When deniers have nothing, they recycle dead arguments....

In the ongoing effort to demonise the work of Professor Michael Mann in particular, Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Judith Curry and John Christy are passing around wrong and worn out "arguments", presumably to try to bolster a defense for the people who allegedly libelled Professor Mann.

It's a pathetic effort on behalf of a pathetic lot from the climate science disinformation brigade.

In a repost at WUWT, Steve McIntyre (and Anthony Watts) are arguably wanting to be added to the list of people being sued.  It's as if they think that if they misrepresent history often enough someone will believe them.

I don't know what point they think they are trying to make. It looks as if they are trying to resurrect "trial by email", which has been tried before and failed dismally. (Update: see especially Marco's comment below, and the links to deepclimate's damning indictments of Steve McIntyre here and here).

I've already written about the misrepresentations from John Christy, which Judith Curry resurrected recently and that is now apparently being touted again at Steve McIntyre's blog and WUWT.  Anthony Watts (archived here) copies Steve McIntyre who copies Judith Curry who quoted from John Christy's misleading testimony to the US government:

Christy gave the following damning summary of Mann’s conduct as IPCC TAR Lead Author:

Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.

Three things.

1. Serengeti Strategy: Singling out one from 850 plus people

Firstly, John Christy was also a lead author of Chapter 2 of TAR, the chapter in question, so he is as culpable as any other lead author of its content.  The other lead authors were: R.A. Clarke, G.V. Gruza, J. Jouzel, M.E. Mann, J. Oerlemans, M.J. Salinger, S.-W. Wang.

In addition there were two coordinating lead authors of Chapter 2, C.K. Folland, T.R. Karl, who presumably vetted the final content.

And two review editors:  R. Hallgren, B. Nyenzi who would also have had a say.

Not only that but there were 140 contributing authors:

J. Bates, M. Crowe, P. Frich, P. Groisman, J. Hurrell, P. Jones, D. Parker, T. Peterson, D. Robinson, J. Walsh, M. Abbott, L. Alexander, H. Alexandersson, R. Allan, R. Alley, P. Ambenje, P. Arkin, L. Bajuk, R. Balling, M.Y. Bardin, R. Bradley, R. Brázdil, K.R. Briffa, H. Brooks, R.D. Brown, S. Brown, M. Brunet-India, M. Cane, D. Changnon, S. Changnon, J. Cole, D. Collins, E. Cook, A. Dai, A. Douglas, B. Douglas, J.C. Duplessy, D. Easterling, P. Englehart, R.E. Eskridge, D. Etheridge, D. Fisher, D. Gaffen, K. Gallo, E. Genikhovich, D. Gong, G. Gutman,W. Haeberli, J. Haigh, J. Hansen, D. Hardy, S. Harrison, R. Heino, K. Hennessy,W. Hogg, S. Huang, K. Hughen, M.K. Hughes, M. Hulme, H. Iskenderian, O.M. Johannessen, D. Kaiser, D. Karoly, D. Kley, R. Knight, K.R. Kumar, K. Kunkel, M. Lal, C. Landsea, J. Lawrimore, J. Lean, C. Leovy, H. Lins, R. Livezey, K.M. Lugina, I. Macadam, J.A. Majorowicz, B. Manighetti, J. Marengo, E. Mekis, M.W. Miles, A. Moberg, I. Mokhov, V. Morgan, L. Mysak, M. New, J. Norris, L. Ogallo, J. Overpeck, T. Owen, D. Paillard, T. Palmer, C. Parkinson, C.R. Pfister, N. Plummer, H. Pollack, C. Prentice, R. Quayle, E.Y. Rankova, N. Rayner, V.N. Razuvaev, G. Ren, J. Renwick, R. Reynolds, D. Rind, A. Robock, R. Rosen, S. Rösner, R. Ross, D. Rothrock, J.M. Russell, M. Serreze,W.R. Skinner, J. Slack, D.M. Smith, D. Stahle, M. Stendel, A. Sterin, T. Stocker, B. Sun, V. Swail, V. Thapliyal, L. Thompson,W.J. Thompson, A. Timmermann, R. Toumi, K. Trenberth, H. Tuomenvirta, T. van Ommen, D. Vaughan, K.Y. Vinnikov, U. von Grafenstein, H. von Storch, M. Vuille, P. Wadhams, J.M. Wallace, S. Warren,W. White, P. Xie, P. Zhai 

And nearly 700 "expert reviewers".

So to my way of thinking, to put imagined "wrongs" of any single IPCC report (which has been twice superseded) on the shoulders of one lone individual and neglect the more than 850 other people who played a part, is a bit much!  What it demonstrates is the Serengeti Strategy so beloved of disinformers and deniers. This time they try to isolate one individual from a very large herd.

2. A false claim from the disinformers

Secondly, the chapter did not misrepresent the temperature record of the past 1,000 years. At the time, arguably the paper by Mann and colleagues was indeed the "best estimate". In any case, Chapter 2 of the IPCC TAR included references to other reconstructions with citations and charts.

3. Deniers are out of touch and out of date

Thirdly, there have been two more IPCC reports since TAR and they present more recent research, which has refined knowledge with new data and multiple new temperature reconstructions, all of which lend support to earlier findings.

Box TS.5 Figure 1 Last-millennium simulations and reconstructions Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Disinformers are misleading

Anthony's copy and paste misleadingly includes the following claim:

Further, both the Oxburgh and Muir Russell reports concluded that the IPCC 2001 graphic was “misleading”. 

This is misleading! The Muir Russell report referred to the WMO graphic used on the cover of the 1999 report and only indirectly, in parenthesis, to the IPCC TAR, writing about "one of the series" (not the others of the series):

25. The WMO report is a short document produced annually. It does not have the status or importance of the IPCC reports. The figure in question was a frontispiece and there is no major discussion or emphasis on it in the text. The caption of the figure states: "Northern Hemisphere temperatures were reconstructed for the past 1000 years (up to 1999) using palaeoclimatic records (tree rings, corals, ice cores, lake sediments, etc.), along with historical and long instrumental records”.

26. Finding: In relation to "hide the decline" we find that, given its subsequent iconic significance (not least the use of a similar figure in the TAR), the figure supplied for the WMO Report was misleading in not describing that one of the series was truncated post 1960 for the figure, and in not being clear on the fact that proxy and instrumental data were spliced together. We do not find that it is misleading to curtail reconstructions at some point per se, or to splice data, but we believe that both of these procedures should have been made plain – ideally in the figure but certainly clearly described in either the caption or the text.

The Oxburgh report does not use the word "misleading" in relation to the WMO graphic or any TAR temperature reconstruction.  The only relevant passage I could find was this:

Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

I think it's worth emphasising what the Oxburgh report noted. For example, one of the papers referred to in TAR emphasizes uncertainties and limitations in its title - Mann, M.E., R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes, 1999: "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations". Geophys. Res. Lett., 26, 759-762.  Since that paper was published there have been numerous other reconstructions. When you take them together with the instrumental records you end up with a hockey stick!

It's also worth highlighting the Addendum to the Oxburgh report, which clearly states about "any research group in the field of climate change":

For the avoidance of misunderstanding in the light of various press stories, it is important to be clear that the neither the panel report nor the press briefing intended to imply that any research group in the field of climate change had been deliberately misleading in any of their analyses or intentionally exaggerated their findings. Rather, the aim was to draw attention to the complexity of statistics in this field, and the need to use the best possible methods.

Meanwhile, the world takes its sweet time to act decisively

The main point, though, is that all this is past history.  There has been a lot more work in the thirteen years since then.  While climate science deniers are obsessed with misrepresenting the past, we keep marching on toward hotter global temperatures and rapidly changing climates. The world hasn't even stopped increasing annual CO2 emissions, let alone reduced them.

A diversion and thank you for one million page views

Climate change is a demanding topic. This is a brief diversion by way of thank you to all HotWhopper readers and contributors.

I know it's not the "done thing" to write about reader stats (when did HotWhopper ever worry about the "done thing"?) - but according to Google blogger, HotWhopper reached it's one millionth page view earlier this week, which astounds me. It's way beyond what I envisaged when the blog was started seventeen months ago. All thanks to readers.

This milestone is also a reality check to lift the game and keep striving for better content.

Here's my thank you to climate scientists everywhere and to HotWhopper readers, particularly to those of you who comment here, and to those of you who retweet and link from other blogs and discussion boards - at least those of you who like bird photos :) These photos were all taken in our back yard or just over the back fence, and are of common visitors. As always, click to enlarge.

First a little Grey Fantail, a lively bird.

Grey Fantail

Then the Laughing Kookaburra.

Kookaburra

And a view of its tail :)

Kookaburra

The Pied Currawong pops in quite often, usually with lots of mates.

Pied Currawong

Eastern Rosellas are a tad shy, but enjoy eating the thistles in the land on the other side of our back fence:

Eastern Rosella

While the Satin Bower Bird likes figs:

Satin Bowerbird

White (sulphur-crested) cockatoos make a racket - this one is screeching while flying overhead:

Cockatoo

Finally my favourite bird, the Magpie, which sings the most beautiful and complex songs in between chatting. Magpies are the friendliest birds and very smart (and playful). They also get to know individual people. They don't swoop on their friends :)

Magpie

Arctic warming: It's not natural variability, it's all down to soot, sez Anthony Watts at WUWT

In yet another "anything but CO2" article (archived here, latest update here), Anthony Watts wants to blame all the recent warming in Greenland on soot.  He reaches left, right, up and down to get out of carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas and warming the world. Which is pretty funny when he also tries the "I'm a reasonable man, really I am" tack by posting articles where he pretends that he really does think there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect.

What's even funnier is that Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in his effort to blame soot for Greenland warming.

Changes in atmospheric circulation caused some of the Arctic warming

Anthony is disputing another Nature paper, this one is about attribution of the causes of the very high amount of warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada. Going by the abstract and the press release, the authors have concluded that up to half the recent warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada may be natural variability. These areas have been warming at around 1° Celsius a decade since 1979, which is about twice that of the global average temperature rise.  The scientists have found that about half of this (0.5° Celsius a decade) is related to changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic, caused by a warmer western tropical Pacific Ocean.

From ScienceDaily.com:

The natural variations in the new study related to an unusually warm western tropical Pacific, near Papua New Guinea. Since the mid-1990s the water surface there has been about 0.3 degrees hotter than normal. Computer models show this affects the regional air pressure, setting off a stationary wave in the atmosphere that arcs in a great circle from the tropical Pacific toward Greenland before turning back over the Atlantic.

"Along this wave train there are warm spots where the air has been pushed down, and cold spots where the air has been pulled up," Wallace said. "And Greenland is in one of the warm spots."

In previous studies, Wallace and Battisti have documented the existence of decades-long climate variations in the Pacific Ocean that resemble the well-known shorter-range El Niño variations.

This particular location in the tropical Pacific may be a "sweet spot" for generating global atmospheric waves. A series of studies led by co-author Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, working with Ding and Battisti, showed that waves starting in the same place but radiating southward are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.
Researchers can't say for how long the tropical Pacific will remain in this state.

"Our work shows that about half of the warming signal in Greenland comes from the predictable part -- forcing of climate by anthropogenic greenhouse gases -- but about half comes from the unpredictable part," Steig said.

The atmosphere makes the world seem small

The world is large, but studies like this show that the world isn't so large that the ocean right down near New Guinea, which is in the tropical southern hemisphere can affect the Arctic, way up north. And at the same time this same area of the Pacific is causing atmospheric waves that are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.

Anthony's sooty fixation

Anthony doesn't believe it.  He wrote about a photo of a pool of water in Greenland, which I traced back to here originally.  Anthony isn't talking about the dirty snow in the foreground. He's talking about the dark section of the pool in the shadow.

Water Filled Canyon (Greenland) Although snow has dammed outflow from the lake, nearby melt streams continue to fill sections of the canyon where snow has not accumulated.

Credit and Source: Polar Science Center, University of Washington

Anthony doesn't say how he can tell from a photograph what is causing the darker colour in the pool - whether it's dust or dirt or soot or algae or just extra deep water or all of these. Anthony Watts has done his photo-science and decided that it's definitely soot, writing:

[Note: part of the answer is in the photo they provide with the press release below, but they don't see it. - Anthony]...

...Note the black at the bottom of the melt pool, that’s carbon soot. That’s something the UW authors aren’t paying attention to....

…it has a big effect on albedo, and thus absorbed solar insolation, likely far more so than CO2 forcing, 

Another thing is, if Anthony had bothered to read the abstract and the references, he'd have noticed that the authors do indeed acknowledge that black soot does play a part in warming the Arctic (and the world). If he'd read the paper the scientists referenced, he'd have noticed that black carbon, although it does have a large effect it's not as large a forcing as CO2. As Hansen and Nazarenko wrote:

The substantial role inferred for soot in global climate does not alter the fact that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming in the past century and are expected to be the largest climate forcing the rest of this century.

You may recall that Anthony has tried this argument before, misrepresenting the findings of another more recent study, which showed that the impact of soot on the Arctic depends on where it comes from. If it comes from the Arctic itself it will have a bigger impact than if it comes from the mid-latitudes. ("The Arctic surface temperature is almost 5 times more sensitive to black carbon emitted from within the Arctic than to emissions from mid-latitudes.")

Since I started this article, Anthony has added another photo showing how the albedo on Greenland has changed over the years. Thing is, it's not just dirt and dust and soot that causes the surface to become darker. As it states in the NASA article that Anthony refers to, it's not just soot:

Climate scientists have long expected that Earth’s icy North would become less reflective as global temperatures rose. Rising temperatures melt snow and ice. The uncovered terrain is darker—ocean water, vegetation, bare ground—so the area absorbs more sunlight than it used to, leading to more warming, which causes more melting. In short, the loss of reflectiveness amplifies the initial warming. This feedback is underway on Greenland’s ice, especially since 2006, a year that marks a fundamental shift toward a warmer, greener Arctic, according to the Arctic Report Card.

...The darkening in the non-melting areas, says Dr. Box, is due to changes in the shape and size of the ice crystals in the snowpack as its temperature rises. Snow grains clump together, and they reflect less light than the many-faceted, smaller crystals. Additional heat rounds the sharp edges of the crystals. Round particles absorb more sunlight than jagged ones do. 

Here is a chart showing overall contributions of humans to global warming. CO2 is by far the biggest followed by methane, but soot plays quite an important role as well. Click for larger view.

Figure TS.7 Radiative forcing of climate change during the industrial era shown by emitted components from 1750 to 2011. Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

A couple of other points. Anthony wants to blame the hotter Greenland and north eastern Canada on soot. What about the rest of the Arctic? Is soot not falling there? And is there more soot falling in the Arctic now than it did in the past?  I don't know the answer to those questions, but from what I've read there isn't any more soot being produced than there was in the past. If anything, it's decreasing.

The really weird thing is that in his focus on soot (much of which comes from human activity), Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in the recent rapid warming of Greenland and north eastern Canada, which is what the paper was all about after all.

From the WUWT comments

Surprisingly a lot of people are quizzing Anthony on his interpretation of the photograph he showed above. He's not having a good day.

Francisco Fernandez thinks that we should have all perished by now. He's quite impatient and has no concept of geological time scales when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:35 am
What I don’t get is, with all this modelling and VERY (sarc) high climate sensitivity, how is it that there’s still life on earth?

Wouldn’t the extintion of the dinosaurs, due to a catastrophic event that obliterated the species, would have caused more damage than mere CO2 <0.04%v/v?

Now, I am not sure if the dinosaur extintion due to the meteorite is a fact or theory. But if it is a fact, shouldn't it shed some light on how resilent the climate is?

steveta_uk thinks the study means he doesn't have to be concerned about global warming and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:36 am
If they’re right, and 1/2 the warming is natural, then that about agrees with the recent lower estimates for sensitivity, and means that the expected 1.5C warming by 2100 is nothing to panic about.
So Steig has joined us at last!

john challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:40 am
Anthony, is it ALL carbon soot? Does wind blown glacial dust, or atmospheric dust, also take on a dark color when submerged? Not disagreeing about albedo effect, just wondering if carbon is the only source of dark coloration at the bottom of a melt pool on a glacier.

Billy Liar also challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:47 am
Can someone point to a chemical analysis of the black stuff in that Greenland pond?
I’m sceptical that it is ‘soot’. Oh, and where does the red stuff that you see over arctic glaciers occasionally come from?

When Paul Woland compliments Anthony for posting an article from Nature, Anthony sticks to his photo-science:

May 8, 2014 at 7:48 am
Well done WUWT for finally starting to publish research papers that, like virtually all climate-related papers in Nature, attests to the reality of significant temperature increases caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

REPLY: So like the authors of the paper, you missed what was in the photo too? – Anthony

SIGINT EX quibbles with Anthony, but Anthony is sticking to his guns:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
No soot in the pool ! Just a photograph, low sun angle, shadow and diminished illumination against a very bright foreground on top ! Particulate measured in Firn and glacier ice is at the ppm level. Not enough to make a difference.

REPLY: No, sorry, you are wrong. It’s soot, dust, etc. people have sampled the bottom of those pools. Read the links provided before inserting foot in mouth. See map I’m adding from NASA showing deposition – Anthony

Neil says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

richard says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:27 am
To me the dark part looks like a deeper part of the water, i notice that there are no darker parts elsewhere or if it is does the movement of water carry it to one part.

The bottom of the picture shows discoloration of the snow- soot? that has melted and yet everywhere else looks pristine. 

Shawn in High River doesn't realise that the scientists have crunched the numbers and says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:44 am
How do they know that exactly half is due to AGW and the other half is the unpredictable part? How did they come up with that figure of 50% AGW ?

hunter confuses Greenland and north eastern Canada with the entire world when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:58 am
In a sense they are back peddling from the apocalypse. Now it is only 50% due to evil humans. Last year it was all human CO2. Is it due to highconfidence that the AGW believers have ‘won’ and will see their self-serviing policies imposed no matter the facts?

Steven Mosher becomes a bit impatient with Anthony Watts and his fake sceptics and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:39 am
“Neil says: May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

1. There is no evidence that this photo shows soot.
2. Its assumed and asserted as fact.
3. Note the lack of skepticism about this “evidence”

That said, soot plays a role. thats part of the human forcing equation.
If you want to know how much of a role soot plays you have to run a GCM.
or you can just speculate and assert that it plays a major role.

Science: build a tool to try to understand the role of soot.

Politics: assert that its all down to soot. no comprehensive data, no methods, a few pictures, no testing of the hypothesis.. just assertion.

Doug Proctor also thinks that Greenland is the whole world and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:55 am
To say that half is natural, not human-caused, is to say that you are a denier (of consensus, IPCC science). It is to say that any action to reduce human generated CO2 will have half the effect of the IPCC scenarios, and kill both the economics and the actual result of what is proposed “must” happen. 

---

Qinghua Ding, John M. Wallace, David S. Battisti, Eric J. Steig, Ailie J. E. Gallant, Hyung-Jin Kim, Lei Geng. Tropical forcing of the recent rapid Arctic warming in northeastern Canada and Greenland. Nature, 2014; 509 (7499): 209 DOI: 10.1038/nature13260

Hansen, James, and Larissa Nazarenko. "Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101, no. 2 (2004): 423-428. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2237157100

Sand, M., T. K. Berntsen, Ø. Seland, and J. E. Kristjánsson (2013), Arctic surface temperature change to emissions of black carbon within Arctic or midlatitudes, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50613.

WUWT is severely undernourished when it comes to the science of crop production with rising CO2

Anthony Watts has another of his "claim" articles - which is his dogwhistle to the members of the WUWT Scientific Illiterati to display their allegiance to ignorance (archived here).

The science is about something that's been appearing in the literature over the years about the impact of rising CO2 on plant nutrients of importance to human health.  This time it's the result of a large international collaboration involving twenty scientists from the USA, Israel, Australia and Japan.

These twenty scientists are affiliated with numerous prominent organisations, including: Harvard (various), Ben-Gurion University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UC Davis, University of Pennsylvania, DEPI Victoria Australia, National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences Japan, USDA (various), University of Arizona, The Nature Conservancy New Mexico and The University of Melbourne (various).

About FACE

No, WUWT-ers haven't done an about-face.  This is about FACE, which was the system used in the research.

ScienceDaily.com has a press release about the research paper. (As usual, Anthony didn't provide a link to the paper or to the press release.) What the various studies looked at was the impact of higher CO2 levels on multiple varieties of multiple important staple crops, including wheat, rice, field peas, soybeans, maize and sorghum. The way they did this was in open-air fields using a system that pumps out CO2 to simulate the levels expected over coming decades.  The CO2 pumping system, called FACE (Free Air Concentration Enrichment), pumps out CO2 and automatically adjusts it.  The research compared the crops grown under high CO2 with crops grown at current CO2 levels.  All the other growing conditions were the same - including sunlight, soil, water and temperature.

What they found is not a surprise to people who've been keeping up with the scientific literature but it's notable for the breadth and depth of the study, the variety of crops studied and the fact that it was conducted in open air conditions, with controls of current day conditions. As reported by ScienceDaily.com:

The study contributed "more than tenfold more data regarding both the zinc and iron content of the edible portions of crops grown under FACE conditions" than available from previous studies, the team wrote.

C3 crops have lower levels of important nutrients at higher CO2

The most important findings were that at higher CO2, a lot of the important crops (wheat, rice, field peas and soybeans) had a big reduction in zinc and iron, which is very important for human health. Zinc and iron deficiencies already affect a large number of people in the world and as CO2 rises, this could become an even bigger problem. Except for the legumes, the C3 crops also had lower concentrations of protein. Protein content is particularly important for processing qualities of wheat - making bread, pizzas and pasta for example. Of course it's also important nutritionally for wheat and rice.

Sorghum and maize are C4 plants and their nutrients weren't affected by higher CO2. C4 plants photosynthesize differently to C3 plants. From ScienceDaily.com again:

Nutrients in sorghum and maize remained relatively stable at higher CO2 levels because these crops use a type of photosynthesis, called C4, which already concentrates carbon dioxide in their leaves, Leakey said.

"C4 is sort of a fuel-injected photosynthesis that maize and sorghum and millet have," he said. "Our previous work here at Illinois has shown that their photosynthesis rates are not stimulated by being at elevated CO2. They already have high CO2 inside their leaves."

Role for plant breeders

The results of this research will be important for plant breeders.  There will need to be a focus on breeding to retain nutrients in crops grown under higher CO2 levels. It's just another feature to add to the growing list of attributes that plant breeders will need to focus on.  The list already includes breeding for drought tolerance, disease resistance under high humidity etc etc.  The abstract of the paper suggests:

Differences between cultivars of a single crop suggest that breeding for decreased sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 concentration could partly address these new challenges to global health.

From the WUWT comments

H/tip to Magma for pointing out the silliness at WUWT.

Lou says there's a simple solution - stop eating food:

May 7, 2014 at 2:10 pm
Hmm… It’s not like wheat is good for you anyway (See Heart Scan Blog or Wheat Belly Diet by Dr Mike Davis) for more information. Some are quite susceptible to wheat based food (diabetes and heart disease).

Anyway, I’ll have to see more studies to make sure that study holds up or not because as everybody already knows, leftists are desperate to label CO2 as dangerous so they’re looking for ways to demonize it.

Matt Maschinot says he's got another solution, the opposite to Lou - Matt says just eat more, not less:

May 7, 2014 at 2:24 pm
I’m curious as to what the growth efficiency was, for those plants that lost nutritional value. Is it possible that the additional CO2 increased the efficiency of the growth of the plant, and that by growing quicker, the plants did not accumulate the same level of nutrients?

If that’s the case, wouldn’t higher crop yields, result in lower cost, and higher consumption? And wouldn’t that offset the lower nutritional value of the individual plant?

schitzree doesn't know the difference between greenhouse tomatoes and open field grain and legume crops (or between greenhouse tomatoes and field tomatoes) and says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:15 pm
So I guess we need to tell commercial greenhouse owners that they’ve been wrong all this time? I’m sure they will be happy to hear they won’t have to buy all that extra CO2 anymore.

tteclod didn't bother reading the press release and has a lot of questions for most of which the answer is already provided (as if anyone at WUWT would answer them anyway). tteclod is a clod and talks about "he" instead of the "they" - being 20 scientists, and says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:22 pm
Also, he seems to differentiate between photosynthesis mechanisms. This looks like a study for a plant biologist and ag engineer to critique.

Also, what carbon-dioxide concentration did he achieve? How was the concentration measured? How was the CO2 introduced? Was the elevated CO2 level maintained throughout the daily photosynthesis cycle, or did it change according to time of day? How did they handle weather and winds in an open field. Did they measure the natural CO2 level in the region before, during, and after the experiment and compare to controls? What species of crops did they use? Did they make any comparison of nutritional values to nearby crops harvested by others?

ladylifegrows knows much more than all of those silly scientists from around the world put together, and says that the little goblins who work inside the cells of the plant factory will have lots of free time under higher CO2, because of "Rubisco". So they can turn their efforts to making other nutrients of "increased concentration and variety", presumably because they won't be as busy manufacturing carbohydrates:

May 7, 2014 at 2:24 pm
Rubisco is the name of the main plant protein that turns CO2 + H2O into sugar and oxygen. With higher CO2, the plant will need less of this protein and minerals associated with it. That will give the plant freedom to produce other nutrients in increased concentration and variety. Logically, this should mean a much more health-promoting food, but it would take sophisticated research for find out for sure or to quantify it. That pretty much cannot be done in a highly biased atmosphere. And good luck finding anything else.

Mike Maguire doesn't believe in wolves (or science), and says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:28 pm
In Aesops Fable “The boy who cried wolf” how many different times did the village people get fooled?

In the IPCC Fable, “The planet that was being destroyed by CO2″ we have been subjected to hundreds(make that many thousands) of CO2 wolf stories but the CO2 wolf still has not come after 20 years.

At this point, even if this study was valid, it is almost impossible for me to believe that finally after screaming wolf for 20 years, a real wolf(and this one, not necessarily a big bad wolf) could actually be there.

Les Johnson says he doesn't believe it, but can't be bothered going to look at the article or tables himself:

May 7, 2014 at 2:33 pm
I see some control issues here. Protein in wheat is determined by how much rain and sun, and when during the wheat development, the rain and sun are applied. How long was the study? If only a few years, or god forbid one year, then the results would be weather more than CO2.
Anyone find the paper? I would like to read about the methods.

R2D2 says that undernourished people living in underdeveloped countries should pop into their local supermarket and buy some multi-vitamins - simple!

May 7, 2014 at 2:45 pm
Or take some multi vitamin

Kon Dealer is probably correct when she or he says:

May 7, 2014 at 2:52 pm
I guess these “scientists” have never heard of the word “fertliser”? 

I haven't come across that word before, either.


tegirinenashi, who wouldn't know science if it bit him in the butt, says:

May 7, 2014 at 3:16 pm
I think there is a way to combat this endless flow of superficial half-baked “research”. Conservative think tank institutions can establish annual “Bad Science” award with nominal prizes. I don’t think researchers would think twice before publishing anything that may be caught by negative publicity of getting BS award.

Charles Nelson didn't bother reading the article. He thinks the paper is about tomatoes. (It wasn't. It was a study of grain and legume field crops.) He says:

May 7, 2014 at 3:23 pm
Pure garbage.
Are they claiming that tomatoes grown in greenhouses with elevated CO2 are less ‘nutritious’?
I’ll bet they can afford ‘organic’ fruit and veg.

Jungle says the research is meaningless because plant breeders "should be able to adapt". Jungle doesn't say how the plant breeders are supposed to know what to adapt to, without studies such as these:

May 7, 2014 at 3:27 pm
Even if this was the case. Plant breeders should be able to adapt to that scenario. Another meaningless study.

Okay, I've read enough.  There are almost 100 WUWT comments along the lines of the above. A good example of the WUWT scientific illiterati who worship ignorance and despise knowledge and learning.

---

Samuel S. Myers, Antonella Zanobetti, Itai Kloog, Peter Huybers, Andrew D. B. Leakey, Arnold J. Bloom, Eli Carlisle, Lee H. Dietterich, Glenn Fitzgerald, Toshihiro Hasegawa, N. Michele Holbrook, Randall L. Nelson, Michael J. Ottman, Victor Raboy, Hidemitsu Sakai, Karla A. Sartor, Joel Schwartz, Saman Seneweera, Michael Tausz, Yasuhiro Usui. Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition. Nature, 2014; DOI: 10.1038/nature13179 (pdf here)

Deniers at WUWT are up in arms about the US National Climate Assessment

Going by the number of protest articles at WUWT, it's unclear whether climate science deniers want to promote or suppress the newly released National Climate Assessment. This assessment was produced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Jeff Masters has a very good summary. Here is an excerpt from the overview, which gives you an idea of what the report covers and the general slant:

This National Climate Assessment collects, integrates, and assesses observations and research from around the country, helping us to see what is actually happening and understand what it means for our lives, our livelihoods, and our future. The report includes analyses of impacts on seven sectors – human health, water, energy, transportation, agriculture, forests, and ecosystems – and the interactions among sectors at the national level. The report also assesses key impacts on all U.S. regions: Northeast, Southeast and Caribbean, Midwest, Great Plains, Southwest, Northwest, Alaska, Hawai'i and Pacific Islands, as well as the country’s coastal areas, oceans, and marine resources.

Over recent decades, climate science has advanced significantly. Increased scrutiny has led to increased certainty that we are now seeing impacts associated with human-induced climate change. With each passing year, the accumulating evidence further expands our understanding and extends the record of observed trends in temperature, precipitation, sea level, ice mass, and many other variables recorded by a variety of measuring systems and analyzed by independent research groups from around the world. It is notable that as these data records have grown longer and climate models have become more comprehensive, earlier predictions have largely been confirmed. The only real surprises have been that some changes, such as sea level rise and Arctic sea ice decline, have outpaced earlier projections.

What is new over the last decade is that we know with increasing certainty that climate change is happening now. While scientists continue to refine projections of the future, observations unequivocally show that climate is changing and that the warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from burning coal, oil, and gas, with additional contributions from forest clearing and some agricultural practices.

Global climate is projected to continue to change over this century and beyond, but there is still time to act to limit the amount of change and the extent of damaging impacts.

This U.S. Global Change Research Program isn't new. It was established under President George Herbert Walker Bush by Presidential Initiative in 1989. It was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 to “assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”

The USGCRP website lists all the agencies participating in the USGCRP. They are:

• Agency for International Development
• Department of Agriculture
• Department of Commerce
• Department of Defense
• Department of Energy
• Department of Health & Human Services
• Department of State
• Department of the Interior
• Department of Transportation
• Environmental Protection Agency
• National Aeronautics & Space Administration
• National Science Foundation
• Smithsonian Institution

The USGCRP has a legal mandate to conduct a National Climate Assessment (NCA) every four years. This latest assessment is only the third National Climate Assessment, so I don't know when it was given the mandate, but the organisation itself has been in existence longer than 16 years.  Some of its reports are a bit slow in coming!

Anthony Watts has so far posted five articles protesting the report (in almost as many hours), with the following headlines:

1. National Climate Assessment report: Alarmists offer untrue, unrelenting doom and gloom (archived here), which is an article by "dirty energy industries' best friend" Marlo Lewis, who is some chap from the US-based right wing lobby group the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
2. I’ve been waiting for this statement, and the National Climate Assessment has helpfully provided it (archived here), in which Anthony quotes "Steve Goddard" of all people, then goes on to push Evan Jones' as yet unpublished work with as yet no substance to underpin it (discussed here and here)
3. Quotes of the Week: Some early comments on the National Climate Assesment report (archived here); in which Anthony has some more quotes from science contrarians and disinformers like Pat'nChip
4. Some advance copy on the National Climate Assessment Report (archived here); in which Anthony appeals to the scaredy cat deniers "they are trying to make people afraid of the more mundane weather" and goes on to give a bit of the content of the report.
5. What the National Climate Assessment Doesn’t Tell You (archived here); a protest article by Pat'nChip from the right wing science disinforming lobby group, the CATO Institute.

There are only a few themes to the protests.

The "they're trying to scare you" theme. First of all, you can tell that deniers often deny because they don't want to be scared. For example, Marlo Lewis writes: As with previous editions, the new report is an alarmist document designed to scare people and build political support for unpopular policies such as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, and EPA regulatory mandates.

The "we'll adapt" theme (or die). Pat'nChip argue that people will adapt to ever-hotter heat waves, so there's no need to worry. I expect they are relying on manufacturers being able to design air conditioners that don't stop working when the temperature gets too hot.  If you shop around you can find air conditioners that will work up to 46° Celsius (115°F), but read the specs because some will only work up to what is even now in some parts becoming a "mild" 43° Celsius (109°F).  And take precautions, because when you want your air conditioner to work, so does everyone else, which can result in rationing of electricity. Fires don't help either. In some parts of the world, it's not just the heat that affects electricity supply, water rationing is introduced as well. (The Arizona Department of Health Services is not nearly as complacent as Pat'nChip.)

The "it's all a hoax" theme. Anthony claims that some unknown persons are making wrong adjustments to the record and that it hasn't really been as hot as everyone knows and has felt it to be. People (and animals and plants) are just imagining the earlier snow melt and the extreme heat and the evaporating water. He's put up a silly chart and some pretty pictures to "prove" it. Thing is, he had to call on not just his unpublished and unsubstantiated paper but "steve goddard".

The "it's political" theme. Where he quotes science denier John Coleman trying to argue that Republicans don't accept science because of their politics, or some such nonsense. John doesn't like it when people point out he's a science denier, even while he denies the science he wrote, while not pointing to a single scientific study to support his wild claim:

There are thousands and thousands of scientists who know without a doubt that the entire matter is based on bad science. We fight with everything we have to inform the public of the truth, but the dominate liberal media shuns us and the global warming team calls us names and insults us.

Is it an insult to say that people like the crowd at WUWT deny science? The fact is they do.

Pleading insanity? Denier weirdness at WUWT - your host: Tim Ball.

Tim Ball the conspiracy theorist was let loose at WUWT today (archived here). No, I don't mean he let loose. I mean what I wrote, he was let loose. He's been let out, unsupervised.  (Perhaps he's angling for the insanity defense in his current court cases.)

As John asked in the WUWT comments:

May 4, 2014 at 8:18 pm
Is this a joke?

Let's see if I can decipher Tim's article.

Tim starts off talking about "agents of the IPCC".  You know, the infamous secret spy ring "the IPCC". It's members infiltrated the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which spread its tentacles far and wide and inserted sleeper agents into NASA and Penn State University and the University of Chicago and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the British Antarctic Expedition and various other nefarious organisations (even Wikipedia).  These evil spies communicate by secret coded emails that they hide from innocent parties like Steve McIntyre and the American Tradition Institute, who have offices of analysts standing by to decode the secret messages in the email headers to find the missing core tops in the bristlecones to determine whether the ice age will start this year or next.

Tim knows that hidden in the blade of Michael Mann's hockey stick that he keeps in a locked basement in the secret hideaway known as "RealClimate" is the secret code. But first he has to get the key from the current Ruler of the World, Tom Wigley, and to do that he needs to get past the duo of bouncers known as "Bradley and Hughes".

Tim tells us that Mr Cuccinelli valiantly fought The Mann, on behalf of the good guys known as The Taxpayers.  However that upright gentleman was thwarted by the evil cabal otherwise known as the Supreme Court, which is an arm of the evil IPCC - though the details are a bit murky and are buried in the Nobel Prize and protected by Proprietary Rights, which is another agency of the evil UN that has surreptitiously taken over the world and is about to seize all Intellectual and Other Property including everyone's private property (before sending everyone on the Long March to the FEMA concentration camps aka Agenda21).

As fobdangerclose says:

May 4, 2014 at 8:16 pm
It is not supported by law, the cult has misplaced the real law of reason, all they have is power.
They use it for their own evil ends. Just say no.

And Oracle has hit the nail on the head, writing:

May 4, 2014 at 8:57 pm
The IPCC’s true goal is to use *any* means possible to bring about a U.N. one world government somewhat communist/marxist/lenninist or extreme socialist in nature, and they clearly don’t care how many lies they propagate to achieve their true goal.
Lord Monckton leaked some documents to Fox News some years ago which showed the UN/IPCC agenda.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/09/08/years-setbacks-looks-world-leader/
http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/austria_retreat_papers.pdf

These U.N. anti-freedom control freak petty tyrants must never be allowed to succeed.
Conspiracy Theory – I think not! 

Of course, the thlot plickens further to the Ineptitude of Obamma (another name for the Barack Fiefdom) and the oilfields of the Middle East as the illustrious Streetcred, you can tell by his name that he has a nose for such things, says:

May 4, 2014 at 10:57 pm
Ah, Bushbunny, but think of how successful the socialists have been to limit fossil fuel supply … via Obamma’s ineptitude the oil output from the Middle East has been strangled by civil war and terrorism, and the supply of cheap gas to Europe from Russia is also threatened. Price of crude through the roof and cost of natural gas similarly disposed. 

While the bushbunny points out that "they" are not just "they" they are also "them" and says:

May 5, 2014 at 1:23 am
Streetcred, Gosh I don’t think it is ‘just’ socialists, what about Fascists. Anyway guys must go and have my dinner, so keep writing.

Twobob nods sagely and says:

May 5, 2014 at 2:38 am
Hi KNR.
Your B. Was it a serendipitous Mistake.
Keep your proof secret,refuse to share it and employ has may some and
mirrors has you can.
Like cracked mirrors of their souls. 

Beware, the secret IPCC which is a front for the evil empire of the UN. The IPCC is coming to get you. Yes, you. You have been warned!

(I kid you not!)

Difficulties in denial at WUWT: Oceans are getting warmer, no they aren't, yes they are...

WUWT-ers must get mightily confused at times. Then again, one thing about deniers, especially those prone to conspiracy ideation, is that they can happily hold two contradictory notions simultaneously. (This article isn't as thorough as usual because I've got a few other things on my plate. Feel free to fill in the gaps in the comments.)

The oceans aren't warming - much, sez Christopher

Yesterday Christopher Monckton wrote (archived here) that he was sent a paper by Willie Soon, that rejects the rising seas. (Isn't there a biblical lesson there somewhere?) Christopher didn't link to the paper but I think this is the one. It's by another science denier called Beenstock.  Christopher didn't link to the paper itself, and none of the commenters asked him for the paper or a link to it either! This is probably the paper - it's by Michael Beenstock et al and it hasn't been published anywhere that I can find. Michael is apparently a Professor of Economics and a climate science denier so I guess he knows all about tide gauges - umm.

Anyway, that's settled. The tides aren't rising so the seas aren't warming, if you listen to people like Michael and Christopher and WUWT.  Christopher even drags up the name of Nils Axel-Morner.  Who can forget Nils Axel-Morner's chart that he presented to a UK Parliamentary Committee to "prove" that seas are not rising:

Source: UK Parliament written submission from Nils Axel-Morner

Citizen's Challenge has an article about Nils and his claims.

Yes they are, sez Anthony

Wait a sec. Now the oceans are warming so much they are causing climate change. It's undersea volcanoes!!

In another article just today (archived here), Anthony goes and muddies the (ocean) waters by arguing that climate science is wrong because it doesn't count undersea volcanoes.  Is he arguing that global warming is caused by a sudden explosion of new volcanoes under the sea that weren't there before and no-one knows about because they are hidden and no-one knows about them?

No. Anthony doesn't go quite that far.  The expert he calls upon is a man by the name of John Reid, who wrote an article for that renowned non-peer reviewed literary unscientific right wing magazine Quadrant. A favourite publication of all the science deniers who can't get their silliness published in a science journal and don't even try.  This time Anthony does put a link to the article - I've archived it here.  John Reid isn't an oceanographer or a climatologist - he's a retired physicist who, from the look of it, gave up physics for climate science denial.

This "undersea volcanoes" meme pops up from time to time at WUWT. Yes, there are volcanoes under the oceans, like on the land, but there aren't suddenly a whole rash of new volcanoes that are heating up the earth and making the oceans boil. Nothing's changed.

Yes, the seas are rising and the oceans are warming

The oceans are warming but they aren't warming from below. They are warming from above. It's because of all the CO2 in the air that's warming the earth as a whole.

From the WUWT comments

Like I said, I'm short of time.  This will have to do :)

drumphil says:

May 3, 2014 at 10:02 pm
Gawd, Christopher has actually found a place where people with call him “Lord” with a straight face?

Climate models are skilful - Gavin Schmidt and TED give us 10 lessons in denialism at WUWT

To show how even-handed he is, Anthony Watts posted a TED video of Gavin Schmidt talking about climate models (archived here).  Anthony wrote:

Love him or hate him, it is worthwhile to understand where he is coming from, so I present this video: The emergent patterns of climate change.

The "love him or hate him" is the language of deniers. They aren't interested so much in what Dr Schmidt has to say, they prefer to get personal.  It's a "must have" for the Serengeti Strategy.

Anthony adds quite unnecessarily: "comments welcome".

It's worth watching the video full screen (click in the bottom right) and reading the transcript:

It's short. In just over 12 minutes Gavin Schmidt shows how scientists write code to emulate what happens with clouds, solar radiation, ice, natural and human-made aerosols, soil and vegetation, and other things that together shape our climate.

For a more detailed discussion of climate models, you can't do much better than this article by Scott K. Johnson at Ars Technica.

I went through the WUWT comments till I got up to ten lessons. There is more to learn, but ten is enough to get you going as an accredited science denier.  Here they are, with examples in the WUWT comments below.

• Lesson 1: accept one part of science and follow it up with a silly statement. Deniers are good at "silly". The silly statement proves to the crowd that you really are a science denier.
• Lesson 2: Make a grossly inaccurate statement and don't even pretend to back it up with any data, not even false data.
• Lesson 3: Make out that physics, chemistry and biology can only explain the past and aren't any use as a predictive tool. (Such people would, I expect, never step into an aeroplane and would quite happily and optimistically step out of a window on the 50th storey.)
• Lesson 4: If you haven't anything intelligent to add to the discussion, go for vulgarity.
• Lesson 5: If you don't like the data, claim a conspiracy.
• Lesson 6: If you can't refute the science, make out that the scientists stole their ideas from deniers.
• Lesson 7: If you can't refute the science and can't stomach facts, don't look. Avoid it altogether where possible. When that fails, try to ignore it.
• Lesson 8: Pretend that science is based on "faith" rather than evidence and reasoning. 
• Lesson 9: Trade on your reputation as a fake sceptic and dazzle with meaningless gobbledegook.
• Lesson 10: Harass any organisation that promotes sound science by sending spam. 

From the WUWT comments

The first out of the gate is a denier and the rest follow.  The WUWT deniers give a very good lesson in "how to be a science denier".

Latitude says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:08 pm
” We know what happened over the 20th century. Right? We know that it’s gotten warmer. We know where it’s gotten warmer. And if you ask the models why did that happen, and you say, okay, well, yes, basically it’s because of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. We have a very good match up until the present day. ”

and if you tell the models ahead of time that’s what happened….
Those computer games can not tell you something you don’t know.

That's an odd thing for Latitude to write. Latitude is a regular science denying commenter at WUWT. What he or she is saying now is that it's well-accepted that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause global warming.

The last sentence is very wrong. If you watch the video you'll get a glimpse of all the extra knowledge that comes from the models. It's not just that CO2 warms earth, it's how dust gets spread around the globe and how that affects weather; and how quickly the CO2 warming happens; and what changes does a hole in the ozone layer cause; and lots more as well. Such changes would be almost impossible to work out without a complex climate model.

Lesson 1: accept one part of science and follow it up with a silly statement. Deniers are good at "silly". The silly statement proves to the crowd that you really are a science denier.


Gerry Parker says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:12 pm
And despite these claims of model skill, they consistently over predict warming.

The lesson that Gerry and quite a few others at WUWT provide is to make a completely wrong statement. Best not to provide any evidence or examples or it becomes too obvious that what you're saying is wrong. For example, if Gerry had put up a chart of CMIP5 and CMIP3 against observations he would see that firstly, observations have been within the model envelop right the way through since 1860, and secondly that the mean of the models has only been above the observations very few occasions. Similarly it's only been below the observations on very few occasions:

Figure TS.9 (a) Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Lesson 2: Make a grossly inaccurate statement and don't even pretend to back it up with any data, not even false data.

Louis says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:23 pm
“The models are skillful.”
That phrase was repeated several times, so it must be the take-away message. But it is one thing to tune the models to forecast the past and quite another to accurately forecast the future.

Louis gives us another lesson in denial. This one is commonly used by "ice age cometh-ers". The trick is to argue that just because science explains past events doesn't mean that science can explain future events.  This is the equivalent of arguing that if you jump off a 30 storey building with no aids, you might fly. Roy Spencer is good at this sort of thing, when he talks about rear-view mirrors.

Lesson 3: Make out that physics, chemistry and biology can only explain the past and aren't any use as a predictive tool. (Such people would, I expect, never step into an aeroplanenever step into an aeroplane and would quite happily and optimistically step out of a window on the 50th storey.)


JEM says, apparently in response to Gavin saying that "a model result is skillful if it gives better predictions than a simpler alternative":

May 3, 2014 at 12:27 pm
Dear Gavin, unless you are carrying the error range of every number you feed into your model all the way through every calculation and out into the result, what’s coming out is not skillful, it’s fecal.

Lesson 4: If you haven't anything intelligent to add to the discussion, go for vulgarity.


Layne says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:31 pm
Let’s not forget that inconvenient warming of the 30s-40s has been disappeared so that the models can align with temps.

Layne learnt from Lesson 2 (making a grossly inaccurate statement), but she or he adds a twist and tosses in a conspiracy theory. That hundreds of people all around the world have conspired over decades to alter the temperature data recorded by volunteers and official weather offices.  Layne is arguing there has been a massive world-wide "fiddling" of data maintained independently by multiple organisations, which would have required not just a massive cover up but incredibly sophisticated coordination worldwide.  Shame that no-one has so far been able to uncover this conspiracy.

Lesson 5: If you don't like the data, claim a conspiracy.


Gary Pearse says (excerpt):

May 3, 2014 at 1:01 pm
“Emergent” hmm where have I heard this before. Oh yeah, Willis’s ‘emergent phenomena’ that serve as a governor on climate overheating. I and others have stated before that something as good as Willis’s emergent phenomena and other climate findings won’t be out there long before they begin to be stolen. They are just too good. Okay, Gav has only used the word emergent, half of the idea but that’s a start.

Gary is referring to Willis' convoluted thunderstorm hypothesis. It's a cocktail of the Gaia hypothesis and Richard Lindzen's failed Iris hypothesis, mixed up in a folksy manner with some some big dollops of fake data (eg Willis maintains that surface temperature varied by +/- 0.3 degrees over the last 100 years) and the tiniest smidgen of real science for good measure. Willis argues variously that we might be heading for an ice age and all the science is wrong and Wondering Willis is right.

Lesson 6: If you can't refute the science, make out that the scientists stole their ideas from deniers.

stephen richards says:

May 3, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Watching that piece of merde makes me sick. I cannot bring myself to do it.

Lesson 7: If you can't refute the science and can't stomach facts, don't look. Try to ignore it.


JFA in Montreal says:

May 3, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Priest of all persuasion of religion held the same discourse: you can’t comprehend anything up until you get the big picture. The underlying message is “you’re just to imbecile to see the light”. Of course, they know the only light is the one shining on them, for power, fame and profit.

This person doesn't understand science so belittles it. In addition to Lesson 5 (claiming a conspiracy with nefarious intent - "power, fame and profit"), pretend that just because you don't understand it, no-one else could possibly understand it. It's used by people who claim that climate science is religion not science.

Lesson 8: Pretend that science is based on "faith" rather than evidence and reasoning.


Steve McIntyre says:

May 3, 2014 at 2:33 pm
Mosh, I do not share the kneejerk antagonism to “models” of many commenters, but the CA post to which you refer doesn’t exactly support your assertion: it indicates that GCMs with positive feedbacks have no “skill” in forecasting global temperature relative to a “naive” no-feedback log relationship of Callendar 1938. I think that it’s entirely reasonable to criticize models on that point. As you and I have discussed, it’s unfortunate that the modeling community have failed to fully map the parameter space and left low-to-no feedback largely as a terra incognita, a mapping failure that seems to originate from a kind of academic stubbornness in the modeling community – it’s hard to contemplate similar behavior from commercial organizations.

As well as being his usual waffle, if you manage to decipher it, Steve is indulging in wishful thinking. From what I gather, he's hoping that someone some day will discover an unknown "parameter" that will offset all the global warming that we see. It will mop up all the warming and climate change will go away all by itself.

Most WUWT readers won't try to figure out what he's saying. They'll just be quite delighted that a notable fake sceptic has lowered himself, as he does from time to time, and joined in the hoi polloi denialati at the low brow denier blog, WUWT.

Lesson 9: Trade on your reputation as a fake sceptic and dazzle with meaningless gobbledegook.

Now I haven't even got a third of the way down the comments. There are doubtless many more lessons in how to be a good little denier.


John Coleman says:

May 3, 2014 at 5:30 pm
I sent the following email:
tedx@ted.com
Hello,
I note you have presented talks by several proponents of Global Warming/Climate Change. However, you have not given an opportunity to present the other side of the issue to climate skeptics. There are several notable, peer reviewed climate experts who present the skeptical view. Among them are Richard Lindzen at MIT, Willie Soon at the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory, Judith Curry at Georgia Tech, Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama and a long list of other Ph.D. experts. Please invite one or more of these experts to take the stage at a future conference. Balance of scientific opinion is important.
Regards,
John Coleman

I think if would be excellent if they heard from many of the rest of you.

If you are a fake sceptic, particularly one who is known as a journalist turned television weather announcer, send a dumb email and urge everyone else to do the same. Thankfully junk email isn't quite as damaging to the environment as snail mail.

Lesson 10: Harass any organisation that promotes sound science by sending spam.

Going against the tide of denialism

There were very few people who tried to buck the trend, some of them just a little bit. I mean when you're battling a tide of denialism of more than 120 comments, you're asking for trouble.  Some people buck the trend because they want to appear as "reasonable" fake sceptics. Others might be more genuine.


Jeff Alberts quoted HenryP and indicated that times, denialism goes a bit too far for his liking, and says:

May 3, 2014 at 7:07 pm
The climate is changing only because of natural reasons.
It is God who made it so.

Actually THERE’S the #1 stupid skeptic argument.

Stephen Philbrick says:

May 3, 2014 at 5:57 pm
I thought it was fairly good.

Some false notes, but overall, an effective presentation.

I liked the orders of magnitude paradigm, a very useful way to illustrate the difficulty of the problem

Surprisingly, he used only 14, with the size of the earth as the upper bounds – somewhat surprising as he clearly (despite some comments upthread) acknowledged the influence of the sun. The 4 down 14 to go was simply the artifact of a live presentation.

I see some chuckles about Fortran, and can only assume people are doing serious modeling.
In a recent role with my company, I worked with a moderately sophisticated financial model. It was written in Fortran, because we had to model interest rates, inflation, and the interactions as they affect bond prices and yields, not to mention stochastic insurance loss projections. Fortran was used because it is a suitable language to do very heavy duty number-crunching. It makes a nice sound-bite to treat it as antiquated, but only to those who don’t really do heavy duty modeling. (Which is not to say it is always the best option – I’ve modeled some processes in APL, some others in Excel,, the choice depends on how much number crunching is needed. One can have a highly sophisticated model that doesn’t require a lot of number crunching, but models of the financial world and models of the climate need to do a lot of brute force calculations)

JohnB says:

May 3, 2014 at 7:12 pm
I thought it extremely interesting and would happily sit through a longer lecture by Dr Schmidt.
I may not agree with his conclusions but the talk certainly allows you to see where he is coming from. Note that he admits the models are “wrong” and should, can and hopefully will be improved. However he thinks that they are good enough for a “reasonable” projection of the future and that future improvements in the models will refine the projection but not fundamentally change it.

If you had a model that you thought gave a reasonable projection and the results of that projection gave you cause for concern, wouldn’t you speak loudly too? Dr Schmidt models climate and the results have convinced him that there are grounds for concern.

He spoke fairly from his point of view and that is the best that anyone can do.

What pushed Judith Curry over the edge?

Serious question. Look, we've all known that Judith has been getting more and more ratty as time goes on. Just when we think she can't sink any lower she surprises us again.  But this time she's really gone over the edge. I mean really and truly.

I've been a bit busy the last few days and have only just got around to checking out the various denier websites. I was surprised to see Judith Curry (archived here) putting up some old, wacky and long bit of idiocy from John Christy. Back in 2011, John was whining to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, protesting the IPCC, the northern hemisphere temperature reconstructions pre-2001, and all else besides.

Earth is as cold as a summit in Central Greenland?

At face value John, and therefore Judith, were doing a Denier Don Easterbrook, arguing that the temperature of earth is the same as it is on the top of the summit in Greenland.  John was complaining that a paper by Dahl-Jensen et al (1998) wasn't referred to in Section 2.3.2 in Chapter 2 of TAR, Temperature of the Past 1,000 Years. Yes, they are talking about the IPCC WG1 report from 2001, thirteen years ago.  Not the current report, not the 2007 report. The third assessment report from 2001.

Anyway, John complained that instead of discussing the temperature of Greenland's ice sheets over the past 1,000 years as if it represented global temperatures, the authors decided to discuss the temperatures of the whole world over the past 1000 years as far as it was known at the time (weird, huh?).  Turns out that back then (as is still the case to a great extent) there was an emphasis on the northern hemisphere reconstructions because there wasn't a lot of data for the southern hemisphere in 2001.

John Christy even admitted the other authors didn't think much of his idiocy:

To me Dahl-Jensen et al.’s reconstruction was a more robust estimate of past temperatures than one produced from a certain set of western U.S. tree-ring proxies. But as the process stood, the L.A. was not required to acknowledge my suggestions, and I was not able to convince him otherwise. It is perhaps a failure of mine that I did not press the issue even harder or sought agreement from others who might have been likewise aware of the evidence against the Hockey Stick realization.

Note too that there were several paleoclimatologists as lead authors of Chapter 2, so I don't know why John talks about "him" rather than "them". It's a case of the Serengeti Strategy again I guess.

John didn't point out that the paper was referred to in Section 2.4.2, How Stable was the Holocene Climate? Here is the relevant passage (my bold italics):

The early Holocene was generally warmer than the 20th century but the period of maximum warmth depends on the region considered. It is seen at the beginning of the Holocene (about 11 to 10 ky BP) in most ice cores from high latitude regions e.g., north-west Canada (Ritchie et al., 1989), central Antarctica (Ciais et al., 1992; Masson et al., 2000) and in some tropical ice cores such as Huascaran in Peru (Thompson et al., 1995). It is also seen during the early Holocene in the Guliya ice core in China (Thompson et al., 1998) but not in two other Chinese cores (Dunde, Thompson et al., 1989; and Dasuopu, to be published). North Africa experienced a greatly expanded monsoon in the early and mid-Holocene, starting at 11 ky BP (Petit-Maire and Guo, 1996), and declining thereafter. In New Zealand the warmest conditions occurred between about 10 to 8 ky BP, when there was a more complete forest cover than at any other time. Glacial activity was at a minimal level in the Southern Alps and speleothem analyses indicate temperatures were about 2°C warmer than present (Salinger and McGlone, 1989; Williams et al., 1999).

By contrast, central Greenland (Dahl-Jensen et al., 1998), and regions downstream of the Laurentide ice sheet, did not warm up until after 8 ky BP (including Europe: COHMAP Members, 1988; eastern North America: Webb et al., 1993). 

Nor did John Christy point out that the temperature reconstructions described in Chapter 2 of TAR were based on many more proxies than just tree rings.  Nor that there were several reconstructions discussed, not just those of Michael Mann and colleagues. Nor that there were lots of caveats in TAR (as always).

Now the fact that John and Judith think that the summit of Greenland on its own is a proxy for global temperatures is wacky enough and way beyond Judith's usual fare. But she not only put forward John's silliness as if it ought to be taken seriously, she threw in snippets of stolen emails as evidence of something or other.

Not only that, but she resurrected her jealousy of Michael Mann, that he was one of eight lead authors of a chapter in the IPCC's third assessment report, whereas she was but a lowly contributing author of Chapter 7. John Christy was a lead author in the same chapter as Michael Mann, so goodness knows why he and Judith were whinging. (Maybe she was miffed that Michael Mann wasn't just a lead author of Chapter 2, he was also a contributing author of Chapter 7 and Chapter 8.)

I mean we're talking TAR, the third assessment report. Judith is going back thirteen years.

Here is another reason I think Judith has finally lost it for good. She wrote:

Christy’s assessment, when combined with the UEA emails, provides substantial insight into how this hockey stick travesty occurred.  

John Christy's assessment! Climategate! Sheesh, Judith is scraping the bottom of the barrel isn't she.  What will Judith write about next? The fake Oregon Petition?

Here is a sample of John Christy's conspiracy ideation - and this is only a snippet.  There's more of the same where that came from.  Here he is referring to authors of the IPCC reports, writing:

As time went on, nations would tend to nominate only those authors whose climate change opinions were in line with a national political agenda which sought perceived advantages (i.e. political capital, economic gain, etc.) by promoting the notion of catastrophic human-induced climate change. Scientists with well-known alternative views would not be nominated or selected. Indeed, it became more and more difficult for dissention and skepticism to penetrate the process now run by this establishment. As noted in my IAC testimony, I saw a process in which L.A.s were transformed from serving as Brokers of science (and policy-relevant information) to Gatekeepers of a preferred point of view. 

John Christy is so deluded as to think that politicians throughout the world will gain economically and politically as a result of global warming. Tell that to Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard! Tell that to Tony Abbott! Tell that to the James Inhofe and the GOP!

And what "hockey stick travesty"? The hockey stick keeps showing up in all the subseqent IPCC reports.  This is from the latest AR5:

Box TS5 Fig 1 Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 

Doesn't Judith know what the current instrumental record shows compared to the Holocene as a whole?  I don't believe it. She has subsequently written an article about the recent Neukom paper under a weird title: "The inconvenient southern hemisphere".  In that article she "rebuts" the paper by referring her readers to, of all places, WUWT! Yep. She's well and truly gone over the edge. Here is Figure 2 from that paper - guess what it shows. You guessed it, a hockey stick:

Figure 2 Temperature variability over the past millennium. a, 30-year loess filtered ensemble mean temperature reconstruction for the Southern Hemisphere (SH; blue) and Northern Hemisphere (NH; red) relative to the millennium mean for the period 1000–2000. Blue shading based on Southern Hemisphere reconstruction uncertainties (Supplementary Section 2.4). Thin orange lines represent the ensemble means of the nine individual temperature reconstructions making up the Northern Hemisphere dataset5. b, as a but for the 24-member climate model ensemble. Note for consistency with reconstruction data, simulated temperatures are shown as individual simulations for the Northern Hemisphere and a probabilistic range based on ensemble percentiles for the Southern Hemisphere.

Source: Neukom14

Back to basic Curry - the IPCC and Michael Mann

For once Judith isn't being her usual ambiguous self.  She is up front about her motivation. She has it in for Michael Mann and the IPCC. She has ever since I first heard of her - when she "came out" as a denier on Keith Kloor's blog way back when.  This is what she wrote the other day:

Back in April 2011, I had a post on The U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy.  John Christy’s testimony is worth revisiting, in two contexts:

• problems with the IPCC process, most recently highlighted in context of WG3 [link]
• the Steyn versus Mann and Mann versus Steyn lawsuits [link]

So she's back to basics - Judith Curry waging a war on the IPCC and Michael Mann. That's bare bones Judith Curry - in a nutshell. Forget science. Forget politics. For Judith, this is personal.

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Neukom, Raphael, Joëlle Gergis, David J. Karoly, Heinz Wanner, Mark Curran, Julie Elbert, Fidel González-Rouco et al. "Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium." Nature Climate Change 4, no. 5 (2014): 362-367. doi:10.1038/nclimate2174