How an economist seeks fame and riches...

Update: Apparently Richard Tol can't even categorise the abstracts to his own papers correctly, so he has a bit of cheek jumping up and down trying to find fault with Cook13.

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This one is funny peculiar.  Anthony Watts of WUWT was so irate that yet another study showing the 97% consensus among scientists who work in the area that humans are causing global warming, that he told big fat lies about the study.

See here and here and here and here for previous studies that found there is an overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming.

Now Anthony has reported that an economist, Richard Tol, who happens to agree that humans cause global warming and doesn't appear to dispute the 97% consensus, has had a comment on the Cook paper rejected.

How (not) to become rich and famous

Tol tweeted that he wanted to become "rich and famous" by courting deniers at WUWT (Curry-style) . Tol figured he'd write a formal comment to the journal  that published the Cook et al study, Environmental Research Letters.

Maybe they got tired  ....

One of Tol's 'arguments' against the Cook et al paper was his speculation that the researchers surely got tired assessing so many abstracts.  I'm not kidding.  This is from the rejection letter as published on WUWT:

The author offers much speculation (e.g. about raters perhaps getting tired) which has no place in the scientific literature

Tol didn't make any rational argument that the method was unsound (which might have warranted a comment) or that he had come up with a different number using the same or different method (which might have warranted a comment or maybe a paper).  No - he argued that the authors might have got a bit sleepy.

Oh my!  What can I say.  Perhaps he's projecting his experience onto others?  Might be a new argument against all the hockey sticks that keep popping up in the literature - all the climate scientists are tired :)

It's a conspiracy!

As for Anthony Watts, he of Kenji fame decides it must be a conspiracy of one, writing:

Also, it appears the opinion of ONE board member is all it takes, so much for consensus.

Anthony doesn't know much about comments on scientific papers.  He says he thinks Tol's paper might have got rejected because Dr Gleick is on the ERL Board, because Dr Gleick helped expose Heartland Institute's dirty linen.  I wasn't aware of a relationship between Richard Tol and the Heartland Institute - maybe by way of the GWPF?   (Richard Tol is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation - along with climate science deniers like David Whitehouse and Ian Plimer).  Anyway, Anthony Watts implies there is a connection and he should know I suppose.

Dogwhistling the dwindling, raggedy, dispirited troop of deniers

While Anthony Watts conspiracy theorises, Richard Tol takes a guess at which Editorial Board member wrote the rejecting report.  That's enough for Anthony Watts, who posts the credentials of the Editor In Chief (which are very impressive) and blows his dog whistle calling for WUWT readers to spam that Board member, posting a link to the editor's email address "for those that wish to query him" (most WUWT readers don't know how to use a search engine).

Unabashed and uncaring...

Unabashed and uncaring of his professional reputation, Richard Tol has published the rejection letter and his rejected comment on his blog for all the world to see.  He really must want that "fame and riches" very badly.  Seeking a career change perhaps?  Maybe Richard Tol is tired of being a lead author of the IPCC AR5 report.

Time to take a nap.

Wake up to the 97% consensus

Okay, I'm awake again and have read a couple of the comments below, which brought to mind a tweet from a wise man who wrote that Anthony Watts at WUWT just "doesn't get it":

Science isn't strong because of the consensus; 

the consensus is strong because of science.

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When is it time to stop digging the hole you've dug yourself into?

Perhaps when new-found "friends" say it's time?

One side show is the three way fight among the denialati: poptech vs Shollenberger vs  Tol, sort of.

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Bad Hair Day: Eli points out that this silly episode was just one of three losses the deniosaurs had recently!

Be worried..."logarithmic" does not mean what some people think it means

There's a straight science article up at WUWT for a change, without any snark.  It's a press release of this new paper (sans reference): McAnena et al (2013) Atlantic cooling associated with a marine biotic crisis during the mid-Cretaceous period, Nature Geoscience: doi:10.1038/ngeo1850.

The research describes how tectonic activity led to changes in the ocean and resulted in massive CO2 fixing by photosynthetic organisms in the seas.  This in turn caused a 5° Celsius drop in the temperature of sea surface waters.  All this took place more than a hundred million years ago, way back in the late Aptian and occurred over a couple of million years.  So the pace of change was a tad slower than the current extinction event.  Here are some excerpts from ScienceDaily.com:

A "cold snap" 116 million years ago triggered a similar marine ecosystem crisis to the ones witnessed in the past as a result of global warming, according to research published in Nature Geoscience....

...Analysing the geochemistry and micropaleontology of a marine sediment core taken from the North Atlantic Ocean, the team show that a global temperature drop of up to 5°C resulted in a major shift in the global carbon cycle over a period of 2.5 million years.

Occurring during a time of high tectonic activity that drove the breaking up of the super-continent Pangaea, the research explains how the opening and widening of new ocean basins around Africa, South America and Europe created additional space where large amounts of atmospheric CO2 was fixed by photosynthetic organisms like marine algae. The dead organisms were then buried in the sediments on the sea bed, producing organic, carbon rich shale in these new basins, locking away the carbon that was previously in the atmosphere.

The result of this massive carbon fixing mechanism was a drop in the levels of atmospheric CO2, reducing the greenhouse effect and lowering global temperature.

This period of global cooling came to an end after about 2 million years following the onset of a period of intense local volcanic activity in the Indian Ocean. Producing huge volumes of volcanic gas, carbon that had been removed from the atmosphere when it was locked away in the shale was replaced with CO2 from Earth's interior, re-instating a greenhouse effect which led to warmer climate and an end to the "cold snap."

Out of the keyboards of deniers

Couldn't help but remark on this comment on WUWT.  Ian W says:

June 17, 2013 at 3:45 am  The result of this massive carbon fixing mechanism was a drop in the levels of atmospheric CO2, reducing the greenhouse effect and lowering global temperature.

Why do these academics continue to claim carbon dioxide must be the cause of every global temperature change? The level of carbon dioxide changes after the change in temperature. The effect of carbon dioxide is logarithmic in any case so large reductions from 1200 to 600ppm would only have the same effect as 600 to 300ppm.

Walking back out of this ‘carbon fixation’ is going to be very difficult for academia.

What a mixed up chappie.  First he says that CO2 levels change after a change in temperature.  Then in the very next sentence he agrees that there is an effect of CO2 on temperature - or at least implies it, saying the effect is logarithmic.

He says a reduction from 1200 ppm to 600 ppm would 'only have the same effect' as 600 to 300 ppm.  Only? Well, not unless he is talking about the degree change.  Does he realise what he has written I wonder?

There would be a big difference in the world if it got five degrees colder (think lots of ice and dry), just as there will be a big difference in a world that is five degrees hotter than now (think lots of heat and wet). Is that what he really wants?

What does Ian think "logarithmic" means?

I almost have the impression that Ian W thinks that logarithmic equals "not much change, not so you'd notice".  If CO2 goes from 300 to 600 ppm and the average global temperature jumps by, say, 3 degrees;  and then CO2 goes from 600 to 1200 ppm and the average global temperature goes up another 3 degrees;  I somehow think Ian W would notice the changes in the world around him.  Just like he would if the average global temperature dropped by three or six degrees and the world got very icy.

I wonder if he will ever figure it out.


PS Ian W's comment is the most 'intelligent' of the lot so far, believe it or not!  They really are a bunch of numbskulls over at WUWT.

A very predictable pattern...

Anthony Watts of WUWT has posted a quote from a Canadian denialist called McIntyre, referring to a new paper by Briffa et al, writing in part: "unsurprisingly there is issue after issue" - but then as far as I can see, doesn't list a single one of his "issues". (McIntyre is not a climate scientist but likes to pretend.)

Watts is a real card sometimes!

Anthony seems to think it will destroy the hockey stick - ROTFL.

McIntyre does make snide comments and suggests the scientists are deceitful and incompetent - but that's par for the course with that dreadful man. He's like the town gossip who has to make up stuff to retain an audience.



I don't normally bother with the Auditor.  He's a very nasty piece of work but is a bit too weird for most people to bother with.  He's also a very good example of the Dunning Kruger Effect.

A very predictable pattern...

If anyone is interested in his latest mud-slinging attempt, referred to by Anthony Watts on WUWT, I suggest you read this 2009 article from Tim Lambert at Deltoid and substitute today's date.  Nothing's changed.  Note especially this quote from realclimate.org referring to yet another example of McIntyre's attempts to discredit science and scientists - back in 2007:

What is clear however, is that there is a very predictable pattern to the reaction to these blog posts that has been discussed many times. As we said last time there was such a kerfuffle:

However, there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake. This led to some truly death-defying leaping to conclusions when this issue hit the blogosphere.

Plus ça change… 

And then read this article in realclimate.org about the new paper by Briffa et al, in which is detailed some of the appalling behaviour of McIntyre.  The Briffa paper and supplementary material can be accessed here (no paywall).

No matter how many times McIntyre gets it wrong he continues to try to tear down the reputations of some of the world's best scientists.  It's like a game to him and is all part of his disinformation campaign.  Luckily no one understands him.  Unfortunately, because they don't understand him, imbeciles like Watts just make up stuff like "all the scientists are wrong and don't no nuffin'".

I'm not wasting any more space on that despicable little man.

Curry on Ice - or How a Denialist Tries to Go Down the Up Escalator

Denialist Judith Curry is trying to rewrite the temperature records

Anthony Watts had a strangely wrong WUWT Quote of the Week from Judith Curry about a supposed "cooling trend".

This period since 2002 is scientifically interesting, since it coincides with the ‘climate shift’ circa 2001/2002 posited by Tsonis and others. This shift and the subsequent slight cooling trend provides a rationale for inferring a slight cooling trend over the next decade or so, rather than a flat trend from the 15 yr ‘pause’.

You can read about the work of Tsonis "and others" here on SkepticalScience.com, which includes links to their papers including one published in 2009, the year before the hottest year on record so far.

Anyway, I went to Curry's blog and found that denialists are apparently now trying to downplay what was the hottest decade on record using wordplay: shifting from a "slowdown" to a "15 to 17 year pause" to a "slight cooling". We wish!

Apparently Judith Curry has been "receiving inquiries from journalists" about the "cooling" since 2002, ignoring the fact that three of the ten years since 2002 were hotter than it was that year.

JC note: Attention in the public debate seems to be moving away from the 15-17 yr ‘pause’ to the cooling since 2002 (note: I am receiving inquiries about this from journalists).

What cooling do you legitimately ask?  I think Curry mixed up her binaries and decimals, her "twos" and "tens" when she speaks of "cooling" and "slight cooling".  If she wanted to be accurate and since she doesn't mind coming across as a total idiot, she could try to say "cooling since 2010", since that was hottest year on record or, in some series, the equal hottest year on record with 2005.

Source: NASA

As for the rest of the earth system - well it certainly hasn't "stopped cooling" or "paused" in the last 15 to 17 years either:

Source: University of Colorado

Source: PIOMAS

Source: NODC/NOAA

Let's stick Curry in ice for a couple of years and see what happens with her fake "cooling trend".

Iced Curry

Postscript

I notice in that blurb that Anthony Watts says he is going to elevate to an article ratbagduke's rgbatduke's rant in which he slammed one of Monckton's charts as "an implicit swindle".  That should be fun, given the way Anthony worships the ground the potty peer walks upon.  Another real, doggone DuKE.

Not evidence of absence...argumentum ad ignorantiam

At WUWT Anthony Watts writes that it was reported on a science-denying blog that it was reported in a science denier's column that someone somewhere didn't happen to mention global warming in a speech therefore global warming has stopped, or some such nonsense.

Crikey, he is getting hard up for denialism topics, isn't he.

Sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctica

Arctic sea ice watching season is here again. I was prompted to look at what is happening overall when I read a post by Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale. He's busy trying to prove that "all the models are wrong".  Unlike real scientists, Bob isn't about to "fix" them.  (Not sure he'd want to even if he could.)

In the case of sea ice projections, all the models are wrong, though CMIP5 is something of an improvement over the previous generation (CMIP3) models in regard to the Arctic.  In the Antarctic, more sea ice doesn't mean it's getting colder, particularly when as it warms, more ice shelves and glaciers break up and fill up the sea.

Antarctic sea ice and models

As far as Antarctica goes, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey write in the abstract of their recent paper that most models overestimate the sea ice extent at the minimum in February and some have less than two thirds of the observed ice extent at the maximum in September.  Not only that, but the models don't model the trends from 1860 to 2005 well.   The abstract concludes with this:

The negative SIE trends in most of the model runs over 1979–2005 are a continuation of an earlier decline, suggesting that the processes responsible for the observed increase over the last 30 years are not being simulated correctly.

Turner, John, Thomas J. Bracegirdle, Tony Phillips, Gareth J. Marshall, J. Scott Hosking, 2013: An Initial Assessment of Antarctic Sea Ice Extent in the CMIP5 Models. J. Climate, 26, 1473–1484. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00068.1

Exploring the matter further, a US team of researchers suggests that the problem may be in part due to the fact that observed internal variability in the Antarctic region is large and that the observed shifts in winds are not well simulated in the CMIP5 models.   Here is an excerpt from the abstract (my bold) and the full paper is available here:

...whether these models can be dismissed as being wrong depends on more than just the sign of change compared to observations.

We show that internal sea ice variability is large in the Antarctic region, and both the observed and modeled trends may represent natural variations along with external forcing. While several models show a negative trend, only a few of them actually show a trend that is significant compared to their internal variability on the time scales of available observational data. Furthermore, the ability of the models to simulate the mean state of sea ice is also important. The representations of Antarctic sea ice in CMIP5 models have not improved compared to CMIP3 and show an unrealistic spread in the mean state that may influence future sea ice behavior.

Finally, Antarctic climate and sea ice area will be affected not only by ocean and air temperature changes but also by changes in the winds. The majority of the CMIP5 models simulate a shift that is too weak compared to observations. Thus, this study identifies several foci for consideration in evaluating and improving the modeling of climate and climate change in the Antarctic region.

Mahlstein, I., P. R. Gent, and S. Solomon (2013), Historical Antarctic mean sea ice area, sea ice trends, and winds in CMIP5 simulations, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50443

Watching the sea ice disappear

To finish up here is a chart.  It shows the average extent for the minimum months in the Arctic and Antarctic. (Click the chart to enlarge it.)

Source: NSIDC

You'll see I've taken a bit of a liberty and added the areas together to give a 'total', although it's not a 'total' in any temporal sense, because the Arctic monthly average is for September whereas the Antarctic monthly average is for February.

Just the same, the minimum month at each hemisphere is when the sun shines the most on the sea. So if there is less ice then more heat is absorbed by the ocean.  In winter when there is lots of ice cover, then the sun doesn't shine anyway.  It's dark.  So the sea ice doesn't reflect sunlight back to space at that time.

Monckton changes his mind again, again and again. Now it's an Orwellian conspiracy!

That eccentric chap Christopher Monckton from Brenchley has found another conspiracy in true "moon-landing" fashion. He's written yet another article on WUWT that Anthony Watts has made "blue" - I think that means Anthony reckons that mixed up pile of codswallop is a "top post".  (How the mighty have fallen and fallen hard!)  Monckton can't make up his mind if the world is warming or cooling or what!

Big Brother is Watching You!

Monckton now reckons he's found an "Orwellian" conspiracy.  No proof of course.  It's how he gets his brain to cope with the fact that the world is warming**.

So what happened in 1984?  Did Eric Arthur Blair really doctor all the world's records of surface temperature?  If so, he must have done it some time before 21 January 1950.  But who knows, he might not really be dead but hiding among us as a lizard man and doctoring Presidential birth certificates.

It's not CO2, it's not the PDO, it's a conspiracy

Monckton writes (my emphasis):

However, the apparently tidy 1.0 to 1.4 to 1.8 Cº/century-equivalent increase in the rates of global warming during the “warming” phases of the PDO may not be attributable to CO2 at all. The true cause may be another and more sinister man-made phenomenon: Orwellian data revisionism.

That is one mixed up sentence.  We'll tackle the PDO reference first.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is an index that is based on the sea surface temperature of the North Pacific and as such it is embedded in the global surface temperature, which includes land surface and sea surface temperatures.  It is described here as:

The PDO is defined as the leading EOF of mean November through March SST anomalies for the Pacific Ocean to the north of 20N latitude. ... Positive values indicate months of above normal SSTs along the west coast of the North and Central America and on the equator, and below normal SSTs in the central and western north Pacific at about the latitude of Japan. Fluctuations in this pattern are dominated by variability on the decadal time scale.

The PDO is not regular, it is an observed oscillation in the North Pacific sea surface temperatures and has been linked to ENSO.  (It's also been linked to kettles and ice blocks.)

If you look at the animation below, it's easy to see that there must be other forces acting on the land and surface temperatures.  Sometimes the temperature trend is in the same direction as the PDO, but as often it isn't.  Right now, for example, the temperature hasn't gone down although the PDO has turned negative.  Even in that big flat stretch from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, the PDO went down and although the global temperature didn't go up, neither did it drop much at all.  So there are other forces pushing the temperature up.  Since the late 1970s, the strongest force has been elevated levels of greenhouse gases. (Click chart to enlarge.)

Sources: JISAO and NASA

Why can't Monckton make up his mind?

Monckton changes his mind more often than the weather changes in Melbourne.  Just a day or so ago Monckton had been so certain that it's cooling he had narrowed down the date his "cooling" began to 17 years and four months ago.  This was after he'd made numerous wild guesses at "cooling" - including it started cooling 16, 17, 18, 19 and 23 years (all in the one letter); then he went for "approaching two decades"; then just last month it was 18 years.  Kenji would be much less confused than Monckton, I'll be willing to bet.

Now Monckton can't make up his mind, saying all of "it's not cooling", "it's warming, but not as fast as before" and "it's cooling".  Or is he saying that Spencer and Christy's UAH record is an Orwellian conspiracy?  He writes:

RSS showed warming at 0.7 Cº/century from 1979-1996 and cooling at almost 0.1 Cº/century from 1997-2012....

...UAH, however, in contrast to both HadCRUt4 and RSS, showed warming in the later period, 1997-2012, that was thrice as fast as the warming of the earlier period, 1979-1996.

So according to Monckton even his precious satellite data sets differ.  Pity he can't work out what's happening.  He writes:

It would be interesting to adjust the global instrumental temperature anomaly record not only for volcanic aerosols, solar cycles and el Niños but also for the cycles of the PDO, but that is above my present pay-grade.

Poor old Monckton.  He admits he doesn't know what he's doing.  He decides to throw in the towel and put the rise in global temperatures down to "an Orwellian conspiracy".  At least he can rest happy now, knowing that, as he says, the satellites are watching and preventing cheating even though he reckons that his "watching satellites" can't even agree with each other.


I hope in his next article Monckton sets out his theory of how this conspiracy works.  How is it that no one else has blown the whistle except an eccentric conspiracy theorist from Brenchley.  It must involve not only 97% of climate researchers all over the world, but also the hundreds of thousands of people who work for weather bureaus as well as the thousands of editors of scientific journals.  Plus more.  There has never been and never will be a conspiracy quite so grand.

Looking forward to the next conspiracy theory promoted by Anthony Watts on WUWT.  You never know, he might move onto fake moon landings next.

(I thought Anthony Watts used to try to present himself as a 'rational' sceptic.  Lately he's been oscillating between irrational and truly weird.  He's effectively handed over WUWT to the crank Monckton, who even Andrew Bolt (temporarily) distanced himself from.  I'm wondering if recent research like Marcott, Lewandowsky, Cook and others on top of the Heartland-China fiasco has done something to his brain.  Or maybe he's always been this strange.)

In the comments

You can easily distinguish the thinkers from the fake "skeptics".  Anyone who was really interested in science, as opposed to purveyors of disinformation and doubt (FUD specialists), wouldn't write this, for example:

Eric Worrall says:
June 15, 2013 at 10:41 pm  The missing piece of the puzzle is how they worked their magic. I’d love to see a recipe for turning Hadcrut3 into Hadcrut4, that would tell us a lot about what was happening. If the details of how to do this are not public domain, they should be.

Instead, they'd Google and then write something like this:

Anyone but Eric Worrall would say:
June 16, 2013 at 8:53 pm I was interested in the changes between HadCRUT3 and HadCRUT4, and found that the researchers had written a paper describing the differences and explaining how HadCRUT4 was developed.  Here is the abstract, which I've broken into paragraphs for easier reading:

Recent developments in observational near-surface air temperature and sea-surface temperature analyses are combined to produce HadCRUT4, a new data set of global and regional temperature evolution from 1850 to the present. This includes the addition of newly digitized measurement data, both over land and sea, new sea-surface temperature bias adjustments and a more comprehensive error model for describing uncertainties in sea-surface temperature measurements.

An ensemble approach has been adopted to better describe complex temporal and spatial interdependencies of measurement and bias uncertainties and to allow these correlated uncertainties to be taken into account in studies that are based upon HadCRUT4.

Climate diagnostics computed from the gridded data set broadly agree with those of other global near-surface temperature analyses. Fitted linear trends in temperature anomalies are approximately 0.07°C/decade from 1901 to 2010 and 0.17°C/decade from 1979 to 2010 globally. Northern/southern hemispheric trends are 0.08/0.07°C/decade over 1901 to 2010 and 0.24/0.10°C/decade over 1979 to 2010. Linear trends in other prominent near-surface temperature analyses agree well with the range of trends computed from the HadCRUT4 ensemble members.

And for those who cannot access the full paper, which is behind a paywall, I found a poster online that summarises the changes.  You can click here to view it. 

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**From a review of Michael Shermer's book "The Believing Brain":

Mr. Shermer offers a handy guide for those who are confused. Conspiracy theories are usually bunk when they are too complex, require too many people to be involved, ratchet up from small events to grand effects, assign portentous meanings to innocuous events, express strong suspicion of either governments or companies, attribute too much power to individuals or generate no further evidence as time goes by.

China is not happy. Heartland Institute in its missionary zeal seriously overstepped the mark.

Oops!  Heartland Institute is in the poo again!  This time with China. Not good.

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From the Lanzhou Branch of the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences website:

The Statements on the Chinese Translation of the“Climate Change Reconsidered—NIPCC Report”

时间: | 2013-06-14 | | 【大 中 小】【打印】【关闭】

The Chinese translation of the “Climate Change Reconsidered—NIPCC report” was organized by the Information Center for Global Change Studies, published in May 2013 through Science Press, with an accompanying workshop on climate change issues in Beijing on June 15, 2013. However, the Heartland Institute published the news titled “Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes Heartland Institute research skeptical of Global Warming” in a strongly misleading way on its website, implying that the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) supports their views, in contrary to what is clearly stated in the Translators’ Note in the Chinese translation.

The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false. To clarify the fact, we formally issue the following statements:

(1) The translation and publication of the Chinese version of the NIPCC report, and the related workshop, are purely non-official academic activities the group of translators. They do not represent, nor they have ever claimed to represent, CAS or any of CAS institutes. They translated the report and organized the workshop just for the purpose of academic discussion of different views.

(2) The above fact was made very clear in the Translators’ Note in the book, and was known to the NIPCC report authors and the Heartland Institute before the translation started. The false claim by the Heartland Institute was made public without any knowledge of the translator group.

(3) Since there is absolutely no ground for the so called CAS endorsement of the report, and the actions by the Heartland Institute went way beyond acceptable academic integrity, we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed. We also requested that the Institute issue a public apology to CAS for the misleading statement on the CAS endorsement.

(4) If the Heartland Institute does not withdraw its false news or refuse to apologize, all the consequences and liabilities should be borne by the Heartland Institute. We reserve the right for further actions to protect the rights of CAS and the translators group.

Information Center for Global Change Studies,

Scientific Information Center for Resources and Environment, 

Chinese Academy of Sciences,

June 14, 2013.

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See here for my initial take on the topic.

See here for the formal notice from the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Click here for the above notice from the Lanzhou Branch of the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences

H/T Lillian and Dan on Ben's wottsupwiththat.com

Shhh - there's too much noise and I can't hear the signal - or Ben Santer's 17 years

There's an eccentric English chap called Christopher Monckton of Brenchley who has Anthony Watts of WUWT in thrall. Barry Bickmore can fill you in on this vexatious Viscount.

Monckton is claiming that there 'hasn't been any significant warming for seventeen years and four months'.

That's right.  I kid you not!  He has done his sums and it's seventeen years and four months. Oh and I guess its seventeen years, four months, one day, 13 hours and 25 seconds by now.

It's good to know that he's finally settled on a number.  His previous lucky dips were for 16, 17, 18, 19 and 23 years (all in the one letter); then he went for "approaching two decades"; then just last month it was 18 years.

Apparently Monckton is trying to put one over the 8% Dismissives over at WUWT, an anti-science blog.  I don't know why he bothers.  The clowns over there already have their heads stuffed full of insects, underwater volcanoes, exploding vegetation, ice ages peeping around corners, lack of ENSOs, leaping El Ninos and scientific dogs.  I doubt there is room in their heads for another denier meme.  Still, I suppose Anthony has to fill up that white space with nonsense several times a day to keep his crowd entertained.

The way I see it, Anthony Watts had a whole heap more than usual of Friday Funnies on WUWT this week.  This article by Monckton was just one of many.  Anthony chose to make Monckton's article a "sticky".  When you're down on your luck you take what you can get.  And Anthony hasn't been having much luck at all lately.

The basis of Monckton's article was ostensibly Santer et al (2011), so I thought I'd write some of what that research found.

Ben Santer and colleagues, the signal and seventeen years of noise and counting

The Santer paper is titled: Separating signal and noise in atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale.

First up they let us know that they are comparing satellite estimates of lower troposphere with CMIP3 model simulations.  What they find, unsurprisingly, is that the signal to noise ratio increases the longer the time period.  From the abstract:

...Because of the pronounced effect of interannual noise on decadal trends, a multi-model ensemble of anthropogenically-forced simulations displays many 10-year periods with little warming. A single decade of observational TLT data (temperature of the lower troposphere) is therefore inadequate for identifying a slowly evolving anthropogenic warming signal. Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.

In the Discussion and Conclusions section, the authors elaborate further.  Here are some excerpts (my bold):

Efforts to apply rigorous statistical methods to the problem of identifying human effects on climate commenced over 30 years ago [Hasselmann, 1979]. At the inception of this endeavor, it was recognized that any human-caused climate change signal is embedded in the noise of natural climate variability, and that separation of human and natural influences requires information on signal and noise properties over a range of timescales....

...Our estimated signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios for global-scale TLT changes were less than 1.0 on the 10-year timescale (Figure 6c). On the 32-year timescale, however, S/N exceeded 3.9 in all three observational TLT data sets. The latter result shows that natural internal variability, as simulated by current climate models, is a highly unlikely explanation for the observed lower tropospheric warming over the satellite era (Figure 6d). Comparisons between simulated and observed low-frequency TLT variability suggest that our estimates of S/N ratios on 5–20 year timescales are conservative (Figures 9 and 10). The strong timescale dependence of S/N ratios arises primarily because of the large decrease in noise amplitude as the period used for trend fitting increases (Figure 6b)....

... In summary, because of the effects of natural internal climate variability, we do not expect each year to be inexorably warmer than the preceding year, or each decade to be warmer than the last decade, even in the presence of strong anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

What I understand from that research is that:

• the longer the time period the more the signal emerges from the noise
• multi-decadal records are needed, the more the better
• it's important to not introduce noise unnecessarily.

How did Monckton fare against these findings?  First, Monckton misrepresented what Santer said.  Santer et al wrote that at least seventeen years and the longer the better to extract the signal from the noise:

Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature....

...The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

"At least seventeen years are required", and "multi-decadal records are required". Compare that to this, from Monckton:

However, as Anthony explained yesterday, the stasis goes back farther than that. He says we shall soon be approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17-year test: if there is no warming for 17 years, the models are wrong.

No, Christopher, that's not what Dr Santer and his colleagues found.  Santer didn't write about 'models being wrong'.  He was pointing out that the longer the better.  Even in the press reports this is what was written:

In order to separate human-caused global warming from the "noise" of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists.

Look we're used to Monckton making up stuff.  We don't have to just lay down and take it though.  

Let's move along.  What else did he do wrong?  

For one thing, he plotted temperature by month, not annually.  What he hoped to achieve I don't know.  Nor do I know if his "results" would have been any different.  But what I do know is that a monthly plot exaggerates the noise and hides the multi-decadal signal.  Why do you think Spencer always provides monthly plots?  It's so that every so often he can gig up the crowd by claiming a drop in temperature.  Yes, from the previous month! Even though it's well above the temperatures of the eighties and nineties.

What else did Monckton do wrong?  For another thing, Monckton misrepresented his chart as an IPCC chart, which it most certainly isn't.  Heck, he even put the name of his foundation on the chart.  And the IPCC doesn't do sloppy, not like Monckton.  Here's one of his charts.  I've animated his "brand" and added an arrow:

As if you couldn't tell anyway.  He's presenting the chart as a monthly chart, stuck some lines on it that he claims are IPCC "backcasted projections", added some dodgy numbers in the left hand corner and put a reference to an IPCC AR5 figure, when AR5 hasn't even been released yet.

Monckton describes it as follows - see if you can understand what he writes. It's not easy:

The IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report backcasts the interval of 34 models’ global warming projections to 2005, since when the world should have been warming at a rate equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century. Instead, it has been cooling at a rate equivalent to a statistically-insignificant 0.87 Cº/century:

I suppose he was right about one thing.  Any "cooling" he might have been able to fiddle is not going to be statistically significant.

On the other matters, since the IPCC's "forthcoming" Fifth Assessment Report is still "forthcoming", neither Monckton nor I would be in a position to say whether it will include any charts that hindcast or backcast or project.  He may have access to the previous draft, but that's a long way from a final version.

What is obvious is that Monckton hasn't the slightest clue about models or climate.  I mean in his second chart as shown above, he's looking at only eight years for heavens sake.  Eight years isn't multi-decadal.  Does he expect surface temperature to go in a straight line somewhere?

Let's do multi-decadal using the same temperature series, HadCRUT4.  It doesn't look anything like what Monckton drew.  You can check for yourself here.

Source: HadCRUT4

I've marked both 1995 (seventeen years of data) and 1996 (sixteen years of data) for what it's worth.  But you don't have to stop at 1995 or 1996.  You can see the trend goes back a lot further than that.  The world is getting hotter.

It's not just the land and sea surface that's warming

I didn't see anyone ask Monckton to explain all the other signs that the earth is warming, but there were a lot of comments so I might have missed it.

Recommended reading

For a different takes on global temperature trends, here are some papers and blogs to check out:

• James Hansen, Makiko Satoa and Reto Ruedy: 2012: Perception of climate change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 109, 14726-14727, E2415-E2423, doi:10.1073/pnas.1205276109.
• Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf (2011): Global temperature evolution 1979–2010, Environ. Res. Lett. 6 (October-December 2011) 044022, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022
• Nick Stokes at Moyhu has some pretty charts as well as some interactive charts for you to play with.
• Tamino's blog - with lots of articles and statistical analysis of trends
• and more in the scientific literature.

The comments at WUWT had a lot of the usual bowing and scraping to the potty peer.  There was some fun to be had though.  There was one guy called rgbatduke (yes, I read ratbag too, then came to realise it's his initials and he teaches at Duke - which leads us to another play on words).  People were calling him Professor Brown but he isn't a climate researcher.  (I don't think he does much research at all.  He teaches physics I believe.)

Anyway the rgbatduke got stuck right into the analysis, with a very strongly worded missive on how you can't do this, that and the other thing and it's all a mess and so on and so forth.  It took up a few screens so I'll only post one bit from somewhere around the middle of his rant.  rgbatduke says:

June 13, 2013 at 7:20 am  ...Note the implicit swindle in this graph — by forming a mean and standard deviation over model projections and then using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error, one is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!.

Say what?

Monckton didn't seem to object to being called a swindler and we'll see why shortly.  Nick popped in quite some time later and recognised rgbatduke had made an erroneous assumption.  Nick figured out that rgbatduke had the wrong end of the stick and thought the graph was one of the IPCC's.  rgbatduke is obviously not au fait with IPCC reports or he would have twigged at once that the charts were inventions of the potty peer himself.

The thread continued with mostly mindless denialist stuff, occasionally interspersed with Nick's astute comments and some general stirring by Mosher.  As usual, Nick was unflappable, remaining calm and polite and sticking to the facts.  Not like Monckton, who was apoplectic flinging wild accusations left, right and centre.  He called Nick a liar (and a Mr instead of Dr, while calling rgbatduke Professor - unsubtle!).  Monckton even wanted Nick to be banned from WUWT.  Then Anthony chimed in to tell Nick, the only cool head in the place, to keep it cool; to behave himself, he was upsetting the potty peer and denier rgbatduke as well as everyone else.  (On WUWT the unwritten policy is that as long as you deny science you can say what you like.  If you write sensible stuff you're under tight watch and banned if enough people flame you.)

It's a madhouse at WUWT.

As a reward for reading through to the end, here's a little bit of CO2 for your exploding plants.

Callous amusement and display of meteorological ignorance from Anthony Watts

Here is yet another display of ignorance from ex-weather announcer Anthony Watts.

It's also one thing to be a disinformation propagandist but it seems to me to be particularly poor taste to be so insensitive to other people's suffering.

Is it an attempt to distract from the extreme weather in the USA?  It's been the driest year to date on record in California and then there is the horrible fire in Colorado this week and its record-breaking hot weather.

No, Anthony, there is no La Niña

Here is a snapshot of an article from today. (Click any image to enlarge).

For someone who used to earn a crust by announcing weather on television, not to mention blogging about "weather and climate" for the past six and a half years, you'd think some knowledge of weather would have rubbed off.  But no, Anthony says there is currently a La Niña and that it's been in place for two years.

No Anthony, it's been well over a year since the end of the last La Niña   The most recent La Niña started to form in October 2011 and persisted until March 2012.  It was pretty well back to back with another La Niña that started to firm up back in July 2010 and finished in May 2011. Conditions have been ENSO neutral since the 27 March 2012 at the latest.  Here is the official notification of it ending, from the Bureau of Meteorology:

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

In its latest ENSO wrap-up, the Bureau states:

All atmospheric and oceanic indicators of ENSO have remained neutral (neither El Niño nor La Niña) since mid-2012. While most models suggest that neutral conditions will continue in 2013, it remains possible that a La Niña event could develop later in the year.

The ENSO state is mostly indicated by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI).  From the Bureau again (on the SOI tab):

Sustained positive values of the SOI above +8 may indicate a La Niña event, while sustained negative values below −8 may indicate an El Niño event. Values of between about +8 and −8 generally indicate neutral conditions.

And more here:

The Southern Oscillation Index, or SOI, gives an indication of the development and intensity of El Niño or La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean. The SOI is calculated using the pressure differences between Tahiti and Darwin. ...Sustained positive values are indicative of La Niña conditions, and sustained negative values indicative of El Niño conditions.

Here is a chart of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) from the Bureau, going back to 2008:

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

The closest it came to a La Niña was back in March this year when the SOI briefly rose about +8, but there was no suggestion that one was about to develop.

Why the persistent drought in the USA when it's ENSO neutral?

Source: National Drought Forum Report

Why then is the drought persisting across 44.1% of the contiguous USA?  Well the tweet that Anthony mocked had a link to the NDIS website, which then led to a report released last month on 16 May 2013.  That report  talked a lot about the current drought and how to respond.  But it didn't discuss what is causing the drought.  About the closest it came was this sentence on page 7 of the report:

The Administration is considering the relevance of climate change as it relates to drought, and the corresponding need for adaptation strategies and strategies for protecting fresh water resources.

Obviously anthropogenic global warming.is affecting all weather around the world today.  Researchers have attempted to determine the extent to which it contributed to the drought in Texas.  Peterson et al (2012) is one such study.  In that report there is a section on the drought in Texas, which concludes with:

Hence, while we can provide evidence that the risk of hot and dry conditions has increased, we cannot say that the 2011 Texas drought and heat wave was "extremely unlikely" (in any absolute sense) to have occurred before this recent warming.

The questions of importance include:

• Will extremes of weather get more extreme?  The answer is obviously yes when it comes to heat and precipitation events.
• How will the different climate zones change over time?  Will parts of the USA become more prone to drought or flood?  Probably, is what I gather.

No, Anthony - it's not "variance"

As for Anthony Watts, you'd have thought in his years as a weather announcer he'd have picked up some knowledge of weather and ENSO.  Instead of admitting he was wrong, he writes this:

skSK says:
June 14, 2013 at 11:34 am Your ENSOMETER signals neutral

REPLY: Yes, that’s called “variance”. It changes from week to week. Check the Enso page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/enso/ -Anthony

No, Anthony.  Wrong again.  ENSO is a sustained period, it doesn't "change from week to week" at all.

Finally...but too little too late

Finally, just as I was about to publish this article, I see that Anthony grudgingly admits his mistake, writing:

Anthony Watts says:
June 14, 2013 at 4:17 pm  I’ve changed the headline to more accurately reflect the history.

So here is the new headline, but still with the comment about the "La Niña pattern" and this time trying to pin the extended drought on the absence of El Niño.  Not good enough, Anthony!

Is WUWT on its last legs?

With the spate of idiotic articles lately and his reliance on nincompoops like Monckton (even promoting his nonsense to "sticky" status), and now manufacturing a La Niña as a "reason" for the continued US drought - it looks as if WUWT is on its last legs.  A refuge for the 8% Dismissives.  That's all.