An economist should know better, maybe ...but what about Anthony Watts?

On WUWT today Anthony Watts seems to be trying to make up for his rampant promotion of disinformation - but is he?

An economist should know better, maybe...but what about Anthony Watts?

Anthony puts up an article about someone on a radio show who doesn't understand the greenhouse effect.  She said a car heats up in the sun because of greenhouse gases, which is woefully wrong.  Someone who works for the Natural Resources Defense Council should know better. A car with all the windows and doors closed will heat up by incoming radiation from the sunlight.  As long as it's in the sun it will stay hot until you open the doors and windows to diffuse the heat (convection).

Ridicule is both powerful and satisfying...

Anthony needs to look in a mirror.  The following aren't rare occurences.  They are typical of the disinformation and ignorant ramblings he spews out daily to pollute cyberspace:

• Girma Orssengo PhD (Mech Eng) - who doesn't accept that burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide.
• Darko Buttina PhD (Org Chem) who seems to think Armagh represents the whole world, and even then doesn't know how to work out a temperature trend. And in another article doesn't know the difference between kinetic energy and IR absorption.
• The potty peer Monckton who thinks it hasn't warmed for two decades - or is it 16, 18, 19 or 23 years - or maybe 18 years. 
• Bob Tisdale - who doesn't accept that greenhouse gases warm the world and thinks it's the frolicking ENSO taking leaps and bounds by magic. Bob's eyesight is impaired - as is that of some other WUWT-ers
• Emeritus Professor and geologist Don Easterbrook PhD who also doesn't seem to accept that greenhouse gases warm the world and gets irate when people point out that Central Greenland isn't the entire world.
• Wondering Willis Eschenbach - who fudginates with curve-fitting, who wonders why land surface heats up more quickly than sea surface, who thinks that a hotter earth can't bring more intense rain and who figures that global warming is exaggerated by aeroplanes landing at remote airports a couple of times a year.
• Tony Brown who can't connect greenhouse gases to the warming world when he looks at the temperature of Central England.
• Ed Hoskins - who reckons we're on the verge of an ice age because Central England happened to be cold in 2010 (which just happened to be the equal hottest year on record globally).
• Anthony putting up one nutty excuse after another for loathing the Marcott et al (2013) study of Holocene temperatures.
• Anthony promoting a bunch of retired NASA engineers who deny the physical evidence and say that "There is no convincing physical evidence to support the man-made climate change hypothesis."
• Anthony again, touting the Lysenko conspiracy theory - that climate science is a hoax.
• This time Anthony appeals to the ugly side of deniers...
• Anthony again, who can't do arithmetic and tells big fat lies.

Pinocchio by André Koehne

Lots more from Anthony Watts, who is so paranoid about "real science" that he enrolls his dog, Kenji, to spy on his behalf at the Union of Concerned Scientists. A man who can barely attract anyone but science deniers and bans people who have no tolerance for his anti-science nonsense. A 'free market' man who despises governments but wants to run squawking and squealing to the government when someone mocks his scientific ignorance.


PS Anthony's not doing a very good job of educating his readers about the greenhouse effect - this from Latitude who says:

May 23, 2013 at 12:04 pm  so tell me again how many people believe in global warming………I’m just curious to know how many total idiots we have

It's also nice to see Kurt in Switzerland vindicating my snark blog, writing:

May 23, 2013 at 11:38 am  ...Ridicule is both powerful and satisfying, especially when the target is begging to be shot.

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"Charts are so confusing!"

Update: Anthony Watts Classic: those baffling temperature anomalies

I'd been looking for this article for a while - and thanks to Lars Karlsson in the comments below here it is.  Scroll down the page for this real gem in which different baselines get the better of Anthony:

I was surprised to learn that only 5% of the GISS data-set was on the cool side of zero, while a whopping 95% was on the warm side. Even with a rising temperature trend, this seems excessive.

When the distribution of data is so lopsided, it suggests that there may be problems with it, especially since there appears to be a 50% greater distribution on the cooler side in the HadCRUT data-set.

(Kenji whispers to Anthony: GISTemp uses a baseline of 1951-80 while HadCRUT uses a baseline of 1961-90, so of course the temperature anomaly will move above the baseline sooner with GISTemp than for HadCRUT.)

Kenji, the scientific dog, must be so embarrassed.

Denier Whackiness: How updating a video spells the End of the World as We Know It

How it all started....

Kevin C at SkepticalScience has got WUWT in an uproar.  Kevin C wrote an article about recent surface temperatures and said he was going to update a video.  I believe this is the video in question, which Kevin wants to update to reflect the latest science:

This got poor old Bob Tisdale going.  Bob wrote a whining article about how SkepticalScience is still not taking any notice of his ENSO magic.  He's ignored everything that Kevin wrote, although he expressed some amazement that a science writer would want to update a video to reflect the latest scientific thinking.

I've spent enough time on Bob already and will just once more imagine his little leprechauns magically heating the oceans.  Bob writes about "naturally created warm water" as if it's different to any other ocean water.  Bob's a tad weird.

Who'd have thought -  an animated graphic spells the end the world...

What really drew my attention was Ferd Berple's comment. (The same Ferd Berple.)  He thinks a skeptical science video is the same as a peer-reviewed paper.

Read how smoothly Ferd makes the transition from updating a video on SkepticalScience.com through to withdrawal of Einstein's scientific papers, through to rewriting the Laws of the Universe and finally a Religious Inquisition (with capital letters).

ferd berple starts by quoting Bob Tisdale quoting SkepticalScience and says:
May 22, 2013 at 8:17 am  However the conclusions of the current video do not represent a consensus in the peer-reviewed results, and thus we will be withdrawing the current version
============
ferd berple continues:...So, following this logic, any paper that doesn’t follow the consensus should be withdrawn?

Did Einstein’s papers in the early 1900′s follow the consensus? Didn’t they break with the consensus of the day? On this basis, shouldn’t Einstein’s papers have been withdrawn?

How can science advance without papers that break with the consensus? If the consensus view is that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun circles the earth, how can anyone publish a paper that says otherwise?

Skeptical Science, this is my question to you. How, if the consensus is that the earth is the center of the universe and the sun and planets circle the earth, how can anyone publish anything different if only papers that match the consensus are allowed?

How is this any different than the days of the Religious Inquisition, when it was forbidden to publish any paper that was contrary to consensus? How can Science advance when it is slave to Consensus?

Galileo before the Holy Office - Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury

Oh, Kevin C - What Have You Done?

Oh, Kevin C - you really started something.  Poor Ferd Berple thinks if you update your video it will sound the death knell for quantum physics, astronomy, all theories of the universe and all the religions in the world.  (Come on, let me call Poe! Could ferd berple be a fake denier?)

The Depths of Delusion on WUWT as the Potty Peer gets Pottier

Anthony Watts is progressively sinking further into the depths of delusion.  Today he's chosen to do it with another article from the potty peer, Monckton.  He's practically turned over his blog, WUWT, to this fruitcake.

One example, today Monckton says of global warming: There has been none for at least 18 years.  

That's crazy talk.  Take a look for yourself.  This is from NASA:

This is the sea ice volume in the Arctic from PIOMAS.  How does he think ice melts?

This is the ocean heat content from NOAA - not exactly cooling is it:

And this is where we're heading if clowns like Monckton and Watts get their way - from Jos Hagelaars on Bart Verheggen's blog:

It gets even weirder

Gotta say that bloke Monckton is a very weird character of the unsavoury kind.  Almost everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie.  Anthony is going the same way.  A man is known by the company he keeps.  Next I expect young Anthony to declare he's a birther, has found a cure for AIDS and is a member of the House of Lords!

Anyway, Monckton rambles on with a lot of nonsense, virtually saying that unless every scientific paper declares a commitment to every scientific fact  ever known, then it denies all science.  He even says the scientific consensus on human-induced climate change is dropping, when in fact it's risen so high and is so mainstream that scientific papers assume AGW these days.  No need to be explicit.  Monckton is a right loon.

By last count Anthony has only 24 Dismissives at most who are dumb enough to fall for Monckton's nonsense, which is slow going by WUWT standards.  I expect the count to grow - there are a few more crazies in the world.  Still, maybe the tide is turning.

The Mice Play - More Fake Forcings from 'Wondering' Willis on WUWT

I don't pretend to be an expert in mathematics, statistics or climate models but I'm going to make a short comment on 'Wondering' Willis Eschenbach's latest foray into fitting an equation to the outputs of climate models.

He's done this before on WUWT as he says, here and here.  What Willis does is fit a linear equation to climate model outputs.  Fortunately he doesn't go so far as make projections or predictions.

Willis' closing derogatory comments are nonsense. He writes:

Does this mean the models are useless? No. But it does indicate that they are pretty worthless for calculating the global average temperature. Since all the millions of calculations that they are doing are functionally equivalent to a simple lagged linear transformation of the inputs, it is very difficult to believe that they will ever show any skill in either hindcasting or forecasting the global climate.

Climate models might not be perfect but they are far from useless and are used for much more than surface temperature.  Indeed they used not just to make climate projections but increasingly to forecast weather on a seasonal basis. (More about POAMA here.)

Willis shows some skill with Microsoft Excel.  However he demonstrates a remarkable lack of understanding of climate forcings and climate models for someone who's been writing about them for so long.

To save you a Google search, let me point you to Tamino's explanation in case anyone is under the false impression that Willis' mathturbation™ is anything other than an exercise in curve-fitting after the event.  Here are some excerpts.  They are just as relevant in this case as they were to Willis' previous articles.

The first excerpt relates to Willis' adjustment for volcanic forcings:

Let me translate: the actual forcing didn’t fit his preconception, so he changed it to a fake forcing.

What he doesn’t do is make the connection: that the short-lived volcanic impulses have reduced impact, not because the GISS modelE treats them differently from all the others, but because they are short-lived and there’s more than one time scale for the model’s climate system response. There is for the real climate system, too — a potent argument for the fundamental soundness of the GISS modelE.

The second excerpt relates to curve fitting in general (as done by a recent visitor here - though Dan's equations were way more extravagant than Willis')

Bottom line: if you put in enough parameters, and fake the data because otherwise your model isn’t very good, you can get an excellent fit to the GISS modelE output. But it’s nothing but curve-fitting; the work of Willis Eschenbach and Paul_K is an outstanding example of mathturbation.

There’s no justification for them to fake the forcing, physical or mathematical. There’s no investigation of “effective forcing” to see how different forcings might actually have a different impact (in part because of feedbacks). That’s an effort which has been pioneered by James Hansen and colleagues. To contribute meaningfully, you’d have to do some actual science other than make an ad hoc change to the forcing data so you can impugn the results of somebody’s climate model.

For once Eric Worrall is spot on when he writes:

May 21, 2013 at 10:01 pm  HIlarious Willis...

Feel free to add your tuppenthworth

or maybe we should just ask Kenji :D

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Postscript: McIntyre's a dill, too

23 May 2013: In case anyone still harboured the false impression that The Auditor, Steven McIntyre knew what he was talking about when it comes to climate science, this comment from him should settle the matter.  Steve can't tell the difference between a curve-fitting exercise in Excel and a simple coupled climate model.  He is most impressed by Wondering Willis' fancy fudginations and has some wonderings of his own:

Steve McIntyre says:
May 22, 2013 at 9:55 am  Willis, nice spotting with the digitization and the fitting of the function. That there was a relatively simple relationship between model forcing and model global temperature is something that has been chatted about from time to time, but the fit here is really impressive. Wigley and Raper’s MAGICC program, used in past IPCC studies, also emulated key model outputs from forcings: I wonder if it does something similar.

According to this page, no.  MAGICC is a suite of models not a fudged curve fit, which is hardly a surprise. (But hey, who cares?  Now The Revered Auditor has elevated Wondering Willis' curve fitting fiasco to the level of 'real proper science' in the minds of the deluded Dismissives.  Doesn't matter that he's talking through his hat.)

MAGICC consists of a suite of coupled gas-cycle, climate and ice-melt models integrated into a single software package.

You can read more about MAGICC and its history here.

Shameful Behaviour at WUWT - Not Asking the Right Question

Update below.

My heart goes out to everyone in Oklahoma and to people everywhere who have lost loved ones and homes in weather disasters.

I wasn't going to write about weather disasters today, out of respect for the people who died and those who have lost everything in Oklahoma.  However I changed my mind when I saw the way Anthony Watts was using the disaster to push his barrow of science denial and rant against doing anything to ameliorate climate change.  Like many readers, I know people who've lost their lives and homes in recent weather-related disasters.  People very close to me and family members lost their father, grandfather and friends.  There is a point to standing up against those who deny what is happening to the world.

So please forgive me if you find this disrespectul, but in my view, something needs to be said.

Anthony Asks the Wrong Question

Anthony Watts is busy stirring up the mob over at WUWT with no less than three shameful posts on the subject.  He really hates it when extreme events happen.  He know that every time a weather-related disaster occurs, people think again of climate change.

What Anthony does know is that if we don't rein in carbon emissions, there will be more droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves and other weather extremes and disasters.  That's why he insists on asking the wrong questions, like:

Tell us, what could any tax, law, edict, or protest have done to stop yesterday’s tornado outbreak?

If they had a shred of human decency, what Anthony and his mob of Dismissives would be asking is:

Tell us, what can we do to limit future weather disasters and prevent the worst excesses of climate change?

Update:

It gets more abominable.  I won't waste my time on a separate post (IdiotTracker says it all) - these appallingly pathetic excuses for human beings don't deserve it.  Many lives were undoubtedly saved in Oklahoma because the tornado warning was able to be issued a few minutes earlier - because of weather monitoring systems.  Yet Roger Pielke Sr wants to take money away from such important science to spend it on shelters.  (I don't believe for a minute that Roger is offering up his own government-funded job as a climate scientist to build a shelter.)  Yes, shelters are a must, but not at the expense of disaster warnings.  And in a revolting display of acrimony against science, Anthony Watts agrees making the following tweet his 'Quote of the Week'.

Spending millions of dollar on no skill climate projections is poor policy compared with grants to communities for school tornado shelters.
— Roger A. Pielke Sr (@RogerAPielkeSr) May 22, 2013

 Someone tell them that all the shelters in the world won't save a soul if they don't know a tornado is coming.

Rajendra Pauchari: Pinning the Oklahoma tornado on climate change is wrong-headed, un-scientific

Dr Pauchari points out what is often emphasised by other scientists, that from a scientific standpoint it's just not possible to relate a single event like the Oklahoma tornado, Superstorm Sandy, Katrina or Cyclone Yasi to human-induced climate change. From The Times of India:

Pinning the deadly tornado in the US state of Oklahoma on climate change is wrongheaded, even though the world is set to see a rise in high-profile weather disasters due to global warming, the leader of a UN body said on Tuesday.

Almost every scientists will tell you the same.  What they can and continue to investigate is the extent to which the world will see more and worse events of various types, such as tropical cyclones, hurricanes, extreme droughts, catastrophic bushfires, paralyzing blizzards and massive floods.

Michael E Mann: The wild-card is the shear

On tornadoes in particular, this is how Professor Mann responded when asked, from Take Part:

“As far as climate change is concerned, there will likely be a greater clashing of cold air masses from the north with even warmer, even more humid air masses coming off the Gulf of Mexico—conditions that are favorable for breeding destructive storms,” says Michael Mann, climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

“The wildcard is the sheer—we don’t know with certainty whether that will increase or not in the key regions for tornado formation as a result of climate change,” Mann continues. “But if one factor is likely to be favorable, and the other is a wildcard, it’s still more likely that the product of the two factors will be favorable. Thus, if you’re a betting person—or the insurance or reinsurance industry for that matter—you’d probably go with a prediction of greater frequency and intensity of tornadoes as a result of human-caused climate change.

Kevin Trenberth: Chance Effect of Weather - The climate change effect is up to 32% in terms of damage

Professor Trenberth is reported by The Brad Blog as responding to a question from Peter Sinclair, saying:

Of course tornadoes are very much a weather phenomenon. They come from certain thunderstorms, usually super-cell thunderstorms that are in a wind shear environment that promotes rotation. The main climate change connection is via the basic instability of the low level air that creates the convection and thunderstorms in the first place.

Warmer and moister conditions are the key for unstable air.

The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10% effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 32% effect in terms of damage. (It is highly nonlinear).

So there is a chain of events and climate change mainly affects the first link: the basic buoyancy of the air is increased. Whether that translates into a super-cell storm and one with a tornado is largely chance weather.

What can we do?

We don't have to go and live in a cave.  That would do no good at all.  What we can do is change our own behaviour and lead by example.  Where possible we can use energy from renewable sources not fossil fuels. We can favour energy efficient appliances.  We can vote for representation by people who will put policies in place to hasten the shift to clean energy.  And we can urge others to do the same.

Help the Snowshoe Hares

Pretty animals, aren't they.

Not that we can do much in the short term, but couldn't we try a bit harder to give them a few extra days protection each year?

Color-Changing Hare Can't Keep Up With Climate Change

Photo credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson adapted by HotWhopper.

Mills et al Camouflage mismatch in seasonal coat color due to decreased snow duration
PNAS 2013 110 (18) 7099-7100; doi:10.1073/iti1813110

I was wrong - maybe

When you get one out of three wrong, might as well admit it.  When you possibly-maybe-could have got two out of three wrong, might as well delete the post altogether :)

Sorry folks. My fault.

While I slink off to cogitate on the perils of rushing in, go read Victor Venema's latest article - it's a good one. And then read Greg Laden's second latest - it's well worth reading as well.

Today's Menu from Anthony Watts - Fruitcake (Nutty As)

Special of the Day from the WUWT Monckton Nuttery.  Your waitperson is Anthony Watts.

Fruitcake with nuts - and with icing on top. 

We call it the Christopher Monckton of Brenchley Special - Viscount Edition.

Want a slice?

Nutty Fruitcake with Icing on Top

More denier weirdness - Anthony Watts praises a paper as a sea change, but sneers at the author's findings

How Watts Praises a Paper

Watts writes a headline about a new paper (discussed here):

Why the new Otto et al climate sensitivity paper is important – it’s a sea change for some IPCC authors

How Watts decides what the paper means

With the modest rate of warming stated by Otto et al, the impacts of global warming are more likely to be positive than negative for humanity in the foreseeable future; increased crop yields for example.

Oh yeah? Pull the other one...(and the old "CO2 is plant food, praise the lord"? Sheesh!)

How Watts tells his readers to ignore the authors of the paper he praises

Watts tells his readers to ignore those silly old authors. "Oh, Sure" he sneers!

Anthony snorts: The BBC says they had it all covered before and this new paper is “consistent” with previous works. Oh, sure.

Quoting the BBC:…when it comes to the longer term picture, the authors say their work is consistent with previous estimates. The IPCC said that climate sensitivity was in the range of 2.0-4.5C.

This latest research, including the decade of stalled temperature rises, produces a range of 0.9-5.0C.

“It is a bigger range of uncertainty,” said Dr Otto.

“But it still includes the old range. We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.”

How Watts looks like a fool (again)

The lead author, Dr Otto responds to a question from the BBC:

Is there any succour in these findings for climate sceptics who say the slowdown over the past 14 years means the global warming is not real?

"None. No comfort whatsoever," he said.

Anthony Watts thumbs his nose at the authors and decides to take comfort anyway: "Meanwhile, in lower sensitivity land, “the pause” in global temperatures continues, and is approaching the Santer definition...If “the pause” reaches 17 years, what then?":

On Climate Sensitivity, Otto and Hansen - and Exaggeration from WUWT

Update below: In which Anthony Watts tells his readers "she'll be right, mate" and to take no notice of what the lead author himself says.


Today WUWT has picked up another article on climate sensitivity.  The authors, Otto et al, seem to have taken a not dissimilar approach to Lewis (2013), in that they based their workings on surface temperatures in recent decades including the temperatures of the most recent decade.  Unlike some other studies of climate sensitivity, the work does not appear to refer to evidence from past climatology, prior to the period covered by instrumental records.

The authors provide best estimates of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity as 2.0 °C based on 2000-09:

The most likely value of equilibrium climate sensitivity based on the energy budget of the most recent decade is 2.0 °C, with a 5–95% confidence interval of 1.2–3.9 °C, compared with the 1970–2009 estimate of 1.9 °C (0.9–5.0 °C). Including the period from 2000 to 2009 into the 40-year 1970–2009 period delivers a finite upper boundary...Observations of the energy budget alone do not rule out an ECS value below 2 °C, but they do rule out an ECS below 1.2 °C with 95% confidence. The upper boundary is lowered slightly, but is also very sensitive to assumptions made in the evaluation process (see Supplementary Section S2). Uncertainties include observational errors and internal variability estimated from control simulations with general circulation models.

And of Transient Climate Response at 1.3 °C (0.9–2.0 °C) based on 2000-09.

This is lower than estimates derived from data of the 1990s (1.6 °C (0.9–3.1 °C); yellow, or for the 1970–2009 period as a whole (1.4 °C (0.7–2.5 °C).

Here is the write up by the Guardian, and from the BBC.  The opening paragraphs from the Guardian are:

Some of the most extreme predictions of global warming are unlikely to materialise, new scientific research has suggested, but the world is still likely to be in for a temperature rise of double that regarded as safe.

The researchers said warming was most likely to reach about 4C above pre-industrial levels if the past decade's readings were taken into account.

That would still lead to catastrophe across large swaths of the Earth, causing droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves, and drastic effects on agricultural productivity leading to secondary effects such as mass migration.

Let's moderate that with a dose of stark reality from Dr James Hansen, the "grandfather" of modern climatology.

The Exaggeration? (Yes, but maybe not so much as I first thought - see update)

Nic Lewis in his WUWT article says this new work is a : "new peer-reviewed climate sensitivity study published as a Letter in Nature Geoscience".  The article itself, however, is not published as a Letter.  It is published as "Correspondence", which is described as "Correspondence provides readers with a forum for comment on papers published in a previous issue of the journal or to discuss issues relevant to the geosciences."  There is no indication that the work has been peer-reviewed (see following Update). Describing the article as a Letter, when it is in fact Correspondence is still wrong and arguably an exaggeration, but not the double exaggeration I previously and erroneously thought it might have been.  Not really worth quibbling about after all - see following update:D

Update: This from Nature GeoScience: "Other types of Correspondence may be peer-reviewed at the editors' discretion". Nature has since advised me the article was peer-reviewed.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not doubting the rigour of the analysis.  And I would welcome any news that climate sensitivity is lower rather than higher.  On the other hand I'm not about to accept estimates based largely on recent instrumental temperature records as the final word on the matter.  Particularly not when there are other studies of actual past climate change that suggest climate sensitivity may well be at the high end of the scale.  (Notice how Anthony Watts went all Dunning Kruger when he wrote about that paper).

Thing is, not one of us will be alive to see what is equilibrium climate sensitivity.  Some of us will, sadly, probably get to find out the transient climate sensitivity - at the time of doubling of CO2.  The medium and longer term effects we'll be leaving for future generations to grapple with.

Another Oddity

Another thing that's decidedly odd when you think about it.  Only a couple of days ago Anthony Watts was telling big fat lies about the 97% scientific consensus on global warming, trying to claim that more papers disagreed that humans are causing global warming than agree.  Now he seems to embrace a paper that assumes humans are causing global warming.  He also shows no lessening of his efforts to send us hurtling at warp speed (geologically speaking) towards a world that is too hot to handle.

I'll leave you with a comment from Anthony, whose frantic advocacy efforts to heat the world take him beyond rationality and morality.  Does he also lack any self-awareness?  Anthony Watts says:

May 19, 2013 at 3:08 pm  @Mosher I agree. Cook and Co. are advocates, so like Romm, they tend to do those sorts of things. Now, it appears Cook and Nuccitelli have reached the level of paid advocates.

Update: Watts tells his readers to take no notice of the authors

In a follow up article entitled: "Why the new Otto et al climate sensitivity paper is important – it’s a sea change for some IPCC authors" there is more ridiculous wishful thinking from Anthony Watts.  As if to prove the denier watcher's correct he writes:

With the modest rate of warming stated by Otto et al, the impacts of global warming are more likely to be positive than negative for humanity in the foreseeable future; increased crop yields for example.

Watts lauds the article, calling it a "sea change", but at the same time he dismisses out of hand what the lead author himself is quoted as saying with a sneering "Oh, sure":

Anthony snorts: The BBC says they had it all covered before and this new paper is “consistent” with previous works. Oh, sure.

Quoting the BBC:…when it comes to the longer term picture, the authors say their work is consistent with previous estimates. The IPCC said that climate sensitivity was in the range of 2.0-4.5C.

This latest research, including the decade of stalled temperature rises, produces a range of 0.9-5.0C.

“It is a bigger range of uncertainty,” said Dr Otto.

“But it still includes the old range. We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.”

Let's add comments from Dr Sherwood, who is urging caution about assuming low climate sensitivity just based on the past decade:

Prof Steven Sherwood, from the University of New South Wales, says the conclusion about the oceans needs to be taken with a grain of salt for now.

"There is other research out there pointing out that this storage may be part of a natural cycle that will eventually reverse, either due to El Nino or the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and therefore may not imply what the authors are suggesting," he said.

And finish with the final remarks from the lead author, Dr Otto - from the same BBC article - aimed squarely at deniers like Anthony Watts who wrote: "Meanwhile, in lower sensitivity land, “the pause” in global temperatures continues, and is approaching the Santer definition":

Is there any succour in these findings for climate sceptics who say the slowdown over the past 14 years means the global warming is not real?

"None. No comfort whatsoever," he said.