Give us your climate predictions, Andy May

Every so often WUWT publishes what it describes as "failed climate predictions". It is often timed to distract from more bad climate news, such as the fact that last year there was a record increase in the annual rise in atmospheric CO2.

The list published today, from Andy May at WUWT, follows the normal pattern. It takes a bunch of statements that were published at various times, including several from 27 years ago, and claims they are failed predictions. This includes statements that refer to things that may happen by 2100.

Yep, science deniers tend to oscillate between living in the past and living way ahead in the future. Tim Ball, one of Anthony's pet conspiracy theorists, rarely manages to emerge beyond 1970. Andy May (and Anthony Watts) both implicitly claim they have a time machine that has taken them into the future.

There are two other points worth making before I give you some examples of the low regard they (rightly) hold for WUWT fans. (They know they are a the dullest of the dim-witted.)

Anthony Watts is already crowing it hasn't warmed since 2016 (last year), with a La Niña watch

If you've been missing HotWhopper's take downs of deniers, you haven't been missing a lot. Wattsupwiththat is just repeating common denier memes over and over again.

In the last day Anthony Watts has even managed - it hasn't warmed since 2016 (therefore global warming is a hoax)! If you can believe that. (It's mostly true, though he only blew on the dog whistle and didn't spell out that last bit.)

He's a bit late to the party. The latest ENSO wrap-up from Australia's Bureau of Meteorology was an announcement of a La Niña watch, and that was last Tuesday. Here's an excerpt (my emphasis), which may disappoint the global cooling believers:

Seven of the eight international climate models surveyed by the Bureau suggest that sea surface temperatures will reach or exceed La Niña thresholds by November 2017. However, indicators need to remain at La Niña levels for at least three months to be considered an event. This is forecast by six of the eight models. If a La Niña does occur this year it is likely to be short and weak, as sea surface temperatures are forecast to warm again in early 2018, as the austral autumn is the time when La Niña events normally decay.

Andy Skuce - you will be sorely missed

Andy Skuce sadly passed away a short while ago on 14 September. He was a wonderful person and will be sorely missed by many. I was privileged to know him, if only online. He was thoughtful, wise and kind and a real gentleman in the true meaning.

If you haven't yet, do read his recent article where Andy let his readers know about his illness. That article is so typical of Andy.

August 2017 is the second hottest August on record - the #climate is changing

Summary: August 2017 was the second hottest August on record. The 12 months to August 2017 was the second hottest September to August period on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for August was 0.85 °C, which is 0.14 °C less than the August 2016. August 2017 was 0.05 °C hotter than the next hottest August in 2014, which had an anomaly of 0.80 °C.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to August each year. The 12 months to August 2017 averaged 0.91 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.13 °C cooler than the 12 months to August 2016.

This makes it the second hottest September to August 12 month period on record.

If everyone thought the way Rud Istvan thinks, civilisation would soon crumble

There's an article at WUWT that gives some insight into the minds of the ideologically-constrained at WUWT. Rud Istvan wrote why he doesn't want his tax going to assist in recovery efforts in Texas and Louisiana (archived here). It boils down to him being able to afford to live in a fancy apartment that was designed to withstand Cat 5 storms. Those who can't afford that should suffer the consequences, according to Rud.

This is symptomatic of all that is wrong in the deniosphere and some "free market" survival of the fittest thinkers. It's ideologically opposed to the fundamentals of most of the world's religions, and society as a whole. Society functions best when we look out for each other, not when we worship money, greed and selfishness.

Hypocrisy alert: Don't make us pay for Harvey floods sez Eric Worrall at WUWT. We paid for his, though.

Credit: Trudy Lampson

I made a comment the other day about paying for floods. I was remarking about how Roger Pielke Jr likes to view the cost of disasters as a function of GDP. He says that GDP is going up faster worldwide than the big spike in the cost of weather disasters and implies that therefore the world can afford to pay for them.

There are flaws in Roger's GDP argument. One I didn't mention was that the cost of the clean up and restoration is part of GDP. The other is that I think a lot of wealthy people will object to their money being paid to recover from disasters unless they themselves are the victims. Remember how many Republicans voted against aid after Sandy.

Anthony Watts wants coral reefs to face extinction - again

Photo: Toby Hudson

Coral reefs are critically important to the marine ecosystem. Despite this, there's another attempt to make corals extinct at Anthony Watts' blog wattsupwiththat.com (WUWT) (archived here). Anthony wrote an article saying how it was hilarious for scientists to want to study corals, because they've been made extinct a number of times before and came back hundreds of millennia later. Or something like that.

As Phil Clarke pointed out in a comment here, Anthony started his strange plea to stop studying corals by referring to an article on the website of the Global Reef Project. Anthony quoted the first sentence of the article, and decided to not post any more of it. Here is the first sentence, plus a bit more (my emphasis). The part that Anthony quoted is in italics. The part that contradicted his whole article is in bold:

Corals are 500 million years old, and date back to the late Cambrian period, during the Paleozoic era (Fig. 1). Evidence suggests that they started as simple, solitary organisms but, in response to changes in their environment, later evolved into the coral reefs we know today. It is also known that over the 500 million years, during which corals are known to have existed, they have experienced a number of extinction events. These extinction events were largely the result of dramatic changes in their environment, such as we are seeing today. 

We can't say Hurricane Harvey caused climate science deniers but it certainly worsened them

Harvey. Credit: NASA

Science deniers were so put out by the deadly rains from Hurricane Harvey that they lost their sense of sight. Now we can't say that Hurricane Harvey caused climate science deniers, they've existed since we changed climate in a big way. We can say that Hurricane Harvey hasn't improved them.

Joe Bastardi, a science denying weather forecaster, got all excited and wrote a dumb article that was copied and pasted in the deniosphere. Danny Hayes first alerted us here at HotWhopper. It took some time before it was copied and pasted at WUWT (archived here). It was in response to an article in the Guardian, by Professor Michael Mann. The Guardian article had the following:

Club of Rome conspiracies from Timothy Ball at WUWT

Timothy Ball is Anthony Watts' most conventional conspiracy theorist, and an utter nutter. Anthony decided for his blog audience he would target the crank end of cyberspace and Tim fits the bill admirably. His latest theory is that the Club of Rome invented climate science, and as a nefarious plot.

Some might call WUWT fans wackadoodles, others will think of the funny farm. Wattsupwiththat is a natural meeting place for paranoid conspiracy theorists who think that efforts to protect humanity and nature are a satanic plot.

Tim is a greenhouse effect denier who wrote the first chapter in an obscure book that gained modest popularity among climate conspiracy nutters a few years ago, called "Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory".  There was no death, of course, but the book is a bible of some of WUWT's "climate hoax" conspiracy theorists. Not that they understand anything in it (who would? It's gobbledegook.) Nor would they understand anything about physics, chemistry, climate or mathematics. They just get some comfort from seeing they are not the only weirdos in the world.

Stefan Rahmstorf wins the AGU Climate Communication Prize, so WUWT compares him to Hitler

Is it the horrors of Hurricane Harvey that have unhinged deniers at WUWT? I don't know, but something has.

There have been two articles bashing Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the world's leading ocean scientists. He is Professor of Physics of the Oceans at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). The AGU is awarding him the Climate Communication Prize, which he richly deserves. As some sort of payback, deniers are using the Serengeti Strategy to defame Dr Rahmstorf in two (so far) ugly and ridiculous articles at WUWT.

In the first WUWT article, Charles the Moderator has copied and pasted an unhinged article by someone called Duane Thresher, who has a huge chip on his shoulder against climate scientists. Charles the Moderator included a photo of Hitler because that's what deniers do when they want to smear and defame. It's a Law of Deniers. That article is a nasty denier take on how Dr Rahmstorf took a newspaper to task way back in April 2010, after it published false information about an IPCC report. You can read about this on Dr. Rahmstorf's blog (if you don't read German you'll need to translate).

See the update below for more context.