WUWT Gets Weirder by the Day - Now burning fossil fuels doesn't produce CO2?

A new bout of craziness has broken out on WUWT, this time led by Girma Orssengo, PhD.  Girma posted an article entitled:  Claim: How the IPCC arrived at climate sensitivity of about 3 deg C instead of 1.2 deg C.

Girma's sixty year cycle based on sixty years of observations!

Nice headline.  But Girma proceeds to do something else entirely - as many commenters point out.  He reckons there's a sixty year cycle, based on his 'analysis' of temperatures over the sixty years between 1940 and 2000 or thereabouts.  I kid you not!  I won't try to delve more deeply - that should be enough to give you the picture.  If you want to know how the IPCC report deals with climate sensitivity - click here.

What's even more ridiculous is what happens in the comments.  Based on the comments, Girma Orssengo, PhD, in one of the most convoluted cases of circular reasoning one can imagine, believes:

• Burning fossil fuels doesn't produce carbon dioxide
• Carbon dioxide is being outgassed by the oceans (oceans in fact are absorbing CO2)
• Temperature is rising by magic
• Climate sensitivity is the doubling of temperature from a rise in CO2 that is being outgassed by the oceans as a result of the rising temperature (and that are in fact absorbing, not emitting CO2).

Burning fossil fuels doesn't release CO2 - what?

After writing his article and making numerous follow up comments explaining how he works out climate sensitivity (to CO2 forcing), down in the comments Girma makes this statement - pretty funny for someone who stresses his PhD (my bold):

Girma says:
May 18, 2013 at 8:59 am
Don Easterbrook
I am not saying CO2 is causing the warming. I believe it is the warming that is causing the increase in CO2 concentration, as the vostok ice cores show. The CO2 concentration will drop when the temperature falls.

What I'm trying to figure out is how that works.  First of all one has to decide that the following chemical reaction doesn't happen:

hydrocarbon + oxygen ---> CO2 + H2O

How is the rise in temperature increasing CO2? (In Girma's reality - not yours and mine)

Then one has to figure out how the warming is causing the increase in CO2 concentration.  Girma explains:

As the temperature increases, more CO2 is released from the oceans (where it is about 50 times than in the atmosphere) increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmospheric.
As the temperature decreases, more CO2 is dissolved in the oceans decreasing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

When temperatures change as a result of forcings other than CO2, carbon dioxide does outgas from the oceans as they warm.  Small perturbations in temperature from orbital changes can produce much larger shifts in temperature because of this CO2 feedback - ending an ice age or plunging into one.  Read more about the greenhouse effect in this booklet from the Bureau of Meteorology.

But that's not what's happening now.  The oceans aren't releasing CO2.  They are absorbing about half the CO2 we pour into the air each year at the same time as they are warming up.  That's evidenced by the fact they are getting more acidic.  However, Girma doesn't even seem to think that burning hydrocarbons produces carbon dioxide and he's ignoring that little detail of ocean acidification.

So how does Girma explain the rise in temperature?  Well, that's a puzzle.  He refers back to his oscillation - but as Russ R. says: Shouldn’t the trend over a complete 60 year cycle be zero? Otherwise, it must be magic.

Just what does Girma mean by climate sensitivity?

Next one has to try to figure out what Girma's original article on climate sensitivity is all about.  Climate sensitivity is the rise in temperature from a doubling of CO2 (in this case).  Given Girma has said that it's the temperature increase that's causing more CO2, then his climate sensitivity can't be a measure of temperature rise from a doubling of CO2.  Maybe it's the doubling of CO2 from a given temperature rise?  Weird.

The Usual

More fun from the comments:

Slayer Graham is outed by Anthony Watts when he says:

May 18, 2013 at 5:57 am  All sensitivity figure are wrong, because there is no linkage between CO2 and temperature.
REPLY: John O’Sullivan, leader of the Principia cult, there’s no need to hide behind a fake email address. We always know who you are here....(inserts email rejection etc here)...Anthony.

Emeritus Professor Don Easterbrook is getting nuttier (and shoutier) by the day if that's possible.  Despite apparently also denying greenhouse gases (like the slayers do), he remains a favourite of Anthony - and says:

May 18, 2013 at 6:51 am  What ever happened to ’cause-and-effect’ in science? Just because temperature went up and CO2 also went up over the same period doesn’t make a basis for calculating how much temperature will go up as CO2 increases! This whole analysis is based on the false premise that temperature is a function of CO2. Why don’t we do the same analysis for the period 1945 to 1977 and calculate how much COOLING occurs with increase in CO2? And why don’t we calculate for the period 1880 to 1915 how much COOLING occurs with increase in CO2? And why don’t we calculate for the Maunder Minimum how much COOLING occurs with increase in CO2? You get the idea–the notion that temperature is a function of CO2 is invalided until you first show a cause-and-effect relationship between the two!

Richard M is in some degree of chaos and says:

May 18, 2013 at 8:14 am  Climate sensitivity is not a constant. It is variable and dependent upon other factors. That is due to the chaotic nature of climate. When near an attractor state it will be small. The further away it gets the higher it will be for any forcing.

A History of "Cyclic" Girma

Let's finish with a bit of history from Girma on realclimate.org. I suspect Jim thought Girma was sending up deniers.  We now know Girma was being Very Serious :D

Girma says:

7 May 2011 at 4:43 PM

Global mean temperature pattern is cyclic as shown in the following graph!  http://bit.ly/cO94in

CO2 emission has nothing to do with global mean temperature as its patterns before and after mid 20th century, before and after wide spread use of fossil fuel, are nearly identical.

[Response: Brilliant in all regards.--Jim]

Here's his 'following graph' (click to enlarge, if you dare!)

Lessons from a journalist

In the last couple of days a journalist has graced this little blog with his presence.  He was kind enough to give tips that surely will help any aspiring science journalist.

If you get an embargoed press release out of the blue - break the embargo.  No need to concern yourself about ethics.  More justification here.  (There might be consequences, but if you're an aspiring also-ran freelance journalist, who cares?)

An explanation of the journalist's job, with some examples: "A journalist's job is to provide information, context and analysis, not to just pass along information as if they're someone's message boy. It's naive to think otherwise."

Here is a brilliant example of "information, context and analysis".

Here's another example.  In writing about a study of scientific consensus, complain that it's not a study of something else - like providing the answer to life, the universe and everything.

The simple statement doesn't address questions like how much warming? What kind of warming (where)? How much are humans causing? How are they causing it? How well is this knowledge known? How good is the data? What are the consequences?

Very deep!  See?  Easy peasy - anyone can do it.  I'd caution that in trying to be controversial rather than informative if you miss instead of hit, you'll risk being seen as starting to head down this path.  For example, this is how the rest of the world saw that particular study:

IdiotTracker says it better - here and here.

About that 97% - Not a "Great Moment" for WUWT

Great WUWT moments in 97% 'beliefs'

Anthony Watts and his followers are up in arms.  They deny science and won't accept the consensus.  Cook et al (2013) found 97% scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.

It's got to Anthony so much that he's telling outright lies.  Now he's put up a 'funny' asking his readers to add to his list of 97%. He's called his article: Friday Funny – great moments in 97% beliefs

My contribution to WUWT's "great (ahem) moments"

Here's my contribution, taken from Anthony's own website.  At the time he was protesting another piece of research: 'An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science'.  He took a poll of his readers, with twofold ironic symmetry.

Cook et al (2013) found that of 4,014 scientific abstracts that took a position on the cause of global warming, 3,896 papers or 97.1% attribute global warming to humans, 78 or 1.9% disputed that and 40 or 1.0% indicated the cause was 'uncertain'.  It turned out that the 97.1% represented 98.4 % of authors of those scientific papers who, based on the irrefutable evidence, attribute global warming to human activity.

Remember those numbers: 97.1% and 98.4%.

Now look at the results of Anthony's poll from a snapshot I took at the time:

Another 97% - how WUWT is upside down and back to front

97.01% of Anthony's readers reject AGW and declare themselves as 'skeptics' (climate science deniers' euphemism for rejection of climate science) and did not participate.  Add to that those who did take part and say they are 'skeptics' and you get 98.4%.

Now add the WUWT respondents who declare they accept that human activity is driving global warming and you get 1.6%.  Not that far from the percentage of the 4,014 papers that took a position and disputed the cause of global warming - 1.9%.

• 98.4% experts find humans are causing global warming
• 98.4% Wattsonians reject human-induced global warming

Anatomy of the motivated rejection of science, 97%, 98.4% - too much ironic coincidence to cope with - eh?

I'd offer to add this to Anthony's 'great moments' but along with most normal people who've tried to comment there, I've been banned.

Anthony Watts is in Serious Trouble with a Whopper of a Lie of 'Epic Proportions'

Update: I've added a few tidbits at the end.


Anthony Watts of WUWT is in serious trouble now.  He can't get away from it.  John Cook and the good people at SkepticalScience.com have got him on the back foot.  He's squealing and squirming and has resorted to telling lies.

As if the Cook et al study wasn't enough all by itself.   But what really got Anthony going was the tweet from President Obama, telling his 31,567,991 followers and the whole world all about it:

Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: OFA.BO/gJsdFp
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 16, 2013

Anthony is green with envy.  He spent ages trying to figure out whether the President used his own fingers and thumbs (and personal Blackberry) to type the tweet.  Check this out - part 3 is the last of a series. Nuts is right (pun fortuitous):

@wattsupwiththat dude, you have seriously lost it.
— nuts (@sherieapple) May 17, 2013

Anthony's Lie of 'Epic Proportions'

Now here is Anthony's lie of 'epic proportions' (my bold):

...When you take a result of 32.6% of all papers that accept AGW, ignoring the 66% that don’t, and twist that into 97%, excluding any mention of that original value in your media reports, there’s nothing else to call it – a lie of presidential proportions.

Anthony wrote that 66% of scientific papers don't accept AGW.  That's a Whopper of a Lie!  

Now just in case you think Anthony was just being sloppy in his writing, well no. He's repeated his big fat lie of 'epic proportions' here at the end of a comment by a reader:

This study done by John Cook and his “team” found more scientific publications whose abstracts reject global warming than say humans are primarily to blame for it.

The fact is that 97% of scientific papers that take a position on the cause of warming attribute the cause to humans.

Cook et al (2013) classified 11,944 papers.  Of those, 4,014 expressed a position on global warming.  3,896 of these or 97.1% attributed the cause to humans.

What Anthony has done is added the 78 papers that dispute this fact to the 40 that aren't certain to the 7,930 that took no position on current anthropogenic climate change.

That's right! Anthony added a whopping 7,970 to the mere 78 papers that dispute global warming - to try to fool his readers.

The papers that took no position included papers about past climate (where today's warming is not relevant), papers on mitigation and lots of other subjects relating to climate change.  They did not dispute that humans are causing global warming.

The fact that Anthony has to lie is a big tell.  He is on the back foot.  He doesn't know what to do, so he resorts to telling big fat lies.

Try it out - classify science papers

You can classify the abstracts that were the subject of Cook et al at SkepticalScience.  You'll even get to compare your ratings with those of the study itself.

Spread the word, visit The Consensus Project.

A few tidbits:

First a real howler from Anthony Watts himself, who says:

May 17, 2013 at 11:40 am:  ...I challenge any blog pro/con for AGW to match our track record for allowing adverse comments and comment volume.

Don't know about volume, but then quality outranks quantity every time.  Anyway, here's a couple or more: Deltoid, RealClimate - with the real bad ones here, and then there's WatchingtheDeniers.


And another one from Anthony.  To explain the context, Anthony has a headline that denies the fact, it reads: The 97% consensus – a lie of epic proportions.  Anthony's whole post is predicated on a lie yet he gets all upset that Washington post didn't correct their too obviously wrong story?

pt (@pt460) says:
May 17, 2013 at 11:35 am  Ummm, that 31 million followers figure is what @BarackObama has and I think someone misread how that figure was used. It was supposed to be something like, 31million is good exposure, meaning BO brought the info to that many people.

REPLY: No doubt, but what does it say about professional journalism when the WaPo reporter can’t get that basic fact right and makes story headlining that? Worse, I’ve made them aware of it and it still isn’t corrected. -Anthony

Well, Anthony, a number of your readers have corrected your lie.  Not only have you failed to correct it, you've repeated it.

Enough of the mendacious Watts. (One of Tony's favourite words is mendacious).  I got a kick out of this one - denier humour from Kaboom, who says:

May 17, 2013 at 10:44 am  If that number was true, 97% of scientists have not done their homework and need to be sent to bed without dinner.

And we'll finish up with a half-baked conspiracy thought from Jolan, who says:

May 17, 2013 at 10:23 am  Is Obama really that thick, or does he have an ulterior motive? 

Ninety-seven per cent consensus and more ...

Who can argue with this ... 100+ articles from around the world

Move your mouse over for controls, skip through images or to view in full screen.

Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous. Read more: OFA.BO/gJsdFp
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 16, 2013

More here...

Someone tried, but flunked arithmetic.

Cook et al Paper Confirms 97% Scientific Consensus - Prompting Silly Conspiracy Theories from Anthony Watts and WUWT

AGW Scientific Consensus: 97% and rising

Visit TheConsensusProject.com

A new peer-reviewed study in the open access journal, Environmental Research Letters** (ERL) confirms (again) the 97% scientific consensus on the causes of the current global warming.  Scientists have looked at the evidence and come to a conclusion. The evidence is so overwhelming now that the consensus has grown - from 90% in the literature twenty-two years ago in 1991 to 97% for the twenty year period to 2011.  Today 98.4% of scientists publishing papers relating to climate science and its impacts, agree that humans are causing global warming.

The finding (for anyone who's been sleeping under a cool rock for the past forty years or so) -  97% of published scientific papers taking a position on global warming all agree: 

We humans are causing global warming and climate change.

The paper is by Cook et al** and titled: Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.  It is by far the largest of its kind in the peer-reviewed literature.  The authors analysed abstracts from 11,944 papers mentioning global warming or global climate change over the twenty year period between 1991 and 2011.  Of the nearly 12,000 papers only 0.7% disputed the fact that humans are causing global warming.  The papers represented the work of scientists from at least 91 countries throughout the world.

These findings are consistent with those of Naomi Oreskes - published in Science in 2004, and those of the recent unpublished work by James Lawrence Powell and other studies.  In the 928 peer-reviewed papers she examined spanning ten years (1993-2003), Oreskes did not find a single paper disputing the consensus that humans are causing global warming. Out of 13,950 peer-reviewed articles on global warming in the past twenty-one years, Powell found that only 24 rejected global warming.  There's more (click image to enlarge):

Cook et al (2013) and two other similar studies all show at least 97% scientific consensus.

In this latest study, abstracts of the 11,944 papers were analysed by 24 volunteers led by John Cook of the University of Queensland and owner of the award-winning website SkepticalScience.com. They cross-checked their work by having at least two people independently rate each paper's abstract.  The people rating the abstracts didn't see the names of the papers' authors.  They further cross-checked by asking the papers' authors.

The research team was just a teeny bit (0.1%)  more conservative in their categorisations than the authors of the scientific papers themselves, showing the paper's findings to be rock solid.  Here's John Cook describing the study and its findings.

Spread the word - visit the new website: TheConsensusProject.com

To find out how to help the public become aware of the consensus, visit this new website: The Consensus Project.

You can also read reports of the study in this article on SkepticalScience.  It's also getting good mainstream and niche press coverage - click here for a multitude of choices:

• UK Guardian
• Australia's ABC News
• Australia's ABC - Environment
• Huffington Post
• The Australian
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Reuters
• RenewEconomy
• The Conversation
• Phys.Org news
•  and probably elsewhere.

And on various high profile blogs:

• ClimateProgress
• Scholars and Rogues
• David Appell's Quark Soup
• Rabett Run
• DeSmogBlog
• Watching the Deniers

As I said up front, the paper was published in the open access journal ERL.  Instead of reader pays, the journal requires an up front payment.  To their credit, SkepticalScience raised the fee from its readers in less than half a day - so it's all there for you to read.  No paywall.  Lots of other good papers from top scientists there as well.

That's about all from me on the research itself for now.  The rest of this article is mainly for denier watchers.  If you want to skip the bulk of it (it's fairly standard denier weirdness, some of it funny) but consider yourself WUWT-literate, you might enjoy the little bonus at the end :D

The paranoid conspiracy theory of Anthony Watts and his motley crew of science deniers

Despite all these confirmations of consensus or more likely because of them, Anthony Watts (reckons he) has uncovered yet another giant conspiracy.  According to him, umpteen editors from one thousand nine hundred and eighty (1,980) journals colluded in one of the biggest scientific scams of two centuries - not!.  (Just how gullible does Tony think his readers are?  See below to find out.)

Let's say for argument's sake that on average there are two editors per journal with 3% a year retiring or quitting editing. (Some journals might only have one editor, others ten or more and the bigger journals have dozens.)  Even using that very conservative estimate, it would mean in aggregate there were more than 6,000 people from all around the world who have been secretly colluding for more than twenty years.  And no-one's found out or provided a single skerrick of evidence for this imaginary collusion. What an achievement!  If you believe that then I've got a bridge to sell you.

I wish someone would ask Anthony: where are all the tens of thousands of "skeptics" whingeing that their paper got rejected?  Not Watts himself - even he managed to get a paper published.

Denier Anthony breaks embargo to feebly protest the 97% consensus

Yesterday Anthony leaked the embargoed press release after Steve Milloy (yeah, another science denier) first broke it.  About time Milloy was dropped from all news distribution lists since he can't be trusted to keep to embargoes.  Anthony thought he'd get in early and try to frame the finding his way - dork!

Anthony can't face the fact that from 11,944 papers mentioning global warming or global climate change since 1991 only 0.7 per cent rejected AGW.  Of all the papers from this 12,000 or so that attribute a cause to the recent warming, 97 per cent of these endorsed the consensus that we are seeing man-made, or anthropogenic, global warming.  Anthony splutters:

And from that (97%) he gets a consensus?

From 97% he gets a consensus?  Wouldn't you?  Not Anthony, though.  He feebly tries to tell his readers to "Ignore the 97%.  Just look at the 1.9%!!!"  I wonder how he'd go if 97 doctors examined his rash and fever, analysed a blood sample and then told him he had measles, while two drongos said it was just mosquito bites.

How many science deniers like Anthony Watts can fit in the teeny weeny denier pit?

From the paper, of the 11,944 papers published between 1991 and 2011 there were 4014 that expressed a position on global warming.  Of these 4014, 3896 papers or 97.1% endorsed human-caused global warming, 78 or 1.9% disputed it and 40 or 1.0% indicated the cause was 'uncertain'. The remaining 7,930 took no position on current anthropogenic climate change. (I expect this proportion to rise dramatically over time.  After all, how many  papers on atomic physics today would explicitly state "we believe atoms exist"?)

Anyway, thought it was worth showing Anthony's position in a chart and compare it to reality:

How Anthony disproves his conspiracy theory

A stubby short of a six pack

Anthony tries hard to find something to support his paranoid conspiracy theory.  His attempt brings to mind 'roos loose in the top paddock, two bob watches, thick planks and stubbies...

Anthony decides to quote a snippet from a stolen email, in which a couple of scientists are arguing that wrong papers should be kept out of the IPCC report.  Trouble is, Anthony's quote doesn't support his argument at all.  On the contrary, it flat out contradicts it.  Not only were those papers published in scientific journals (obviously, or there'd have been no argument), they were also included in the IPCC report!

From the USC:

Yet, the papers in question made it into the IPCC report, indicating that no restrictions on their incorporation were made. The IPCC process contains hundreds of authors and reviewers, with an exacting and transparent review process.

How Brandon Shollenberger Defends Consensus

Here's a tidbit of denier weirdness from a site called "The Blackboard".  Most deniers are weakly protesting that although thousands of experts all agree on AGW, it doesn't matter squat.  'Consensus is for the birds', they mumble.  Brandon Shollenberger (yes, that one) is taking a different tack, probably doing an Anthony Watts (see above) when he writes:

How many people currently believe Columbus set off to prove the Earth is round even though it is completely untrue? I’d say there’s even a consensus on it

One can only conclude that Brandon believes consensus is only of value if it's a consensus among experts, like scientists in the case of science.  Consensus among a motley mob of ideologically-driven deniers, conspiracy theorists and scientific illiterati from WUWT or The Blackboard is not only rare but meaningless. About the only thing deniers ever agree on is that it must be a giant conspiracy.  They can't even agree on what the conspiracy is.

More denier weirdness

Here are some choice excerpts from the comments to Anthony's article - so you can spend your valuable time on the paper itself and not have to wallow in the mud at WUWT:

Ron House ignores any findings from the 11,994 papers proffered by the authors, the numerous IPCC reports, the millions of papers to date mentioning climate change, and says that's not enough.  Instead he puts his two hands over his ears and shuts his eyes as he shouts that he wants not scientific evidence, but just evidence:

May 14, 2013 at 8:56 pm  I am sick of being told “97% agree…”  I want to be told THE EVIDENCE (yes, I am SHOUTING because no warmist ever, anywhere, any time, answers this question) – WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE. 

davidmhoffer says confidently, at least seventeen hours before he can possible have seen the paper itself:

May 14, 2013 at 9:49 pm  This paper is so bad that mocking it may improve its credibility.

And later, davidmhoffer gives some insight into the way his mind works.  He brings up a completely unrelated thought held by a Greek philospher two and a half thousand years ago.  (Empedocles was pretty close to the mark, he just got it back to front.)

May 14, 2013 at 10:59 pm  In 5th century BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles postulated we could see things due to rays coming out of our eyes.

Has David created a paradox for himself? Does that mean all the thousands of scientists creating knowledge today are wrong?  If so, how does David know that Empedocles was wrong?

A.D. Everard apparently prefers to listen to people who don't know and says:

May 14, 2013 at 10:01 pm  So, they are trying to herd the population back into fear by reinforcing the idea of consensus amongst “scientists” who “know”. 

RockyRoad is a back-to-front arithmetician.  He thinks that a rise from 90% in 1991 to 97% over the whole twenty years is a decline, saying:

May 14, 2013 at 10:37 pm  Hmmmm…..It appears their “concensus” (sic) is declining…. significantly….(and as a reminder to himself, adds) ...Never let a touch of reality ruin your cause, right?

Peter Ward not only can't understand math, he can't read, looks as if he misread 12,000 as 2,000 - and says:

May 14, 2013 at 10:51 pm  So 97% of 4000 papers endorsed AGW but of the “over 2000″ papers surveyed only 32.6% did? I don’t understand that math.

Manfred, after two centuries of science and thousands of papers confirming the consensus, is still waiting hopefully  for his "one" paper, writing (with a touch of historical liberty and shades of the fake Oregon petition <--worth reading):

May 15, 2013 at 1:37 am  How tiresomely ignorant and devoid of science. If I recall correctly, after Einstein had fled from Germany and the Nazis, he was informed that a hundred ‘Nazi’ scientists had come forward to debunk his eminent work on relativity. His comment: “they only needed one paper.”

While poor old Fred would never believe the findings of any collection of experts.  He probably gets up every day wondering if this is the day when the sun doesn't rise or the day he'll float off earth and into space.  He says:

May 14, 2013 at 8:34 pm  And “consensus” is exactly what part of the scientific method? I wonder if Galileo was aware of this concept.

Sheesh.  What a weird, contradictory, conspiratorial world deniers inhabit.

An almost final word: Independent.  If a denier should stray here from WUWT or The Blackboard, maybe they will be kind to the folk there, and whisper to Anthony and Brandon (and Lucia) what Riki tried to tell them: "I do not think that word means what you think it means…."  Similar applies to words taken out of context.  You might also mention that stealing is not only immoral, in most places it's illegal. As is receiving stolen property.

A bonus for faithful readers

Here's a little bonus for everyone who's made it all the way to the end of this article.  A comment that slipped right by the eagle eyes of Watts and the WUWT moderators censors - so far (Please do Kevin and the world a favour.  If you follow the link to WUWT, don't just click from here - copy and paste it into a new browser tab.) (My formatting and inline hyperlink)

Kevin MacDonald says:
May 15, 2013 at 1:12 am  Fuzzy math: In a new soon to be published paper.  I thought you might be referring to that one that simply ignored the TOB’s adjustments, but then I realised that piece of junk is never getting published.

Now, time to shift back to the real world:

This is the Critical Decade.

---

**John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs and Andrew Skuce 2013 Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Gotta give WUWT deniers credit...

They all agree on one thing...it's a conspiracy!!!

Update: I've added a bonus for returning readers and latecomers.


WUWT deniers can't agree about what is happening to the climate (it's the sun, it's natural, it's not warming, it's cooling, we're heading for an ice age, it's thunderstorms, there is no greenhouse effect, it's cosmic rays, it's warming, it's not warming, it's ENSO, it's an ice age) - but when it comes to conspiracies they all agree that climate science is a hoax! A conspiracy! A scam! A SECRET scam!

Ooh, look - another conspiracy.  On that famous science-spying blog wattsupwiththat, justthefactswuwt has found that secret countries from every secret continent all around the globe have secretly conspired with the secret UK Met Office and secretly made the world warmer! Well, some places warmer! (and only some cooler.)  That proves it! (Not sure what it proves but whatever it is, it PROVES it!)

Just like before, the latest secret changes to HadCRUT and CRUTem are secretly published (huh?) on the secret UK Met Office website here and here, and all these secret places are part of the secret hoax...

Norway

Australia

Brazil

Antarctica

St Helena

Bolivia

South East Asia

Germany

Poland

Uganda

USA

Canada

Did I mention how secretive they are? I mean, justthefactswuwt found that in some places the temperature chart was adjusted UP (mind you) and not for every year and not for every place, but in some years and some places by a whole 5 one hundredths of a degree.   That's right, not one hundredth, not two hundredths but a whole FIVE one hundredths of a degree!!! That's bordering on criminal, that is.  Look here and you'll see what I mean:

As one commenting auditor from WUWT cannily observed:

Peter Wardle says:
May 12, 2013 at 6:04 pm  Isn’t this a clear case of fraud? If so how can they get away with it? Perhaps I might rethink my next tax return.

Net Result of the Secret Changes on the Met Office Hadley Centre website

Here is the net result of all those dastardly secret changes on the HadCRUT global surface temperature dataset.  Good grief it's gone up by nearly TEN THOUSAND one millionths of a degree in parts (as Reginald Perrin might say) :

Only available to bona fide Climate Cultists who have the Secret URL

Look how HUGE10,000 one millionths of a degree is compared to no change. (Note: it's really MUCH bigger than it looks here.  I had to shrink it so it would fit on the blog.)

A bonus for latecomers: More words of wisdom from those who swear they aren't gullible.  Brad, if I deduce correctly from his reference to "Republicans", believes the UK Met's Hadley Centre and the UEA Climatic Research Unit are funded by the USA.  He bemoans the secrecy surrounding this data, which is only available to those who have the secret URLs of the websites here and here, and says:

May 12, 2013 at 7:04 pm  When will the funders, our elected officials, wake up to this? If only the Republicans take this up it could make things worse as it will look like more anti-science stuff. How do we get the truth out?

Cute, eh! Republicans only make it worse with 'more anti-science stuff'.  I guess the message is spreading...

Wanna be a SPY?

To secretly spy on previous updates to CRUTem and HadCRUT see this secret discussion on RealClimate.org, which refers to a secret paper published by Jones et al.

Ha, you can't pull the wool over deniers' eyes - they are sharp and onto every secret move!

A better t-shirt for WUWT-ers

Anthony Watts has a t-shirt for sale, celebrating what deniers think of as success in making Earth more dangerous.

According to Anthony's t-shirt they didn't survive Y2K but those who are still around did survive 400 ppm of CO2.

Since science deniers are surprisingly into extreme risks, here's an even better t-shirt that would fit their jubilant mood and ambitions:

I don't know if they'll have the time (or attention span) to improve the t-shirt as I suggested.  They are now busy arguing amongst each other over whether one denier camp's 'theory' that the earth is heading for an ice age is better or worse than the other denier camp's theory that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist and "all the physics is wrong" or another camp's theory that global warming is real but 'insignificant' and is caused by thunderstorms or another camp's theory that ENSO has suddenly decided to cause global warming.

Earth in the grip of a fever - CO2 at 400 ppm - deniers ecstatic

Unknown Territory - Never Since Humans Appeared on Earth

Yesterday we were told that at Mauna Loa, CO2 passed the 400 ppm mark.  It hasn't been this high in more than 3 million years at least - never ever since humans evolved, let alone since human civilisation.

CO2 crosses400 PPM lineat Mauna Loa@noaa go.usa.gov/TwNP #climate @haikufridays
— NOAA Research (@NOAAResearch) May 10, 2013

This event, memorialised in a haiku tweet from NOAA, is a frightening reminder of how poorly we are doing in attempting to reduce CO2 emissions.  The implications are awful.  Here are some thoughts from various sources:

• Scripps Institution of Oceanography (keepers of the Keeling Curve): What Does 400 ppm Look Like?
• ABC (Australia), Sarah Clarke: Carbon pollution hits highest point in 3 million years
• The Guardian, George Monbiot: Climate milestone is a moment of symbolic significance on road of idiocy
• New York Times: Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears
• Associated Press: Seth Borenstein on the Greenhouse Gas Milestone
• Bloomberg: Alex Morales on Greenhouse Gases Hit Threshold Unseen in 3 Million Years

...and more from Richard Monastersky at Nature, Damien Carrington of the Guardian, Greg Laden putting it into perspective, National Geographic,  MIT Technology Review, Imperial College London and many, many more.

The Fever Came on Quickly

For some of us, the milestone has come much sooner than expected.  It was only three years ago, in March 2010, that Atmoz had a competition asking his readers to state when they thought the average global CO2** would hit 400ppm.  These bets were for the global monthly average, not Mauna Loa daily.  Global monthly CO2 hasn't hit 400 ppm yet.

Anyway, back in March 2010, this is what climate bloggers bet - and that was only three years ago.  Several were very optimistic, thinking that dreadful milestone was years away.  I hate to say it, but I believe I will have come closest.

March 2018

March 2018

October 2016

June 2016

May 2016

January 2016

December 2015

December 2015

April 2015

April 2015

March 2015

December 2014

December 2014

May 2014

April 2014 - Sou

Deniers say "Bring it ON!"

On the anti-science blogs, people are positively gloating.  On WUWT, Anthony Watts is heralding his triumph, offering T-Shirts in celebration.  He and his band of Dismissives are trumpeting what they see as a milestone in their frantic efforts to make earth dangerously hot, writing:

Mauna Loa hits 400 PPM of CO2, alarmists wail and gnash teeth, Earth survives

Since the world hasn’t ended (just like what happened with Y2K) we can now go forward from here.  T-shirts saying “I survived 400 PPM” will be made available if there’s enough interest in comments.

Some are pretending to be blasé, but there have been 169 responses to Anthony's article so far, so deniers aren't disinterested.  There are even many science-denying people who want to shoot higher and hasten the Anthropocene Extinction Event:

AndyG55 can't wait for another Permian-Triassic extinction event to give Earth a clean sweep and says:
May 10, 2013 at 2:23 pm  700ppm .. upward and onward.. Yee-haw !! :-)))
Let Mother Earth flourish as she once did. !

James at 48 ambitions are more modest, maybe settling for an Ordovician–Silurian extinction event - he says:
May 10, 2013 at 12:25 pm  500 or fight! (that was for all of my Canadian brethren).  In all seriousness, though, I reckon we will never reach 500. We’ll probably be peakin’ shortly, given the way things are trending.

There are some WUWT-ers who are as bad as Moondoong, not able to distinguish real dangers from make-believe.  They stridently oppose actions to minimise real risk and when others, despite this opposition, work hard and take actions that succeed, the Dismissives say "ha! there was no risk". (Like Anthony did with his allusion to Y2K.)

Olaf Koenders says:
May 10, 2013 at 6:28 pm  davidmhoffer says: May 10, 2013 at 11:25 am

“Y2K? That seems pretty light. I suppose the younger folks might not relate to all the disasters their elders have survived. If memory serves, I’ve survived (so far)..”

Thanks David. I survived them too. Maybe we should put this on a tee:
10 Impending Ice Age
20 Ozone Depletion
30 Acid Rain
40 Toxic Rain
50 Y2K
60 Bird Flu
70 Swine Flu
80 Global Economic Collapse (fossil fuel depletion)
90 Global Starvation (population exceeding food supply)
100 Catastrophic AGW
110 Goto 10

Ghoulishly Celebrating a Fever

Would the deniers be acting the same if their child had a temperature of 40° Celsius (104° Fahrenheit)?  Would they be making T-shirts saying:

Shoot for 50° Celsius (122° Fahrenheit)

Fevers come and go.  The analogy fails with Earth.  Until we stop emitting CO2, Earth will just keep getting hotter.  When we do stop it will take centuries to make a difference.

Source: Base chart from Jos Hagelaars 

Fear Averse Deniers

Frankly, I think the reason many deniers are triumphing their success is because they are fear averse.  (See the Conservative Brain.)  They are putting on a front, acting as if there's no problem, because they don't want to be wrong.  They are not wired to face danger but cannot flee, so instead they pretend to themselves the danger isn't real.

Climate science deniers are a danger to us all.  Dismissives only number about 8% in the USA and probably slightly lower proportions elsewhere.  They do yell and shout a lot so it sometimes seems as if there are more who oppose progress than there really are.  Mostly they confine themselves to their own echo chambers, where they are more at ease and take comfort in the echos.  (For an industrialised democracy, the USA is an oddity from a cultural perspective, with wider extremes than most places - from fundamentalist/religious illiterati through to some of the world's best thinkers.  In some ways it's more like some countries in the Middle East than, say, Europe.)

The number of people opposed to modernising energy and who don't care about our long term survival will drop further as time goes by.  In the meantime, the Dismissives' fear of change will be exploited by sociopaths and other unscrupulous people who have no regard for earth or their fellow human beings and don't care if Earth is unlivable 200 years from now.

The world is changing

Despite the efforts from some influential quarters to send humanity to oblivion, individuals, businesses and even some governments are making gains in the shift to clean energy.  Not quickly enough yet.

This is The Critical Decade.

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**Note: I haven't been able to access the global or any CO2 data or the NOAA ftp site lately. If the server gets back up or if I find a new location, I'll post it here.  Meantime, if anyone knows what the problem is, can you tell me please?

This might explain things.  None of the options work for me at the moment.

Meteoric Research at Lake E and The DuKEs™** Feeble Battle

Meteoric Research at Lake El'gygytgyn: the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands

There has been some "meteoric research" done at Lake El'gygytgyn (bit of a tongue-twister), which is in the Arctic in Russia.  Looks to be a wealth of information and I can't wait to read this second paper on the sediment core from Lake E in Science next Friday (?).  (The first one is here.) For those of you who can access it, it's pre-released in Science Express.  Otherwise, you can read about it in the Guardian and ScienceDaily and probably elsewhere.

The paper is called: Pliocene Warmth, Polar Amplification, and Stepped Pleistocene Cooling Recorded in NE Arctic Russia.

There were 16 authors of the paper, led by Julie Brigham-Grette, Professor of Quaternary/ Glacial Geology and Arctic Paleoenvironments in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Like reading a detective novel: the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands - from ScienceDaily:

"While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there," says
Brigham-Grette.

A huge meteorite, perhaps a kilometer in diameter! Telling a story going back more than 3 million years...

"Lake E" (that's easier) was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite, perhaps a kilometer in diameter, hit the Earth and blasted out an 11-mile (18 km) wide crater. It has been collecting sediment layers ever since. Luckily for geoscientists, it lies in one of the few Arctic areas not eroded by continental ice sheets during ice ages, so a thick, continuous sediment record was left remarkably undisturbed. Cores from Lake E reach back in geologic time nearly 25 times farther than Greenland ice cores that span only the past 140,000 years.

The Arctic was very warm way back in time, when CO2 was not much higher than those of today...a sign of things to come:

"One of our major findings is that the Arctic was very warm in the middle Pliocene and Early Pleistocene [~ 3.6 to 2.2 million years ago] when others have suggested atmospheric CO2 was not much higher than levels we see today. This could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier climate models," the authors state.

The research doesn't just provide answers it raises some intriguing new questions, the answers to which will add to knowledge about past climatic events:

The sediment core also reveals that even during the first major "cold snap" to show up in the record 3.3 Million years ago, temperatures in the western Arctic were similar to recent averages of the past 12,000 years. "Most importantly, conditions were not 'glacial,' raising new questions as to the timing of the first appearance of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere," the authors add.

An Incredible Achievement, Phenomenal and Difficult

The Guardian article gives a glimpse into the difficulties faced by the scientists (my bold):

"It's a phenomenal record," said Prof Peter Sammonds, at University College London. "It is also an incredible achievement [the study's work], given the remoteness of the lake." Sixteen shipping containers of equipment had to be hauled 90km over snow by bulldozers from the nearest ice road, used by gold miners.

But this incredible achievement, this phenomenal, difficult and dangerous work was all for nothing if you follow the deniosaurs.  They could have just asked Tony!

DuKE™ 1: Anthony Watts Dimly DuKEs** it Out

Anthony draws on his years of anti-science blogging and solid paleo research (not!) and decides that the "researcher" (he doesn't say which of the 16 researchers) forgot about the Isthmus of Panama. (Read together with Lunt et al (2008) here.)  This researcher, according to Anthony "simply skipped over this important detail is pushing the idea that CO2 was the only issue."  

Scientists "don't know nuffin'" - if only they'd asked Tony

I expect Anthony's trying to say that not only all the specialists conducting this research, but the editors of Science and the paper's reviewers "don't know nuffin'".  Oh my! If only they'd remembered (or just asked Tony). It would have saved them years of work.

Warning: The Auditor is on the warpath

Anthony goes on to issue this dire warning that The Auditor is On the Warpath, which will no doubt leave all the scientists quaking in their boots and wishing they'd never embarked on such a foolish venture:

I’m sure Steve McIntyre will be interested in getting a look at the sediments and the dating methods to see if there are errors there.

 He finishes by telling his rabble that scientists should do what he does, ignore all prior knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology and instead make up stuff out of thin (but CO2-enriched) air (my bold).

Lately, it seems that paleo research has made some very broad assumptions, and almost always in the favor of the theory.

Duh!

DuKE™ 2: The Australian Raises the White Flag

On another front, Graham Readfearn has devoted some space to pointing out how Graham Lloyd of/and The Australian are so far into science denial that they are now "too fringe for Monckton".  Earlier this week Lloyd wrote a piece regurgitating some idiocy promoted five years ago by the Dragon Slayers (who don't 'believe in' greenhouse gases).  He reckons we might be "heading for an ice age". Wow!

Can they fall any lower?

Tim Lambert kept up with The Australian's War on Science for many years.  Seems to me The Australian has raised the white flag and signalled it has lost its war.  Now they are reduced to pushing fantasies that are even too much for the potty peer.

Time for Barry Bickmore to come up with the First and Second Laws of Graham Lloyd and The Australian.

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**DuKE™ - Collective noun for science deniers suffering from the Dunning Kruger Effect.