Two media releases from CSIRO show up the WUWT illiterati

Today on WUWT Anthony Watts pasted two press releases from Australia's CSIRO.

1. Aerosol influence on ocean circulation

The first one is about this paper (open access) published in Nature's Scientific Reports.  It's titled: Forcing of anthropogenic aerosols on temperature trends of the sub-thermocline southern Indian Ocean.

The authors, Tim Cowan et al find support for the hypothesis that aerosols influence ocean circulation trends.  Here is the abstract:

In the late twentieth century, the sub-thermocline waters of the southern tropical and subtropical Indian Ocean experienced a sharp cooling. This cooling has been previously attributed to an anthropogenic aerosol-induced strengthening of the global ocean conveyor, which transfers heat from the subtropical gyre latitudes toward the North Atlantic.

From the mid-1990s the sub-thermocline southern Indian Ocean experienced a rapid temperature trend reversal. Here we show, using climate models from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, that the late twentieth century sub-thermocline cooling of the southern Indian Ocean was primarily driven by increasing anthropogenic aerosols and greenhouse gases. The models simulate a slow-down in the sub-thermocline cooling followed by a rapid warming towards the mid twenty-first century. The simulated evolution of the Indian Ocean temperature trend is linked with the peak in aerosols and their subsequent decline in the twenty-first century, reinforcing the hypothesis that aerosols influence ocean circulation trends.

Anthony Watts comments: From CSIRO, but sadly just with modeling, not empirical analysis:

While it's true that the scientist explored the situation using computer simulations, what they are testing for is an explanation for real world observations.  It makes one wonder if Anthony knows what the word "empirical" means.  And he's not the only one.  From the comments:

Anymoose hasn't read the paper and doesn't know that it's all about explaining "actual measured data" and says:

July 23, 2013 at 6:40 pm  Simulation? Model? How about some actual measured data, just like a scientist might provide?

 The other comments are mainly deniers saying "we know more than those dumb scientists" or "we don't believe you".

2. Carbon exchanges in tropical ecosystems are extremely sensitive to temperature

The second one is an interesting analysis of what happens to photosynthesis and respiration in the tropics, particularly during El Niño years, and how it affects the carbon cycle.  In this research, the scientists looked at data on CO2 concentration and global air temperatures for to a fifty-two year time span, from 1959 to 2011.  The press release is not the best one I've read.  As far as I can make out, the gist of it is as follows.

The focus of the study was on El Niño years when it's hotter and drier in the tropics.  What the researchers found was that under those conditions, plants cut down on photosynthesis and increase respiration such that the net effect is an increase in CO2 emissions from the tropical vegetation.  And quite a big increase at that.  A one degree increase in temperature causes a rise in CO2 equivalent to one third of annual human emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation combined.  The money quote seems to be this one:

"Our study indicates that carbon exchanges in tropical ecosystems are extremely sensitive to temperature, and they respond with the release of emissions when warmer temperatures occur".

I couldn't find the PNAS paper itself.  It doesn't seem to listed at PNAS yet, not even as part of the PNAS early edition.  I'd have preferred to read the paper because the press release is not easy to follow.  I don't know if there is a net reduction in CO2 during La Nina years, for example.  One would presume so, otherwise in the past there would have been an accumulation of CO2 over time. But there wasn't - until recently.  But that was from our efforts.

Consistently unstable at WUWT

I notice that Anthony Watts interpreted "consistent" as "stable" - writing a headline "Earth’s self regulation of Carbon Dioxide is remarkably stable".  Can't say I got that from the press release.  It doesn't match with the "extremely sensitive" quote.

The comments at WUWT are the usual mixed bag of denialist denial, conspiracy theorising, "we know better" and other nonsense.  Quite a few comments were debating whether or not a petagram equals a billion tonnes, confusion between tonnes and tons and similar.

Protect the children...or trapped in the denialist echo chamber

I see that a WUWT reader has written to Anthony Watts to thank him for his part in protecting his ten year old daughter from the truth about the warming world.  Children mature at different ages and some ten year olds may not be mature enough to handle the facts about global warming.  However it's one thing to not tell them about it, it's quite another to lie to them.

It's a sad indictment on society that her father isn't able to handle the truth and probably never will.  It would appear that he is one of the bottom 21%, either one of the 8% Dismissives or, more likely, one of the 13% Doubtfuls. Maybe his daughter will grow into a mature adult and maybe not.  If she does, I hope she acquires the wisdom, intellect and courage that her father lacks.

Reading the WUWT comments shows just what sort of echo chamber is WUWT.  Many of those commenting are complaining that their colleagues and/or children accept the science.  I didn't see a single comment that the person was open to the idea they could be wrong about their denial.  Only that all the world is wrong except WUWT deniers.

I couldn't see some of the comments because Anthony snipped any from people who accept the science, although some commenters copied and pasted them before they were snipped.  Here's an example of what Anthony censors, from Jai Mitchell as quoted by Michael Moon says:

July 23, 2013 at 5:42 pm  Jai Mitchell,
“I have also witnessed daily assertions that global warming has stopped. This is, of course a complete fallacy as the ocean heat content and sea level (as well as land-based glacial melt) evidence has shown”

The above statement would seem perfectly ordinary and non-controversial to anyone but a denier of science.  Anthony is getting more strict about keeping his blog for science denial purists.  This next one, in which Gunga Din quotes Jai Mitchell, is admonishing Anthony.  We all know Anthony can't take criticism and censors it.  Gunga Din quotes jai mitchell:

July 23, 2013 at 6:01 pm  jai mitchell says: July 23, 2013 at 3:19 pm
Anthony,

You should be ashamed of yourself.

The point of this thread is how one can use the information present here to indoctrinate their child to the fringe scientific view that global warming is a) not happening or b) stopped.

This is a fringe scientific view — not anywhere near the consensus of over 100 years of a scientific body of work performed by tens of thousands of accomplished scientists, over several millions of person-hours of work in the last 45 years.

Many WUWT comments are straight from the conspiracy theorists' handbook: "science is a left-wing plot". A large number advocate home-schooling so that young minds don't get polluted by "left-wing" nonsense. The following demonstrate the sort of weirdos who are the mainstay of WUWT and their paranoia:

Kiwi Sceptic thinks all the world is wrong except him and the WUWT echo chamber:

July 23, 2013 at 6:17 pm The alarmists are impervious to reason; impervious to empirical evidence that proves them wrong; impervious to the stink of Climategate. They simply don’t care how much evidence you throw at them, or how many times you prove them to be liars in blogs, newspapers and journals. They don’t care because the point of the exercise is to get this poisonous dogma drummed into the minds of children who, through innocence and naivety, are not equipped to challenge it, let alone ask important and searching questions.

Owen in GA says the same:

July 23, 2013 at 6:43 pm Wayne, It is always good to examine your arguments to make sure you are not just going through the motions and keeping the same old memes. This is what I enjoy in the rebuttals to folks like Jai Mitchell, those rebutting put forth arguments backed by data and we are all able to look and see that the misdirection and subterfuge used by CAGW believers is just that: misdirection and subterfuge. One day, we may have someone put the charts together to make a rebuttal and we all go “hmm, that doesn’t look right” and something new may come of it. Of course I understand your point about time wasting, life is short.

tango says:

July 23, 2013 at 2:16 pm I have 4 grand kids in Australia oldest 18 she is going to uni youngest 7 our school system is controlled by left wing unions and a lot of teachers are greenies so they are brain washing students in global warming it is sad but I keep telling them the truth, what you are being told is not true . every parent must try and stop this brain washing

Dennis York says education is child abuse:

July 23, 2013 at 2:24 pm  My biggest mistake as a parent was letting my children attend public schools. They can all read, write, add and subtract (of course I taught them that). In fact two are post-graduate engineers and one is a molecular biologist The problem is that they are members of the Church of Ecodruidism. They harbor guilt and are depressed for being normal humans with normal human desires.
Public education is child abuse. Save your kids! Get them out of public schools!

Eric Worrall doesn't say he's going to encourage his daughter to think for herself, he's going to teach his daughter how to lie so she is not discriminated against (paranoia plus):

July 23, 2013 at 2:26 pm  My little girl is 3.
Since they can’t convince enough thinking adults to believe their cr@p, plan B is to brainwash the kids.  Its going to be a battle – I’ve got to not only teach my little girl the truth, I’ve got to teach her to lie to her teachers, so she isn’t discriminated against.

It's raining, it's pouring

Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale has written a second article on precipitation, on WUWT.  It's mainly a gripe that he cannot find data sets that agree.  When I wrote about his first gripe I made the uninformed observation that precipitation must be one of the most difficult things to monitor globally.  This would be so for any number of reasons that I expect readers here could imagine.

Anyway I've done a bit more reading and came across this paper by Udo Schneider et al (2013), titled: GPCC's new land surface precipitation climatology based on quality-controlled in situ data and its role in quantifying the global water cycle

Here is the abstract:

In 1989, the need for reliable gridded land surface precipitation data sets, in view of the large uncertainties in the assessment of the global energy and water cycle, has led to the establishment of the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) at Deutscher Wetterdienst on invitation of the WMO.

The GPCC has calculated a precipitation climatology for the global land areas for the target period 1951–2000 by objective analysis of climatological normals of about 67,200 rain gauge stations from its data base. GPCC's new precipitation climatology is compared to several other station-based precipitation climatologies as well as to precipitation climatologies derived from the GPCP V2.2 data set and from ECMWF's model reanalyses ERA-40 and ERA-Interim.

Finally, how GPCC's best estimate for terrestrial mean precipitation derived from the precipitation climatology of 786 mm per year (equivalent to a water transport of 117,000 km3) is fitting into the global water cycle context is discussed.

The paper is a very easy read.  It goes into a lot of detail, describing how the team collects data, corrects it, stores it etc.  And towards the end it has some information about global precipitation patterns, among other things.  I recommend it.

BTW - I'd say my uninformed observation was pretty close to the mark.

Bombshell: Anthony Watts sez UHI only happens very rarely ... or E-Cat eat your heart out!

Anthony Watts has a new article up at WUWT.  From what he writes, he now thinks that UHI only happens very rarely.  His post is a stark rebuttal to a study of night time heat waves in the north west of the United States.

First the study itself, from ScienceDaily (note the image is from an earlier poster, so it's probably not the final version but it's easier to see the colour differences than the image in ScienceDaily):

The colors represent different ways of processing the historical readings.
Source: K. Bumbaco / UW poster - not ScienceDaily or the paper

University of Washington research shows that the region west of the Cascades saw only three nighttime heat waves between 1901 and 1980, but that number quadrupled to 12 nighttime heat waves in the three decades after 1980, according to a paper published in the July issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.

Nighttime heat waves are when the daily low is in the top 1 percent of the temperatures on record -- in Seattle above around 61.5 F -- for at least three nights in a row.

"In general, minimum daily temperatures have been warming faster than maximum temperatures, so we're not surprised to see a trend in the minimum events," said corresponding author Karin Bumbaco, a research scientist at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean. "Still, we were surprised to see this significant increase in the frequency of nighttime heat waves."

...They studied temperature readings west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Oregon from 1901 to 2009, looking for instances where the daytime high or nighttime low temperature hit the top 1 percent of readings for at least three consecutive days.

The 2009 scorcher set records in daytime temperature, but it was the string of warm nights that stood out, Bumbaco said. By their definition it was a three-day daytime heat wave in the Pacific Northwest -- but included eight consecutive hot nights, the longest seen in the observational record.

...Researchers also found a clue to suggest why we're seeing more hot nights. It's well known that Pacific Northwest heat waves occur when breeze off the ocean is replaced with air flow from the east, which warms up as it flows down the western slope of the Cascade Mountains.

But they found another trait for nighttime heat waves. The records show that nighttime heat waves happen during high humidity, where water vapor in the air serves as a blanket to trap heat.

Read more. 

E-Cat eat your heart out!

What Anthony Watts discovered will amaze and maybe disappoint you.  The heat waves weren't caused by high humidity preventing the heat escaping to space.  Guess what they were caused by.  Yep, you guessed it.  They were caused by UHI at the Seattle Tacoma Airport, which miraculously heated up at night time for at least three nights in a row on no less than twelve occasions in the years since 1980.  And the effect was so huge on those twelve occasions that it heated up the night time air of entire north-west of the USA, west of the Cascades.

Here's all the proof anyone needs, provided by esteemed blog-sciencyintist Anthony Watts himself:

It would seem that every so often, the UHI night switch is turned on at Seattle airport and the whole of north western USA heats up. No-one has yet discovered why that happens, but it undoubtedly happens because WUWT sez so.  Here are some of the comments at WUWT, which might give blog sciencyintists a clue as to the cause, and offer insights for future blog research:

Chris @NJSnowFan says:

July 22, 2013 at 2:09 pm  I did not read anything about how Jet powered aircraft traffic has also increased at day and night or how Commercial Jet travel was not around before the 1970′s Prop powered aircraft put off way less heat. Jet engines are Giant blower heaters so having a temp gauge reading station anywhere near a runway will NEVER be accurate.

brians356 says:

July 22, 2013 at 2:13 pm Please consider SeaTac opened a 3rd runway in 2008, arguably increasing the paved area surrounding the GHCN station by more than 50%.

Larry Hamlin says:

July 22, 2013 at 3:26 pm Sounds like this is clearly linked to UHI effects for land based temperatures.

Philip Bradley says:

July 22, 2013 at 4:28 pm  (blah blah blah) UHI looks the likeliest reason.

And once wasn't enough for Philip Bradley:

July 22, 2013 at 4:55 pm UHI, including the effect of reduced urban aerosols, looks the likeliest reason.

Tip for people in Oregon and Washington State

The next time you have a few hot nights, don't go out and buy an air conditioner.  Write to your Senator and the Mayor and the local school teacher and whoever else you can think of and get them to shut down Seattle airport. That's wots causing all them night time heat waves! Ain't blog science just great.

Bumbaco, Karin A., Kathie D. Dello, Nicholas A. Bond, 2013: History of Pacific Northwest Heat Waves: Synoptic Pattern and Trends*. J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 52, 1618–1631.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-094.1

Anthony Watts and his illiterati at WUWT deny ocean acidification

Anthony Watts in referring to a post in which William Connolley at Stoat expresses frustration with the uncertainty monster Judith Curry, for her lack of understanding of basic chemistry among other things:

"Is is just me, or does professionalism and f-bombs not go together? Sheesh."

Sheesh, is right, coming from Anthony Watts.  He might frown on "f-bombs" but he's not shy when it comes to ad hominems rather than science.

Not that Anthony would recognise science when he saw it.  He ridiculously quotes a sentence from this study in PLOS One (my bold, not Anthony's):

This natural variability has prompted the suggestion that “an appropriate null hypothesis may be, until evidence is obtained to the contrary, that major biogeochemical processes in the oceans other than calcification will not be fundamentally different under future higher CO2/lower pH conditions".

I wonder does Anthony know what calcification means?  And I wonder why he didn't quote this sentence:

For all the marine habitats described above, one very important consideration is that the extreme range of environmental variability does not necessarily translate to extreme resistance to future OA. Instead, such a range of variation may mean that the organisms resident in tidal, estuarine, and upwelling regions are already operating at the limits of their physiological tolerances (a la the classic tolerance windows of Fox – see [68]). Thus, future acidification, whether it be atmospheric or from other sources, may drive the physiology of these organisms closer to the edges of their tolerance windows. When environmental change is layered upon their present-day range of environmental exposures, they may thereby be pushed to the “guardrails” of their tolerance [20], [68].

Or this one:

In contrast to more stochastic changes in pH that were observed in some sites, our coral reef locations displayed a strikingly consistent pattern of diel fluctuations over the 30-day recording period. Similar short-term pH time series with lower daily resolution [69], [70] have reported regular diel pH fluctuation correlated to changes in total alkalinity and oxygen levels. These environmental patterns of pH suggest that reef organisms may be acclimatized to consistent but moderate changes in the carbonate system. Coral reefs have been at the center of research regarding the effects of OA on marine ecosystems [71]–[73]. Along with the calcification biology of the dominant scleractinian corals and coralline algae, the biodiversity on coral reefs includes many other calcifying species that will likely be affected [74]–[77]. Across the existing datasets in tropical reef ecosystems, the biological response of calcifying species to variation in seawater chemistry is complex (see [78]) –all corals or calcifying algal species will not respond similarly, in part because these calcifying reef-builders are photo-autotrophs (or mixotrophs), with algal symbionts that complicate the physiological response of the animal to changes in seawater chemistry.

He seems to think the study was another "nothing to worry about" study.  He's wrong.

I won't bother with the dozens of ad homs in the WUWT comments.  Nor with the ignorant comments about acidification, pH and the like at WUWT (or Curry's blog).  It's very basic high school chemistry.  Or about the idiotic comments about corals and fish not being sensitive to pH.  That's very basic aquaculture that anyone who's owned a fish farm or home aquarium would dispute.  Sure, some species are more tolerant of a wider range of pH than others.  Some are very intolerant of any change beyond a narrow band.  Same with tolerance to temperature as has been widely observed in the ocean.  (And temperature can trigger or prevent breeding.)  An even bigger issue, which was brought out in the PLOS study quoted above, is the impact on the ecosystem as a whole, given the interdependencies.

Frankly, the more I read WUWT the more I see that what I snipe about them being illiterati is quite true. It would be hard to find more people gathering together who have such a disdain for knowledge as you'll find at WUWT.  Or such a large gathering of people who take so much pride in their ignorance.

Still more Tisdale Tricks: How Bob tries to hide the incline at WUWT

Update: 31 August 2013  Getting a lot of WUWT visitors today!  I've provided an update for them.  Bob Tisdale is either as thick as a brick or a liar.  You can read and comment here if you want to!

By now most people who read climate denier blogs would be aware of the awful trouble poor little Anthony Watts has with anomalies.  He is befuddled, bamboozled and betrayed by them over and over again.  He's not the only one.

However this time it's Bob Tisdale who wants to hide the rising global surface temperatures.  He often gets up to tricks like this and this, but deniers are the only ones who are willing to fall for them.

But before we get to that, Bob comments (archived here) about the NCDC/NOAA global temperature record.  Here is an excerpt from his WUWT article from today:

The opening paragraph of NOAA’s press release NCDC Releases June 2013 Global Climate Report begins with alarmist statistics and an error (my boldface):

According to NOAA scientists, the globally averaged temperature for June 2013 tied with 2006 as the fifth warmest June since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 37th consecutive June and 340th consecutive month (more than 28 years) with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last below-average June temperature was June 1976 and the last below-average temperature for any month was February 1985.

First, the error: According to the NOAA Monthly Global (land and ocean combined into an anomaly) Index (°C), the “last below-average temperature for any month was” in reality was December 1984, not February 1985. Makes one wonder, if they can’t read a list of temperature anomalies, should we believe they can read thermometers?

Being of a sceptical bent, especially when it comes to WUWT, I went to the NODC/NOAA website and downloaded the data for February and the data for December.  The data I downloaded was not inconsistent with the NCDC report.  According to these data, the February 1985 anomaly from the 1901-2000 mean was zero while the December 1984 anomaly from the 1901-2000 mean was -0.1.

Then I checked Bob's source.  It happened to be measured to four decimal places.  The February 1985 anomaly from the 1901-2000 mean was 0.0027 (ie zero to two decimal places) while the December 1984 anomaly was  -0.0971 (or -0.1 to two decimal places).  So one could argue that technically Bob was correct.  However taking a temperature anomaly to four decimal places, or even three decimal places is cutting it fine.  Fake skeptics are often quick to screech "error bars" except when they are looking at a denier chart.  Nonetheless, February 1985 was not below average in either record.  It was exactly average in the first source and above average in the second.

I wonder if NCDC/NOAA had said that December 1984 was the last month "below average" would Bob have gone to my first source and claimed they should have referred to February 1985?

How Bob Tisdale tries to hide the incline

Now we come to the part where Bob wants to hide the incline.  Bob writes:

Second, it’s very obvious that NOAA press releases have degraded to nothing but alarmist babble. 

Why does he say it's alarmist babble?  Well, it's because they do a comparison with the twentieth century mean instead of the 1981-2010 mean.  Bob even puts up a picture to show us the difference.  Here it is - as always, you can click it to see the larger version if you want to.

 Bob writes:

If the NCDC had revised their base years to comply with WMO recommendations, the press release wouldn’t have the same alarm-bell ring to it.

So Bob, being either a scaredy cat himself and not wanting to face up to the reality of a warming world, or preying on the fears of the scaredy cats at WUWT, decides to rewrite the NCDC media release so that all the little fearful brains at WUWT can stop being alarmed:

According to NOAA scientists, the globally averaged temperature for June 2013 tied with 2006 as the fifth warmest June since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 17th consecutive June and 16th consecutive month (less than two years) with a global temperature above the 1981-2010 average. The last below-average June temperature was June 1996 and the last below-average temperature for any month was February 2012, though December 2012 was basically zero.

Bob would just love to hide the incline.

---

Update (31 August 2013): I've inserted this clarification for Bob Tisdale, since he still doesn't "get it":


Here is the excerpt from the NCDC media release with Bob's suggested changes:

According to NOAA scientists, the globally averaged temperature for June 2013 tied with 2006 as the fifth warmest June since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 37th consecutive June and 340th consecutive month (more than 28 years) with a global temperature above the 20th century average. It also marked the 17th consecutive June and 16th consecutive month (less than two years) with a global temperature above the 1981-2010 average. The last below-average June temperature was June 1976 June 1996 and the last below-average temperature for any month was February 1985 February 2012, though December 2012 was basically zero.

Bob Tisdale is trying to hide the temperature incline!

Bob wants to "hide" the warming by shifting the baseline up!  He doesn't want you to know that it's more than 340 months or more than 28 years since any monthly temperature was below the twentieth century average.  No-one aged 28 years or younger has ever in their life experienced a year where the global average surface temperature was at or below the average for the entire twentieth century.   No-one aged 37 years or younger has ever experienced a June that was colder than the average June temperature in the twentieth century.  That's what Bob doesn't want his readers to know.   Is Bob Tisdale trying to deceive people?  Yes.  He tries to deceive his readers into thinking that there has only been a couple of years of global warming.   In the words of the IPCC - it is unequivocal!


- o - End of 31 August update

---

Think about this - are you a member of the privileged few?

The chart on the right shows the percentage of people in the world today younger than particular ages in years.  So 9% of people are younger than five years of age and 92% are younger than 65 years of age.

Data source: US Census Bureau

Lets play the anomaly game like Bob did, but using years. It's seventeen (17) years since there was a year with an average global temperature below the 1981-2010 average.  The last time was 1996. That means that around 30% of people alive today have never experienced a year where globally it was colder than the most recent three decade average.

For older readers who are as familiar with the period 1961-90, it's twenty eight (28) years since there was a year with an average global temperature below the 1961-90 average.  The last time was 1985 - and that was only 0.01 degrees below.  The second last time was 1978, a whole 35 years ago.

So almost half the people alive today have never in their lives experienced a year where the global surface temperature was colder than the 1961-90 average.  Almost 60% of people alive today would barely have noticed, since 1985 was only 0.01 degrees colder than the average.

Sixty per cent of the world today has never lived through a year colder than the 20th century average

What about last century as a whole?  The last time the annual global surface temperature was below the twentieth century average was 1976.  That's 37 years ago.  So around 60% of people alive today have never in their lives experienced a year cooler than the average of the twentieth century.

Data Source: NASA

Update:  Go here for the update.

WUWT Misquote of the Week?

It could be that Senator Vitter did say this somewhere along the way, I am not about to go through three plus hours of Senate hearings to find out.  However it isn't something that I can find President Obama saying.  It looks to have morphed from "faster than was predicted ten years ago" to "accelerated during the past 10 years".  From WUWT today:

Here is Senator Vitter accurately quoting President Obama (approx 1 hour 53 minutes in):

.. a statement of President Obama in asking for the data, the science behind it and President Obama said quote: "The temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even ten years ago" ...close quote.

Which seems to have come from this response from President Obama to a question by a journalist, Mark Landler of the New York Times, back in November 2012.  Here is a fuller transcript:

What we do know is the temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even ten years ago. We do know the ice cap is melting, faster than was predicted even five years ago. We do know there have been extraordinarily, an extraordinarily large number of severe weather events here in North America but also around the globe.  And I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it's impacted by human behaviour and carbon emissions and as a consequence I think we've got an obligation to future generations to do something about it.

I don't think there was a particular prediction for global surface temperatures for only ten years out.  However here's one thing that's warming way faster than almost anyone anticipated, the Arctic - as evidenced by this chart of the minimum volume of Arctic sea ice each year since 1979:

Data source: PIOMAS

In the IPCC report, AR4, it was reported that climate models (AOGCM's) tended to overestimate sea ice.  In this recent news item, last year's record low Arctic ice extent is referred to as "astonishing".  (That article also discusses the rapid disappearance of northern hemisphere snow this May.)

President Obama has referred on at least one other occasion to a warming faster than anticipated "five or ten years ago".  Here is  another quote in context from a talk given back in May this year (the part in bold):

We still have a situation in which, on the one hand, our energy future is more promising than we’ve ever allowed ourselves to believe.  We will probably be a net exporter of traditional fossil fuels over the next 20 years -- within the next 20 years, probably a net exporter of natural gas in the next three or four years -- something that could not be imagined even five, 10 years ago -- because of the dynamism and technology that America has produced. 

But the flipside is we also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago, and that the future of Bettylu’s grandkids, in part, is going to depend on our willingness to deal with something that we may not be able to see or smell the way you could when the Chicago River was on fire, or at least could have caught on fire, but is in some ways more serious, more fundamental. 

To see how fast the warming was anticipated ten years ago, I refer the reader to the IPCC TAR (Third Assessment Report) from 2001.  Climate scientists as a general rule don't make predictions out for such short periods as five or ten years, with some exceptions.

Australia - a hot detrending topic at WUWT

Anthony Watts posted an article by someone callled Bill Johnston, headed up "Australia's Average Temperature".

Bill explains how he went to some lengths to collect and play with numbers from the Bureau of Meteorology.  He really went to a lot of trouble, though not as much as the Bureau does.  I don't see anywhere that he looked at area weighted analysis for example, which would be helpful.  Nor regional analysis (Australia is a big country).

From what I can follow, he first removed as many fluctuations as he could from the data to allow for seasonal fluctuations and maybe other stuff and then ended up with this:

He decided to remove what he called the "shifts" as well.  That allowed him to conclude:

Bill's Clever Solution and Conclusions - Remove the Trend and the Trend Disappears!

1. Australia’s averaged temperature data were impacted on by climate shifts in the 1950’s, 1970’s 2002 and 2010. After deducting the impact of those natural events, no residual warming trend was evident that could be related to atmospheric CO2 levels. Well, duh! What did you expect, Bill?
2. Australia’s, ‘hot decade’ (2000-2010) was used to relentlessly market global warming by Australia’s Climate Commission; the Bureau of Meteorology; green groups and politicians in order to stir a sense of catastrophe and climate-fear. However, the fear was unfounded; the drought and associated high temperatures were a temporary aberration caused by El Niño cycles, not global warming. Huh! You mean ENSO events just keep getting bigger and bigger? Is that the same "logic" that Bob Tisdale uses with his magical leaping ENSO's?
3. The 2010 down-step exposed much of that decade’s climate-grooming as false and deceptive. Deceit continues under the guise of “climate change”. There is no evidence at this time that climate change and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere are related. Huh! The lowest low around 2010 in Bill's data is still way higher than the lows of the 20th century.  And what about the Angry Summer - see Lewis and Karoly.
4. The outcome of Australia’s looming election will make no difference to the climate, or to the likelihood or impact of future climate changes. Ditching the carbon tax together with ‘direct action’ would save the Nation’s taxpayers many billions of AUD$ which would be better spent on Nation-building and improving access to services. 

If you detrend the data you remove the trend - we know that, Bill!

Looks as if he caught the trick from John McLean and Bob Carter.  Detect the trends and give them a name like IPO, PDO or DPO or Tisdale's Leaping ENSO's.  Remove the trend (detrend the data) and then claim there aren't any trends!

Here is the longer term record of Australia's temperature from a more accurate and complete approach by the Bureau of Meteorology:

Data Source: Bureau of Meteorology, Australia

Direct Action - A Socialist Approach

Bill says "Ditching the carbon tax together with ‘direct action’ would save the Nation’s taxpayers many billions of AUD$ which would be better spent on Nation-building and improving access to services."

For people who aren't aware, the system in place at the moment is a revenue-neutral price on carbon, with all but the wealthier taxpayers reimbursed by direct payment and/or tax deduction.  The proposed Emissions Trading Scheme is a market-based approach and also revenue neutral.

Direct Action on the other hand is the socialist solution (ironically from the conservative party).  It would be fully funded by taxpayers, with no compensation.  It would be funded by general revenue.  So it would be paid for either by cutting services elsewhere or by increasing taxes or more likely both.

Bill wants none of the above. (At first I thought he favoured Direct Action, but on reflection I see he doesn't want any of the above.)

From the comments

They are not a very sceptical lot at WUWT.  Here are some of the comments:

Phineas Fahrquar says:

July 21, 2013 at 3:33 pm  Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
The upshot is that, after accounting for natural events, there is no discernible trend toward warming, let alone one that could be attributed to human-generated CO2. In other words, it’s all scare-mongering on the part of the Eco-Left and Green Statists, and the fools think they’re right.

Stuart Elliot says:

July 21, 2013 at 3:43 pm  I wish facts were enough. I believe that a collective sense of outrage and betrayal will be required to shatter the grasping smugness of the alarmist / politician complex. But at least facts give the world a place to start the journey back to sanity.

Chad Wozniak is still deluded and says:

July 21, 2013 at 3:46 pm  No surprises here – the warm anomaly in Australia could be compared to the warn autumn of 2011 in the northeastern US and eastern Canada while the rest of the world was entering into one of the coldest winters since 1850. Meaningless in any case for the world as a whole.

Anenome Ofglobalgov is a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire and says:

July 21, 2013 at 3:47 pm  We, the People, have been deceived. In the Larry Abraham book ‘The Greening’, 1993, he gives evidence that the world’s ‘Elite’ have always believed that war is necessary to keep the masses under control, that they were seeking an alternative control mechanism for the same purpose, and that the Environment was chosen as the tool. And look how they have succeeded. That is why they are using the global warming fraud, and also UN Agenda 21 to regulate, restrict and control us step by evil step until we are cleared off the land into self-contained highrise ‘transit centres’ with public transport and no cars allowed.. To create dependency of We, the People, on our (controlled) ‘governments’, the derivatives markets were created to create debt overload of the banks (by removing the Glass-Steagalls Act that separated commercial banks from casino investment banks like Goldman Sacs), which will collapse in the near future, and ‘bail-ins’, the theft of depositors money, will take place – all planned decade ahead. Australia and New Zealand in april began working on legislation to legalise the theft of our deposits by the banks that are too big to fail, so-called. There is a push around the world to prevent this catastrophe by brining Glass-Steagallsinto legislation, see Citizens Electoral Council. of Australia, LaRouchePac too.

Finally one lone voice emerges. thingdonta says:

July 21, 2013 at 7:16 pm  “Regardless of their origin, events that impact on data are not trends.”
You don’t know whether the events are part of the overall trend or not, so this statement is statistically invalid. You cant filter out step changes when it is convenient. There is no way of knowing whether the step changes are part of the overall trend or not. They may or may not be. But to filter them out routinely, you have caught the academic disease of ignoring aspects or parts of the data that don’t suit you. This filtering of step changes as you have done is an old trick, and it is invalid. Step changes can be caused by an overall trend.

But is quickly put in his place by geran, who has other ideas!:

July 21, 2013 at 7:53 pm  thing, you must have missed the next sentence:
“The popular choice of 1950 as a climate change “starting point” is not a valid one because the data from 1950 to 1957 are from a pool of lower than average values that exert leverage on the trend-line. As indicated earlier, data prior to 1957 were non-trending.”
(I know you don’t want your comment to be “statistically invalid”. Glad to help.)

Update: I see Nick Stokes has now joined the party and has gone into more detail of how Bill's analysis is cock-eyed.  More than it deserves IMO :D 

Christopher the expert fiddler...

Update: I missed this, but an astute commenter on Wotts' blog picked it up.  The disrespectful potty peer calls President Obama "Mr" throughout until he gets to the end, when he puts President in quotation marks.  That's his birtherism showing.  Nice that Anthony allows this - not!  (I don't feel any qualms about being disrespectful towards Monckton.)

---

After a couple of weeks away, Lord Christopher is back on WUWT.   (You were all starting to miss him, weren't you.) This time he's tearing into President Obama, who is reported to have said:

But the flipside is we also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or 10 years ago

The Lord might have missed Obama's speech made in May, but he's now caught up, since it was a much-asked question at the US Senate hearings last week.

First up, Monckton shows us all a stunning drawing in full technicolor like this:

I think it's an improvement on his previous drawings.  It brings to mind a locomotive for some reason.  And there's not quite as much of his ghastly pink background.  Of course it bears no resemblance to anything except Monckton's imagination.

Monckton waffles on in his usual fashion about being an "expert reviewer" for the IPCC.  I expect the IPCC lead authors will give his comments the attention they deserve.  (For the benefit of anyone new to climate discussions, anyone at all can nominate themselves as an 'expert reviewer' for the IPCC, even a potty peer.)

Moncton then makes some huge errors of fact.  For example, he says "the models expect an approximately linear warming...".  I cannot imagine that any of the models expect anything.  It's the scientists who interpret the models who may draw conclusions and thus have some expectations.  And I doubt any climate scientist has an expectation of a linear warming, given the system till now has not demonstrated linear warming.  Here is how the surface temperature has progressed over the past century and more:

Data Source: NASA

Even the five year moving average goes up and down over time, reflecting internal variation like ENSO and other forcings like volcanos, aerosols and the like.  Still, there is a definite upward trend.

Monckton continues his deceptions.  The reason is obvious.  He wants to argue that all the models are wrong.  So what he does is show charts for very short periods of time.  All except RSS is either five years or ten years. Not only does he pick very short intervals, but he puts up monthly charts so he can make sure that the noise of month to month variation masks any signal of the trend.  Not that you would expect to see the signal in a short period of time.  (The longest period he shows is for RSS, for which he puts up a monthly chart of sixteen years and seven months.)

Here's an example with UAH, Monckton's five years by month compared to the same period on an annual basis:

Data Source: UAH

Now Monckton's ten years by month compared to the same period on an annual basis:

Data Source: UAH

Now compare the above with all the data for UAH:

Data Source: UAH

It's pretty easy to see the cherry pick and why it pays to use as much data as you can if you want to see what's happening to the lower troposphere surface temperature.

Dishonest is the best adjective I can come up with to describe the man.

In the comments

One thing you can almost always count on in the comments to a Monckton article, is at least one pompous response.  This from Ben Wilson who says (spoilt only by the exclamation marks):

July 21, 2013 at 8:31 am  Lord Monckton, I would like to personally think you for the work you have done and are doing, and pray that your efforts will bear abundant fruit!!

Jon Jewett says:

July 21, 2013 at 9:13 am  

Dear Lord Monckton of Brenchley,

Thank you.

Should you ever be at loose ends in the Heart of Texas, you would be welcome at our table. We could shoot guns and eat BBQ and drink beer and go to a rousing Bible thumping Baptist Church service (all of the things that the coasters believe of us here.)

Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)

Robin sums it up quite well, though unwittingly, when he says (excerpt):

July 21, 2013 at 10:39 am  We are dealing with an ideology here pure and simple. 

Climate change is popular even when discussion gagged

Some of you may remember the kerfuffle a few weeks ago on the popular Australian weather-watching website, Weatherzone. I still get the occasional visitor from there and today I wandered over to see how things were going.  Oddly enough, despite having no new comments since it was closed last month, the Climate and Climate Change forum still seems to be the most popular:

The next most visited at the moment is NSW/ACT:

Since global warming is such a hot topic - sorry, couldn't resist that one :) - maybe the climate forum will be opened again one of these days.  Who knows.