fact, with this pair claiming:

Year after year, alarmists have changed their protective shells for more absurd answers regarding where the Earth has mysteriously stashed all the energy that greenhouse gases supposedly trapped. For years, alarmists said ocean waters were storing the missing energy. But when the ARGO project demonstrated that the heat was not in the ocean, at least down two kilometers (1.2 miles) beneath the surface, one prominent alarmist responded, “We are puzzled at the results.” We are not puzzled.

They are wrong of course as this chart illustrates:

Fig 3.21 Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

 The only way that seas can rise is by ocean warming and/or melting ice, both of which means the oceans are getting warmer.  The above chart from Chapter 3 of the IPCC report shows that sea levels are rising and the oceans are getting warmer.

As for the bit about the four per cent.  I presume they are talking about the carbon cycle and the annual exchange with the biosphere, land surface and oceans. I don't know if that's accurate or not.  But you'd have thought that even if Professor David Legates isn't crash hot at arithmetic, Dennis Mitchell, being a CPA, would be familiar with the notion of compound interest.  What we add to the air stays there for a very long time.  So far we've increased the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 40%. Not only that, but half of the waste CO2 that we're tossing into the air ends up in the ocean.  And now the ocean pH is dropping at an alarming rate.

Oceans are heating up

Of course most fake sceptics don't have a clue about science.  This pair, for example, write this sort of nonsense, knowing that many WUWT readers will fall for it, being science illiterate:

The “puzzling” facts triggered the predictable alarmist tactic of attacking the data and claiming the heat was hiding in the really deep ocean. Ignoring the physics of the problem – how the asserted heat was transferred from atmospheric carbon dioxide, through the sea surface, and beyond the first mile of ocean waters, without being detected – they expect us to believe that fluid thermodynamics is akin to magic.

First, I don't know what David and Dennis mean by "really deep ocean".  They couldn't be more wrong about the oceans heating up.  The heat is accumulating in the top two kilometres as the chart below shows.  I don't know if it's getting warmer at lower depths or not.

Source: NOAA/NODC

It doesn't get "beyond the first mile" without being detected.  It is indeed detected in the top 700 metres as well.  Just look at the chart below.  Do they honestly think otherwise?  I'd say not.  This is just another denier meme. Probably picked up when deniers used to claim there are a lot of undetected underwater volcanoes and people said, how come the top ocean is getting warmer but it's not as hot at depth.

Data Source: NOAA/NODC

Rhetorical strawman fallacy

It's a common tactic of disinformers to make up stuff.  For example, they write:

Have we forgotten that 1998 was to be the “tipping point,” after which Earth would warm uncontrollably? 

Who said that?  When? Where?  I've never even seen deniers try to claim that one before.  It's a load of codswallop.

Deniers reject the greenhouse effect

And this one is so worn out I'm surprised that any denier is still wearing it.

 increasing temperatures always preceded higher CO2

Fancy Anthony Watts allowing such an idiotic statement on his blog :)  Everyone knows that when CO2 is a feedback it has to come after the initial forcing.  This time it's happening as a forcing.  We're adding it to the air.  Whether CO2 rises as a forcing or a feedback doesn't matter.  It will raise the temperature of earth both times.

Now I can understand someone like Dennis Mitchell, who's just a CPA, not understanding climate science.  But I have to ask where he gets his disinformation from and why he doesn't accept science from scientists.  What makes him, a non-expert, think that he knows more than all the world's experts on the subject?  Is he a conspiracy theorist or is it extreme free market ideology that's motivating him to tell lies? I cannot accept that even extremist right wing views mean that one has to toss ethics out the window.  No, it's probably a character defect.

Judge them by their company

And you can judge a man by the company he keeps.  In this case, Dennis the Menace keeps company with known climate disinformer David Legates.  Now David has no excuse for spreading lies about climate science.  He is apparently a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware.  There is no way that he isn't aware of the greenhouse effect.  A professor.  Someone who purports to study climate. And he doesn't know the first thing about the properties of greenhouse gases?

I don't buy it.

PS You may remember that David Legates was a co-author with Christopher Monckton and Willie Soon. What did I say about judging a man by the company he keeps?  Anthony Watts, David Legates, Willie Soon, Christopher Monckton, Tim Ball - all denying science in a most ridiculous fashion.

Denier Weirdness: Wondering Willis Eschenbach wonders does "an ice age cometh"...

Wondering Willis "I'm Wonderful" Eschenbach has decided to join the "ice age cometh" deniers at WUWT.  Willis doesn't read scientific papers.  He prefers to "wonder" about stuff.  Today he's wondering about the next ice age and he says he's going to watch the snow cover to see when it's going to arrive.  He writes (archived here):

So … would it not be truly ironic if pollution, in the form of soot and brown carbon,  were all that has been holding off another ice age? And wouldn’t it be a cosmic joke if our efforts to clean up soot and brown carbon pollution were the straw that broke the back of the Holocene, and ushered in the new ice age?

Well, it would not only be ironic, it would be pretty near impossible for earth to enter an ice age this side of 50,000 years ahead, save a massive nuclear war or a few super volcanic eruptions.

An ice age isn't due for at least 50,000 years, even without AGW

If Willis had bothered to read any science he might have come across this paper from Berger and Loutre in Science.  They calculate that even without global warming, Earth wouldn't start getting cold for at least another 50,000 years.  That's because of the calculated insolation in future years.  Here is a diagram from their paper:

Long-term variations of eccentricity (top), June insolation at 65°N (middle), and simulated Northern Hemisphere ice volume (increasing downward) (bottom) for 200,000 years before the present to 130,000 from now. Time is negative in the past and positive in the future. For the future, three CO2 scenarios were used: last glacial-interglacial values (solid line), a human-induced concentration of 750 ppmv (dashed line), and a constant concentration of 210 ppmv (dotted line). Simulation results from (13, 15); eccentricity and insolation from (19).

Black soot and global warming

How much does soot contribute to global warming?  The IPCC AR5 WG1 Technical Summary has a chart that shows what contributes what.  I've highlighted black carbon.  You can see it makes quite a contribution but nothing like as much as CO2 or CH4.:

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Technical Summary

Just so you know, the IPCC report states on page TS-20 that the radiative forcing from black carbon on snow and ice is around 0.04 (0.02 to 0.09) Wm^-2, compared to well-mixed greenhouse gases, which exert a forcing of 2.83 (2.54 to 3.12) Wm^-2. So even if we were able to stop all black carbon from reaching the snow, it wouldn't make that much difference globally.

On black carbon, some of you might remember the article that showed that black carbon from mid-latitudes doesn't have much effect on the Arctic compared to black carbon from the far north.  This is because when the soot comes from the Arctic itself, it stays at low altitude and gets deposited on the snow and ice.

Northern Hemisphere snow cover is declining in spring

Willis has also put up some charts of snow cover.  The ones he chose don't tell much  of a story.  If he'd wanted to, he could have put up something like northern hemisphere snow cover on a seasonal basis, which would have been more informative.  Notice the change in spring cover compared to the other seasons in the animation below:

Source: Rutgers University Global Snow Lab

Maybe after being called out by Roy Spencer recently, Wondering Willis has decided he might as well give up trying to impress scientific types.  He's hoping to be fêted by the "ice age cometh" brigade at WUWT.

In the comments Willis proves that he doesn't read science by writing (excerpt):

October 18, 2013 at 11:33 am

By all astronomical Milankovitch calculations, we should be falling back into an ice age somewhere around now. To date there’s no sign of it, which is good … but there’s always tomorrow.

And more here from Wondering Willis (excerpt):

October 18, 2013 at 12:38 

Now, when I look at that, I say “Yikes! We could have another ice age at any time”. In part it’s the length of the Holocene, and in part it’s that the other interglacials rose to a peak temperature … and very soon thereafter, they started dropping quickly to glacial temperatures.

The Holocene, on the other hand, rose to a peak, but has only been dropping very slowly. It has maintained a fairly flat plateau for a long, long time now. I see nothing in the historical record to indicate that we couldn’t enter another ice age tomorrow …

To add, in Willis' article he is wondering about albedo and surface temperature.  His chart and wonderings look wonky but I haven't paid that part of his article any attention (archived here).

---

Berger, A., and M. F. Loutre. "An exceptionally long interglacial ahead?" Science 297.5585 (2002): 1287. DOI: 10.1126/science.1076120

Bob Tisdale rejects the greenhouse effect (again)

Perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale is a bit of a nutter.  He doesn't accept that carbon dioxide, water vapour and other gases like methane absorb long wave radiation and prevent earth from turning into a block of ice.  Anthony Watts has banned from WUWT a number of people who don't accept the greenhouse effect but he gives a platform to greenhouse effect deniers Bob Tisdale and the appalling Tim Ball (who co-authored the silly slayers book) and other people who indulge in pseudo-science and quackery.

Bob Tisdale has a "thing" for Dana Nuccitelli, who is a scientist who writes for SkepticalScience.com and the UK Guardian.  Bob's article is a dismal attempt to refute a recent blog article Dana wrote for the Guardian newspaper.  Dana irritates Bob because Dana writes sensible articles explaining different aspects of climate science.  Bob doesn't understand climate science.  He doesn't understand, for example, that the world's oceans hold a lot of water.  To heat them up by even a few tenths of a degree needs an awful lot of energy.

Bob denies global warming outright in his article (archived here).  The title of his post is:

Dana Nuccitelli Can’t Come to Terms with the Death of the AGW Hypothesis

And in a comment Bob writes this:

For the past few years in numerous blog posts, I’ve illustrated and discussed how the ocean heat content data and satellite-era sea surface temperature data both indicate they’ve warmed, but they’ve warmed due to naturally occurring, naturally fueled ocean-atmosphere processes—not manmade greenhouse gases. (October 18, 2013 at 7:27 am)

"Naturally fueled" is Bob's code word for "magic".  Bob is one of the utter nutters. He thinks that the physics of the greenhouse effect is a hypothesis and he thinks it doesn't hold up.  These days he's in the minority of deniers.  Most fake sceptics these days accept that there are such things as greenhouse gases and that the world is warming.  They'll argue various things like how much the world is warming and what the future climates will be like, but they realise they'd look pretty stupid if they denied any warming at all.  Bob Tisdale looks pretty stupid.

In order to fool his readers at WUWT, Bob has to fudge quite a lot.  For example, he writes about the ocean:

The warming of the top 700 meters has also slowed to a crawl, and is nonexistent in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, but more on that later.

What Bob doesn't mention at all is the Indian Ocean.  Nor does he mention the change in global ocean heat content for the top 2000 m of ocean.  He tries to persuade his readers that as long as they ignore the global data and only look at the parts of the earth system he wants them to look at, they can pretend that the world isn't warming.

It's like saying that if you measure the temperature of the inside of your refrigerator you can pretend that it's not 42° Celsius in the shade outside.

Here is a chart showing the ocean heat content down only as far as 700 metres, including the Indian Ocean that Bob Tisdale doesn't want his readers to know about:

Data Source: NOAA/NODC

The heat accumulating in the different oceans is added together to get the total heat accumulating in all the oceans.  The chart above shows just how much the system is heating up.

The chart below shows the top two kilometres of ocean.  It's accumulating more and more heat.  The heat from the top 700 metres is heating the layers below.  Bob doesn't want his readers to know that.

Bob's final contribution is a chart with surface temperature anomaly plotted on the same chart as temperature changes in the oceans!  I don't know how many of his readers fall for that trick.  Bob is ever hopeful that there are enough dumb readers who don't consider how much energy the ocean has to absorb to raise it by a degree Celsius, compared to the land surface.  (If any readers are grappling with that concept, think of the last time you spent at the beach on a hot day.  The temperature of the sea doesn't rise nearly as much as the sand does, despite getting the same amount of energy from the sun.)

On energy being accumulated on earth, from the AR5 WG1 IPCC report page TS-7 (my bold italics and paras):

It is virtually certain that Earth has gained substantial energy from 1971–2010 — the estimated increase in energy inventory between 1971 and 2010 is 274 [196 to 351] ZJ (1 ZJ = 1021 J), with a rate of 213 TW from a linear fit to the annual values over that time period (Box 3.1, Figure 1).

Ocean warming dominates the total energy change inventory, accounting for roughly 93% on average from 1971–2010. Melting ice (including Arctic sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers) accounts for 3% of the total, and warming of the continents 3%. Warming of the atmosphere makes up the remaining 1%.

The 1971–2010 estimated rate of oceanic energy gain is 199 TW from a linear fit to data over that time period, implying a mean heat flux of 0.55 W m–2 across the global ocean surface area. Earth's net estimated energy increase from 1993–2010 is 163 [127 to 201] ZJ with a trend estimate of 275 TW. The ocean portion of the trend for 1993–2010 is 257 TW, equivalent to a mean heat flux into the ocean of 0.71 W m–2.

Buttons, dogs and climate trends

Someone called Kip Hansen has written a long post at WUWT about buttons (archived here).  He's referred to an article of his that Andrew Revkin put up at DotEarth, possibly to show how wrong people can be sometimes.

In the Dot Earth article, Kip discusses the cute animation from TeddyTVNorge that you've probably seen before.  I'm really only writing this because it gives me an excuse to post it :D
.

The cartoon illustrates how global surface temperature (or weather) can fluctuate (the dog) but the trend continues upwards, with the man representing the temperature trend (or climate trend) being forced by increasing greenhouse gases.

At Dot Earth Kip made a song and dance about trends not determining the future and waffles on about stock markets.  Well, duh.  It's the forcing from the extra greenhouse gases that determines the climate trend.

Anyway, it looks as if Kip has chosen WUWT to try to make up for his mistake, though he does it in a very longwinded way.  After much argy bargy about how trend isn't itself a force he finally gets to the punchline, writing:

Models, not trends, can predict, project, or inform about possible futures, to some sort of accuracy. Models must include all of the causative agents involved which must be modeled correctly for relative effects. 

In general it looks as if Kip learnt something from his experience at Dot Earth.  Good for him. The same can't be said of some of the WUWT-ers.

(Personally I think models can be useful even when not all information is available.  If you waited for perfect knowledge you'd be waiting for ever.  You've got to make do with the best you've got.)

Anthony Watts spends hours denying reality at WUWT

Anthony Watts continues to tell lies at WUWT.  Remember this whopper of a lie?  Now he writes (archived here):

I guess he didn’t read the recent IPCC AR5 report that showed no connections of climate change/global warming with severe weather

Another whopper of a lie.

Anthony's writing about an upcoming 24 hours of reality by the Climate Reality Project, which will be broadcast in about five days time.

It's Anthony's constant refrain of "no connections of climate change/global warming with severe weather" that I'm writing about.  If you are curious where he gets his weird notions, I believe he bases it on Table 12.4 from the IPCC WG1 AR5 report, which discusses the likelihood or otherwise of specific events, most of which are not weather events but things like huge methane releases from permafrost melt. And the table isn't about whether or not they will happen at all, it's about the likelihood of them happening before this century is out.  Anthony reckons if these events don't happen in his lifetime then what should he care if they happen in his children's lifetime or that of their children.

As you know, Anthony Watts' capacity for brainpower is severely hampered by his world view, which is limited to about 10 paces from his front door, by my reckoning.  He's heard about tornadoes and hurricanes.  I'm not sure if he realises that a hurricane is what is known elsewhere as a typhoon or tropical cyclone.  Anthony is oblivious to the fact that severe weather includes such things as heat waves, flash floods and blizzards and can cause catastrophic wildfires.

Speaking of wildfires, his article is a slap in the face to his followers from Australia, which today experienced one of the worst bushfire days on record for NSW - and it's only the middle of spring.  Summer is another six weeks away.

Back to Anthony's claim about the IPCC AR5 report.  He's wrong of course. Here is just some of what the report states about severe weather and global warming:

• Future increase in precipitation extremes related to the monsoon is very likely in South America, Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia.(page 14-3)
• It is also very likely that heat waves, defined as spells of days with temperature above a threshold determined from historical climatology, will occur with a higher frequency and duration, mainly as a direct consequence of the increase in seasonal mean temperatures (page 12-36)
• Several recent studies have also argued that the probability of occurrence of a Russian heat wave at least as severe as the one in 2010 increases substantially (by a factor of 5 to 10 by the midcentury) along with increasing mean temperatures and enhanced temperature variability. (page 12-36)
• Model projections show rainfall becoming more intense, in part because more moisture will be present in the atmosphere. Thus, for simulations assessed in this report, over much of the land, 1-day precipitation events that currently occur on average every 20 years could occur every 10 years or even more frequently by the end of this century. At the same time, projections also show that precipitation events overall will tend to occur less frequently. These changes produce two seemingly contradictory effects: more intense downpours, leading to more floods, yet longer dry periods between rain events, leading to more drought. (page 12-87)
• Changes in the climate are also associated with disturbances such as fires, insect damage, storms, droughts and heat waves which are already significant processes of inter-annual variability and possibly trends of regional land carbon fluxes. (page 6-37)
• Regional studies for boreal regions suggest an increase in future fire risk...Models predict spatially variable responses in fire activity, including strong increases and decreases, due to regional variations in the climate–fire relationship, and anthropogenic interference. (page 6-66)

Update: Since writing this Anthony has added some text from the IPCC report, some of which contradicts his claim of "no connection".

Free marketers and conspiracy theorists at WUWT protest and prove Lewandowsky et al (2013)

Anthony Watts has decided to generate additional evidence supporting the findings of a recent paper by Stephan Lewandowsky et al, published in PLoS One.  Anthony writes (archived here):

He STILL is using the “Free Market” beliefs are associated with climate denialism.

It is odd for Anthony to find fault with that result, because Anthony himself admitted that he reason he rejects climate science is because of his free market ideology.  From his PBS interview at 54 seconds:

Interviewer: "What bothers you the most about the arguments that there is serious global warming?"

Watts: "They want to change policy, they want to apply taxes"!

If you've been keeping up with the HotWhopper blog roll, you're probably already aware of the paper, which was discussed on Shaping Tomorrow's World a couple of weeks ago in FAQ format.  It elicited comments from the usual suspects.

Anyone who's aware of the weirdness of climate science deniers won't be surprised at the findings of this latest research.  The study reinforced findings of work by the authors and other research teams and added some.  For example, it found that free-market world views predict rejection of science that has regulatory implications, but not necessarily of other scientific issues.  (You can see that in a recent article here, where even when scientific findings are in accord with denialist memes, fake sceptics still scoff at them.)

It also found that conspiracist ideation predicts rejection of climate science, genetically modified (GM) foods and vaccinations, though to varying degrees.  One thing they did find was that, contrary to some thinking, was no evidence of an association between ideological leanings and opposition to GM foods, and only very weak evidence for an association between ideological bent and anti-vaxers.  This latter association is complex and if you're interested you can read what it says in the paper itself.  To give you an inkling, the paper states:

Although conservatism and libertarian worldviews tend to be perceived as allied or nearly synonymous when viewed through the conventional “right vs. left” political lens, recent research has begun to differentiate libertarian worldviews from conservatism. 

Below is a section from the FAQ on the paper:

Q: How might people who reject scientific findings deal with the now fairly well-established fact that denial involves a measure of conspiratorial thinking?
A: Some ideologically-motivated people who oppose the scientific consensus on climate change have recognized that their proximity to conspiratorial thinking is discomforting and have publically distanced themselves from that component of denial, in particular its anti-Semitic element. The present data may provide a further “Sister Souljah” moment.

The FAQ also describes how this research differs from LOG13 (the NASA faked the moon landing paper).

From the WUWT comments

I waited a bit before completing this article to see what gems emerged in the comments.  Below is a sample (archived here):

Gerry - England is a great mix of free market ideology, anti-vax mythology and conspiracy ideation.  He says:

October 17, 2013 at 6:14 am
Since governments have got so involved with funding science, is it such a surprise given the mess governments make of everything they go near that the populace are more sceptical about their claims? In Booker & North’s book Scared To Death, they highlight how much governments get wrong based on just one flimsy report. People also use their personal experience. With vaccination for example, I believe it is generally good, but the MMR vaccine has questions against it with regards to autism. I have a close friend and have worked with somebody who have both experienced a child becoming autistic having received the MMR vaccine. The doctor who suspected a link was subjected to the full force of the establishment to say he was wrong. I believe his evidence has been satisfactorily countered but there does seem to be a lack of enthusiasm to look further at why normal children become autistic shortly after received the MMR jab.

Given that the government will be in trouble should a link be proved, they won’t be keen to fund it. The pharma companies that make the vaccine won’t be keen either. And given the hounding the only person who has questioned it received, why would somebody of limited means put their career on the line?

On free markets, if wind and solar power was so great and profitable, private companies wouldn’t need to be bribed with taxpayers’ money to get involved would they?

There is more than a hint of conspiracy ideation from Pamela Gray who, after commenting on a recently deliberately faked paper, says:

October 17, 2013 at 6:04 am
That is not to say that the current paper is fake. But it does give reason to think that if a well-done faked paper with fatal flaws can get in, a less well-done real paper with poor design and unsupported conclusions can get in.

It's worth pointing out that PLoS One, which published Lewandowsky's paper, rejected the faked Bohannon paper.


D. Holliday is betrayed by his or her own words:

October 17, 2013 at 5:15 am
Seriously? Conservatives don’t believe in science? What we don’t believe in are “consensus” driven, politically motivated statements by supposed scientists like this dork Lewandowsky.

Jimmy Haigh. says:

October 17, 2013 at 4:33 am
“Climate science” is all about bullshitters making up bullshit.

techgm classifies trust as an emotion and is up front about conspiracy ideation, writing:

October 17, 2013 at 4:12 am
“Trust in science has been declining since 1970’s.”

Besides the error of attributing emotion (trust) to something that is inanimate (science), the article errs in that the decline in trust has been with scientists (not “science”) – that people believe that (many) scientists have been corrupted by grant money and a lust for recognition, and/or that their skills are 2nd-rate.

Old Hoya says:

October 17, 2013 at 8:31 am
Questioning Big Brother as always been recognized as a form of mental illness. We have always been at war with EastAsia precisely because the enemy is warming the planet….
How do we characterize the disposition toward science by CAGW fanboys who believe that there are more hurricanes, malaria, extinctions and an imminent ice-free Himalayas because the rapid warming has already taken place?

Notice that skepticism directed at the most politicized corner of science since Lysenko is treated like a form of mental illness or sociological aberration by this clown. “Lewandowsky” is becoming a synonym for self-satire.

Elliott M. Althouse doesn't recognise conspiracy ideation when he sees it and says:

October 17, 2013 at 8:28 am
If his survey asked a group of 1000 physicians, dentists, PhD chemists and physicists, and engineers would he get the same result? Not to mention statisiticians should be included. I find it hard to believe there are very many (less than 2) conspiracy theorists amongst the posters at WUWT, Climate, etc. and Climate Audit. It is intriguing that someone can publish utter nonsense and get away with it.

Vince Causey comes up with a counter argument, which proves popular at WUWT, but looking at it more closely his argument is itself conspiracy ideation.  (Plus his use of the term CAGW lets him down.) He says:

October 17, 2013 at 7:55 am
Lew’s paper raises the corollary. If we must ask why sceptics tend towards free market views, we must also ask why believers tend towards socialist or statist views. Given Lew’s answer to the first question, one could equally reply that people with socialist/statist views believe in cAGW precisely because mitigation entails statist solutions, government intervention and redistributive economics.

Of course, Lew isn’t going to give this answer. He might say something like “People with liberal/left wing views aren’t contaminated with the free market blinkers that prevents those types from seeing the truth,” or something equally logically absurd. In other words, the liberal/socialist/leftist positions are characterised by an absence of a property (free market blinkers) rather than with properties of their own.

But, if we look at the activities of cAGW scientists we see not merely the absence of free market views, we see a vigorous pursuit of pushing mitigation policies. Why is this, if not that they themselves are driven by statist ideologies?

If Lew’s paper has anything to commend it, it is that it has shown the politicisation of climate science – on both sides of the divide. Having now let the cat out the bag, he must confront his own reflection in the mirror, to mix metaphors.

---

Lewandowsky S, Gignac GE, Oberauer K (2013) The Role of Conspiracist Ideation and Worldviews in Predicting Rejection of Science. PLoS ONE 8(10): e75637. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0075637

Early start to the fire season in Australia

Update: Hundreds of homes may have been destroyed today.  Some areas had people trapped with no water and no firefighters.  Conditions have been among the worst ever experienced in NSW with very strong winds fanning the fires and very dry conditions.

#nswfires #bushfire #GodBlessFirefighters Middle of Spring!?! Enough already!! pic.twitter.com/32yhaIoL5y
— Jo (@BeringWells) October 17, 2013

Thank you to the thousands of firefighters who have so bravely fought fires in difficult conds. #NSWRFS #nswfires pic.twitter.com/stDcOP0hIA
— NSW RFS (@NSWRFS) October 17, 2013

---

Australia has had an early start to the fire season.  In September, when spring had barely started, fires started raging in NSW.

My heartfelt sympathy to everyone who has lost property or been threatened by fire these past few weeks.  This is not something one would wish on their worst enemy.  All Australians are very grateful to all the brave men and women fighting these fires and everyone who is supporting the firefighters in their efforts.

This is where the fires are burning at the moment, from the NSW Rural Fire Service.  Fires are scattered over 1,200 km (approx 750 miles) up NSW, almost from the Victorian border to Queensland.

Source: NSW RFS

Sydney is baking in heat more akin to the height of summer

This week has seen more fire disasters as reported by Peter Hannam in the Sydney Morning Herald.  On Sunday dozens of people lost their cars when a fire destroyed a car park at Olympic Park Aquatic Centre in Homebush (home of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games).

Today's fires aren't restricted to the back blocks either, there are fires burning around Australia's largest city, Sydney.  From Peter Hannam:

The strength of Thursday's winds caught authorities on the hop, with the fire danger only rated "severe" rather than "extreme", as had been forecast for the previous Sunday's heat spike.

Bankstown, for instance, recorded 95 km/h winds, the strongest there for at least 10 years, said Ben McBurney, a meteorologist with Weatherzone.

"The bureau didn't expect wind speeds to go quite as high as they did," he said.
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Humidity across the basin also fell as low as 10 per cent. "That's probably what led to these fires getting out of control," said McBurney.

Many areas saw their fire danger ratings rocket to "catastrophic", including for Richmond and Sydney Airport. Camden also had a "catastrophic" rating, the highest in 11 years.

While strong winds remained a concern, the arrival of cooler conditions late on Thursday gave firefighters in some areas a break. But relief may be temporary as a lack of rain and rising temperatures over the weekend will see high fire dangers return.

Friday's maximum will drop back to the long-run October average of 22 degrees and will seem almost cool after Sydneysiders have been baking in heat more akin to the height of summer than mid-spring.

Climate change will see fire conditions worsen

Peter Hannam is one of the journalists in Australia who reports it as it is.  In the same article he writes:

David Jones, head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said climate change will see fire conditions worsen for much of Australia over the longer run.

While weather patterns vary from year to year, southern Australia is already seeing springs and summer becoming hotter. As a result, there is a "trend towards more severe fire weather conditions across Australia.”

"We know from about March-April to around June, things have been drying out across southern Australia," he said.

"The fact there is less soil moisture increases the fire risk both towards the end of the fire season but also the subsequent fire season," Dr Jones said. "You have a lesser opportunity to really wet up the vegetation.”

“Global warming exacerbates a number of factors associated with fire," he said, adding that humidity is expected to decline over much of the continent particular in summer.

Read the full article here

Too dangerous for prescribed burns

The thing is, as climate change kicks in it becomes more difficult to do any hazard reduction burns as has happened in NSW.

You can read more articles by Peter Hannam in the environment section here and in the business section here.

CO2 is plant food? Not on your nellie, sez Anthony (Pavlov) Watts and his dogs!

Did anyone say deniers are nuts?  Here is a paper not just telling everyone that plants are using a heap more CO2, but quantifying just how much more CO2 has been absorbed.

How does Anthony Watts react?  After all his articles about how "CO2 is plant food", you'd think he'd be shouting from the rooftops that at last those wretched scientists started listening to science deniers, wouldn't you.

But no! He's posted the press release under the headline:

Climate Craziness of the Week: Plants blamed for us not roasting since 1950

Perhaps Anthony didn't like the way the conclusion was worded, although it's on the cards that he hasn't read the paper itself.  He probably just skimmed the press release he copied and pasted.  This call to arms from Anthony Watts is archived here.


Anyway, this is what Elena Shevliakova and her team found:

The results of our study indicate that historical enhanced vegetation growth has avoided release of 251–274 GtC, about an additional 85 ppm of atmospheric CO2 concentration, and a warming of 0.31 ± 0.06 °C. To accurately predict observed trends in both temperature and the atmospheric CO2 concentration over the 20th century, ESMs need to account for the interaction of LUC and enhanced vegetation growth, including vegetation regrowth on the secondary lands. CO2 fertilization is a plausible but debated mechanism for the ongoing land carbon sink. The empirical evidence for enhanced vegetation growth under elevated CO2 remains equivocal (29–32). The model used here does not include nitrogen or phosphorus limitations on carbon uptake. Some modeling (33) and observational (34–36) studies have found that nitrogen availability has not significantly affected global carbon uptake over the 20th century, whereas others have reached the opposite conclusion (37). The magnitude and the sign of the future net land carbon flux will impact the atmospheric CO2 growth rate, climate change, and any efforts to mitigate it. Because of the importance of the land sink in reconciling atmospheric CO2 and climate records, this study adds urgency to independently test and isolate the mechanisms responsible for the growing terrestrial C sink.

So the world would most probably have been quite a bit hotter already if not for the enhanced vegetation growth. You'll notice their caution though.  "The empirical evidence for enhanced vegetation growth remains equivocal." and "The model used here does not include nitrogen or phosphorus limitations on carbon uptake."

The researchers used a coupled climate–carbon cycle model (ESM2G) and gridded land use changes from 1700 to 2005. They "conducted three types of CO2 emissions-driven experiments from 1861 to 2005: historical (EH), historical without LUC (land use change)  (EHnoLU), and historical without the CO2 fertilization effect on vegetation (EHnoFR)".

The full paper is available at PNAS for those who are interested.  It reads well.

Shevliakova, Elena, et al. "Historical warming reduced due to enhanced land carbon uptake." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013): 201314047. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1314047110

From the WUWT comments

Because Anthony led the way deriding the research, almost all of his fans followed suit.  They are well-trained pups. Here's a selection (archived here):

JohnWho says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:23 pm
“Without plants, Earth would cook under billions of tons of additional carbon”
And who would care?
Without plants, all creatures that rely on the plants would die.
So, even if they “cooked”, who would be around to eat them?
We would not have a runaway carbon cycle without plants – the carbon cycle would quickly cease to revolve, would it not?

MattN says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Dumbest “what if” ever. Complete waste of money.

Bob Tisdale says who needs real science when you've got blog pseudo-science at WUWT?

October 16, 2013 at 1:26 pm
Someone wasted taxpayer dollars for this? Ridiculous!!!

JohnWho has another crack and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:29 pm
Please, Lord, stop me from reading the above:
“The planet’s land-based carbon “sink” — or carbon-storage capacity — has kept 186 billion to 192 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere since the mid-20th century,…”
Uh, sure is a good thing those plants did that. Wonder if they were removing carbon from the atmosphere before the mid-20th century, too?

Bob, Missoula agrees with Bob Tisdale that science is for the literate, not the scientific illiterati at WUWT:

October 16, 2013 at 1:30 pm
Bob you said what I wanted to but without cussing.

Sparks thinks all science is a big joke and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:32 pm
I loved it, needed a good laugh!

Philip Lee is the first person to commend the researchers for (not really) saying that "CO2 is plant food".  But he gets climate models woefully wrong when he says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:34 pm
A useful admission that CO2 is plant food that promotes plant growth (that will provide food for humans) and will limit temperature in ways not modeled by climate models.

richardscourtney isn't shy about displaying his ignorance of climate models either (he seems to think, wrongly, they are "made to fit" the past), and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Friends:
The report says
“A unique value of this study is that it simulates the past, for which, unlike the future, we have observations,” Saleska said. “Past observations about climate and carbon dioxide provide a test about how good the model simulation was. If it’s right about the past, we should have more confidence in its ability to predict the future.

No competent scientist would utter such nonsensical drivel.

If a model cannot emulate the past there is reason to suppose it cannot predict the future.
But an ability of a model to emulate the past does NOT of itself provide any “confidence in its ability to predict the future”. This is because there are an infinite number of ways to make a model fit the past but there is only one way the future will occur.
Richard

Bennett In Vermont shows off the Dunning Kruger Effect and says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:46 pm
If they had asked an indoor gardener they could have learned that most plants don’t even hit their maximum growth potential until the level of CO2 is above 1200 ppm. That’s when they really start to take off.

Oh well, we can’t let simple facts get in the way of a Mad Magazine style scientific paper.

Tim Collins says:

October 16, 2013 at 1:56 pm
Wow what a lot of words, and I guess salary? In order to state the bleeding obvious except for the absurd postulation that plants will have so much to eat they will stop being carbon dioxide hungry – yeah right.

Stop paying these academidiots now and make them get proper jobs.

Chad Wozniak - does Chad ever think about what he writes?  He writes almost the same lot of words no matter what article he's commenting on:

October 16, 2013 at 2:15 pm
How desperate can these people get?
Will Happer at Princeton must be just shaking his head.

Okay, that's enough.  I'm sure you get the idea.  They'll never be happy these science deniers.  Scientists quantify an effect the deniers have been bleating about incessantly and the deniers still deny.  Like Pavlov's dog trained to growl whenever they come across some real science.  It doesn't matter if they agree with it or disagree.  As long as it's science they'll growl, mock, complain, tell the scientists how wrong they are and wail "if only they'd asked us deniers..."