A longer view of Arctic sea ice: 1953 to now

The other day I wrote about Arctic sea ice and showed a chart from Meier et al (2012). The chart went from 1953 to 2011. In case you can use these somewhere while you're talking Arctic sea ice, I've now got updated data and have plotted charts from 1953 to the present. I can do others if you want (just ask in the comments).

I'll be a bit busy over the next few days, so won't be able to respond immediately - should be within a few hours tops.

Desperate Deniers: Bob Tisdale is lost in uncertainty of February temperatures

Bob Tisdale has got himself lost in a world of uncertainty. He's written an article at WUWT (archived here) with the headline: "February 2016 Global Surface Temperature Anomalies May or May Not Have Been Highest on Record, According to the UKMO".

In fact it was the hottest February on record. What Bob does to support his claim is say how the UK Met Office Hadley Centre publishes uncertainty limits with the global surface temperature data. Bob went looking for any month that might have had an anomaly that came close. He couldn't find any other February, but he did find a January. He wrote:

Another low: Richard Verney's Arctic sea ice fudge at WUWT

Some of the "thoughts" of deniers at WUWT defy belief. I'm talking about a comment from WUWT regular Richard Verney today under an unusual article (for WUWT). The WUWT article was unusual because despite being posted by Anthony Watts, and despite it being a press release from a scientific organisation, and despite it being about how winter sea ice hit another record low maximum this year - there was no "claim" in the headline (archived here, latest here).  There was even a link to the NASA press release.

This is the comment that I'm talking about, from richard verney on March 29, 2016 at 1:48 am

They have satellite data going back to the early 1970s. They should use all the data, not just that post 1979, but then again the early 1970s would be inconvenient especially since the amount of ice observed today is more than in 1974.

He's wrong in his conspiracy ideation. The amount of Arctic sea ice observed today is a lot less than it was in 1974. Here are some plots of sea ice extent going back as far as the satellite era will travel.

Willis Eschenbach and his carbon uptake mistake at WUWT

Willis Eschenbach is wondering about how much extra CO2 can go into the air (archived here, latest here). He's done some calculations and figured that atmospheric CO2 can't double. Even without doing any calculations it's easy to see that he's wrong. This is why.

Willis has used two models for his estimate, and two estimates of fossil fuel available to burn. He got his estimates from a diagram in the IPCC WG1 AR5 report, which put fossil fuel reserves at between around 900 GtC (gigatonnes of carbon) and 2000 GtC.  I will leave it to the experts to quibble over how much of the remaining fossil fuel reserves would be technically feasible to exploit. This article is about how and perhaps why Willis has underestimated the impact - or so it seems to me. Willis' two examples are described here as:

• Example 1: burning 900 GtC by 2100 and
• Example 2: burning an extra 2,000 GtC by 2100.

As far as I can tell, where he went wrong was in using single pulse models. That is, there's an inherent assumption in the models he used that CO2 will be released as a single pulse, followed by nothing. (Willis doesn't assume that himself, but the models he uses do, I think. That leads to a flaw in his reasoning.) Update: Willis mentions a tau of 33 years, suggesting he has factored in additional removal of CO2 from the air, over and above what the biosphere, oceans and land surface can already handle. In other words, he's erroneously double counted.

Cognitive dissidence: Quiet, if confusing, on the denier front, and a peep at Hansen (2016)

It's still quiet if a bit confusing on the denier front. Judith Curry admits to being a knowing dissident. She says she's suffering cognitive dissidence in one of her mixed up articles where, apart from that, she commits to little if anything as is usual with Judith. While it was probably a Freudian slip, it's a great term, isn't it. One that sums up disinformers rather well.

Other people seem to be afflicted by cognitive dissidence as well, arguing for the sake of arguing.

Over at WUWT, Bob Tisdale wants to know what Presidential hopefuls are going to do to protect the US populace against weather-related disasters (archived here), which he admits are happening now.

How false denier memes are built on quicksand

Science deniers build memes on quicksand, but the memes can hang around as if they are built on solid rock. Today there is another example. At WUWT there's an article with the headline: "Friday Funny: more upside down data". Except the data wasn't upside down or back to front or wrong in any discernible way.

John McLean sent an email to Bishop Hill blog owner saying he found things wrong with the sea surface temperature data from the Hadley Centre, UK Met Office (archived here). Among other things, he thought that the data labeled nh (northern hemisphere) should have been sh (southern hemisphere) and vice versa. Parts of the email were published on the blog without much fanfare, just asking if others could confirm or otherwise what John thought he found.

Update: John McLean was partly correct, there were some errors in the data files. They have now been rectified. (See also this update article, which includes an explanation from Nick Stokes.)

Added by Sou at 2:16 pm, 12 April 2016 AEST

Scientists checked but found nothing wrong

ATTP was the first to look and couldn't find anything wrong with the data and about two hours after the blog article was written he said so. (He also suggested checking with John Kennedy of the UK Met Office.) An hour later, Zeke Hausfather also said he couldn't find the problems that John McLean identified. A few hours later Eternal Optimist checked some of John's other numbers and got something different to what John got. Around the same time Nick Stokes said he also looked and couldn't find anything wrong with the data. He wrote:

Spinning in fright at WUWT

I wrote about the AMS survey yesterday, so this will be short. The survey has belatedly hit the news at WUWT, with much denier spin (lumping the half and halfers in with the human-caused deniers). Anthony wrote about his conspiracy-minded colleagues:

Two colleagues I know locally also got this survey, and they didn’t send it in because they didn’t believe their opinion or identity would actually be protected. 

Ooh, scary! Anthony added that he doesn't want anyone to know that he rejects climate science. Must be why his blog is so secret:

I can’t say that I blame them. I wouldn’t have sent it in either when the man asking the questions might flag you for criminal prosecution for having an opinion he doesn’t like.

ROTFL! 

Shady journalism at WUWT: Investigative reporting vs disinformation smears

There's quite a bit of difference between investigative reporting, "science" via FOI email fishing, and lazy smears via word association games. There are some examples of the difference at WUWT today (archived here). As you know, Anthony Watts isn't the sharpest tool in the toolshed, which is maybe one reason his fans forgive him his lack of critical thinking and dreadful double standards. Another reason is that his disinformation is aimed at the bluntest tools in the toolshed, so the content doesn't matter. As long as there are some slogans to toss about, the facts are irrelevant.

Today I happened to notice, belatedly, that Anthony Watts whistled for my attention, using me as an excuse to beg for money again - so I'll do him the honour of responding. He copied and pasted a smear attack on some top notch investigative reporting. The closest that his sloppy, lazy copy and paste came to "investigative reporting" was:

• misrepresenting a press release, 
• reading a paragraph publicly available for all to see on a web page (I'm guessing Katie read it), and 
• adding some sensationalist language.

Untenable denier delusions: Another Norman Page "ice age cometh" at WUWT

Times are tough in climate conspiracy land. Today there is another ice age cometh article at WUWT by Dr Norman Page (archived here). His headline is "Collapse of the CAGW Delusion: Untenable Past 2020". Anthony hasn't posted an "ice age cometh" article from this greenhouse effect denier for some time. His article seems to be based on the "work" of Syun-Ichi Akasofu, who is also a greenhouse effect denier. Akasofu's article was published in one of the journals of Scientific Research Publishing, which Beale has identified as a predatory publisher of junk. That is, it accepts any old nonsense. It's a "Little Ice Age bounce" paper otherwise known as a "the world warms by magic" article.

Norman Page's forecasts and imaginary millenial peak

Norman is also a "world warms by magic" proponent. He hides it by writing a lot of gobbledegook about patterns and cycles that don't have any physical basis. This time he put up some of his own forecasts. Here they are:

Creationist and anti-vaxxer Galileos - step this way

Pinocchio by André Koehne

A couple of lawyers seem to be wanting to make a name for themselves as defenders of anti-science defamers (archived here). David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman have written an article at the Wall Street Journal about how they or their current or future clients (presumably) want to press their right to falsely defame climate scientists. Why do I say this? Because right in the middle of the article is written:

The Climate Inquisition began with Michael Mann’s 2012 lawsuit against critics of his “hockey stick” research—a holy text to climate alarmists. The suggestion that Prof. Mann’s famous diagram showing rapid recent warming was an artifact of his statistical methods, rather than an accurate representation of historical reality, was too much for the Penn State climatologist and his acolytes to bear.

That is a complete fabrication of the situation. Dr Mann's case isn't about critics of his research. It's about defamation. This pair of scallywag lawyers seem to want to join the queue waiting to be sued. Since they are lawyers, they must know that the case is about the ugly and false allegations of fraud by the people Professor Mann is suing.