WUWT predicts highest Arctic September sea ice extent in ten years

The readers at WUWT have put in their sea ice prediction to arcus.org at 6.11 million square kilometres average for the month of September. (Archived here.)

Here it is compared to previous September averages, I've put in a red line to show the WUWT prediction. Click to enlarge:

Adapted from arcus.org

Anthony applied a weighted average to the top five most popular predictions. WUWT-ers think the average ice extent will be the same as it was around ten years ago, in 2004.

Here are the averages for the month of September going back to 2006 (the archives didn't go back any further), from NSIDC:

• 2006 5.9 million square kilometers
• 2007 4.28 million square kilometers
• 2008 4.67 million square kilometers
• 2009 5.36 million square kilometers 
• 2010 4.90 million square kilometers
• 2011 4.61 million square kilometers
• 2012 3.61 million square kilometers
• 2013 5.35 million square kilometers
• 2014? 6.11 million square kilometers? (WUWT prediction)

I myself won't take a guess. The Arctic is too fickle and I'm not an expert. Here's the latest chart from NSIDC. Click the image to view larger:

The graph above shows Arctic sea ice extent as of June 1, 2014, along with daily ice extent data for four previous years. 2014 is shown in blue, 2013 in green, 2012 in orange, 2011 in brown, and 2010 in purple. The 1981 to 2010 average is in dark gray. Sea Ice Index data.
Source: NSIDC

I came across a recent paper in Nature Climate Change by David Schröder, Daniel L. Feltham, Daniela Flocco & Michel Tsamados. The authors reckon they've come up with a better approach to predictions - look at the melt-pond area in the spring. The abstract says in part:

...here we show that the Arctic sea-ice minimum can be accurately forecasted from melt-pond area in spring. We find a strong correlation between the spring pond fraction and September sea-ice extent. This is explained by a positive feedback mechanism: more ponds reduce the albedo; a lower albedo causes more melting; more melting increases pond fraction. Our results help explain the acceleration of Arctic sea-ice decrease during the past decade. The inclusion of our new melt-pond model promises to improve the skill of future forecast and climate models in Arctic regions and beyond.

If you want to keep up with the latest in the Arctic, I recommend Neven's Arctic Sea Ice blog.

From the WUWT comments

william's contribution must be a Poe, he says he saw a NOAA documentary called "The Day After Tomorrow":

June 10, 2014 at 9:12 am
Whatever the extent, all of the Polar bears will be drowned and life on our planet will cease when the atlantic conveyor stops and North American temperatures drop to 100 degrees below zero. I saw a documentary put out by NOAA called “The Day After Tomorrow”. Thank goodness our president is going to shut down all the coal plants so that all those people dont freeze to death. There are not enough books to burn to stay warm through something like that!

Jim Hunt offers some good information about Arctic sea ice, but Anthony will have none of it. It's too sciency for Anthony who says that Arctic ice extent has nothing to do with volume:

June 10, 2014 at 9:32 am
Re: @Anthony says: June 10, 2014 at 8:55 am
It’s not my “own views” Anthony. In fact it’s a long list of useful facts and figures for anybody attempting to forecast the future of Arctic sea ice. A long list of useful information still noticeable only by its absence from the WUWT sea ice reference page.

REPLY: We aren’t forecasting volume, we are forecasting extent, so again, your views that we should pay attention to volume graphs on your website (your favorite hobby horse) in this extent forecasting exercise are irrelevant. Don’t clutter up this thread further – Anthony

Anthony really doesn't like scientific comments, it upsets his denier audience. He prefers comments like this one, from Joe Bastardi, award-winning meteorologist and greenhouse effect denier. Joseph Bastardi says (excerpt):

June 10, 2014 at 8:49 am
...One thing is certain. even if it gets NEAR NORMAL given what its been the past 10-15 years since the warm amo really took hold, we can safely say that co2 has nothing to do with this. ...

dbstealey is a Little Ice Age bouncer who keeps contradicting himself trying to cover too many bases while still denying human-caused global warming, and says:

June 10, 2014 at 9:38 am
As we see here, the planet is still recovering from the Little Ice Age. Naturally polar ice is going to decline.

Notice that in the [natural] global warming since the LIA, the trend has remained within its long term parameters. Despite all the alarmist predictions, there has been no acceleration in global warming [in fact, GW has stopped].

If polar ice declines, so what? As with rising CO2, that would be a net benefit: much shorter transit times for shipping, with much reduced fuel costs, an open northwest passage, less need for icebreakers, etc.

The only reason polar ice is discussed is because of the endless predictions that Arctic ice would soon disappear. The alarmist crowd is desperately hoping that it does. But so what if it does? It’s all good… and it’s all natural.

ripshin says it's cold in Virginia so there'll be a lot of ice in the Arctic in September:

June 10, 2014 at 10:18 am
June feels a lot cooler here in central Virginia than it used to…so I’m going with more ice: 7.75 MsqKM. “Today, I go for the gusto.”
rip

Steven Mosher linked to some charts (see third one down for different projections), but Anthony doesn't want to acknowledge the disappearance of Arctic sea ice:

June 10, 2014 at 11:20 am

https://sites.google.com/site/pettitclimategraphs/sea-ice-extent

REPLY:IMHO, any graph that uses “death spiral” as part of the description should be ignored – Anthony

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Schröder, David, Daniel L. Feltham, Daniela Flocco, and Michel Tsamados. "September Arctic sea-ice minimum predicted by spring melt-pond fraction." Nature Climate Change (2014). doi:10.1038/nclimate2203

Denier Weirdness: Why won't Anthony Watts release his data and code for the 97%?

Anthony Watts has an article today about reproducibility of scientific experiments (archived here). It's mainly about medical and pharmacological research. It's not at all about climate science.

However I noticed that Anthony himself, in the opening paragraph, snuck in an example of what he reckoned couldn't be reproduced - it was Cook13, the research that examined the nearly 12,000 papers that were retrieved from a Web of Science search of scientific papers on global warming. That study in itself could be regarded as a reproduction and validation of other similar studies, which all found that going back over the past 20 years or so, around 97% of science on the subject supports the fact that humans are causing global warming.

So I was intrigued to find Anthony had written (my bold italics):

Reproducibility — the ability to redo an experiment and get the same results — is a cornerstone of science, but it has been the subject of some troubling news lately. In recent years, researchers have reported that they could not reproduce the results from many studies, including research in oncology, drug-target validation, and sex differences in disease (and climate with Cook et al. ).

What is Anthony Watts hiding? I wondered. Does that mean that he or someone else has tried to reproduce Cook13 and been unable to do so? If so, why is he hiding his working, results and code? Why hasn't he shouted to the world his effort to reproduce the study?

Of course, I thought, it could be that because he doesn't understand much science his failure to reproduce the results is simply incompetence on his part.

Replicating research vs replicating researchers

Anyway, Anthony provided a link - so I followed it. It turns out that it's got nothing at all to do with the research itself. Anthony didn't redo the work. He didn't even try to reproduce the results. All he did was link to a dumb letter from an idiot denier complaining that he can't get confidential information about the people who did do the research.

It looks as if Anthony Watts thinks that redoing research and reproducing results means that you have to replicate the researchers! What a nutter.

File this one under "Denier Weirdness".

PS The latest "reproduction" of this research is by James Powell, who's been checking the science for some time now. His latest analysis is from last year. What he found is illustrated below:

---

Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Geothermal flux, West Antarctica and deniers at WUWT

Anthony Watts has a headline about a new paper on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). He wrote (archived here):

Uh oh: Study says ‘collapsing’ Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica melting from geothermal heat, not ‘climate change’ effects
Remember the wailing from Suzanne Goldenberg over the “collapse” of the Thwaites glacier blaming man-made CO2 effects and the smackdown given to the claim on WUWT?

Well, never mind. From the University of Texas at Austin  and the “you can stop your wailing now” department, comes this really, really, inconvenient truth.

Researchers find major West Antarctic glacier melting from geothermal sources

Anthony then pastes a press release that he copied but didn't bother to read. If he had read it, he would have noticed the following:

Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it’s being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The "being eroded by the ocean" refers to the warmer ocean melting the ice in West Antarctica.  West Antarctic melting been discussed in recent articles on several occasions - here and here and here and here and here and here for example. Many slightly older articles too, such as this one. The geothermal heat is adding to this effect, not replacing it.

So for Anthony to write "you can stop your wailing now" is dumb on two counts. Firstly that global warming is melting WAIS. Secondly that if WAIS is also being melted from below by geothermal heat, that could mean that seas will rise sooner rather than later, which will cause a lot of "wailing". I don't know if the effects from warmer oceans and geothermal activity are additive or not. What I would say is that the combined effect has to be greater than either one on its own.

Of course it's easy to see why Anthony wants to pretend that WAIS isn't melting from global warming. The facts, like all global warming facts, threaten his ideology and his blog business. Anthony writes purely for science deniers, not for the general public.

Anthony Watts has already written a lot of wrong articles about melting ice and rising sea level (eg he was wrong about the Suzanne Goldenberg article he referred to above). Anthony effectively argues that ice doesn't melt as earth gets hotter. He usually extrapolates past sea level trends as measured by tide gauges to "prove" his point that ice won't melt in the future.  Anthony can be regarded as a sea level rise denier.

Once again, Anthony didn't even link to the press release, let alone the paper itself. So I will. The paper is by Dustin M. Schroeder, Donald D. Blankenship, Duncan A. Young, and Enrica Quartini. You can read the early release of the full paper at PNAS.

The front page of the paper has a text box describing the significance of the work.

Thwaites Glacier is one of the West Antarctica’s most prominent, rapidly evolving, and potentially unstable contributors to global sea level rise. Uncertainty in the amount and spatial pattern of geothermal flux and melting beneath this glacier is a major limitation in predicting its future behavior and sea level contribution. In this paper, a combination of radar sounding and subglacial water routing is used to show that large areas at the base of Thwaites Glacier are actively melting in response to geothermal flux consistent with rift-associated magma migration and volcanism. This supports the hypothesis that heterogeneous geothermal flux and local magmatic processes could be critical factors in determining the future behavior of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Scientists have known that there are geothermal heat sources under the West Antarctic ice sheet. This research has pinpointed them and finds they are less homogenous and warmer than previously thought. From the press release as published at ScienceDaily.com:

Thwaites Glacier, the large, rapidly changing outlet of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is not only being eroded by the ocean, it's being melted from below by geothermal heat, researchers at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin (UTIG) report in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings significantly change the understanding of conditions beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet where accurate information has previously been unobtainable.

The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by UTIG will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.

Using radar techniques to map how water flows under ice sheets, UTIG researchers were able to estimate ice melting rates and thus identify significant sources of geothermal heat under Thwaites Glacier. They found these sources are distributed over a wider area and are much hotter than previously assumed.

The geothermal heat contributed significantly to melting of the underside of the glacier, and it might be a key factor in allowing the ice sheet to slide, affecting the ice sheet's stability and its contribution to future sea level rise.

The cause of the variable distribution of heat beneath the glacier is thought to be the movement of magma and associated volcanic activity arising from the rifting of Earth's crust beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

The fact of geothermal fluxes in West Antarctica isn't a new discovery. For example, there's a 2004 paper by  Hermann Engelhardt on the subject. What is new in this paper is that it provides more insight into the spatial layout and the size of the geothermal flux. The scientists have deduced that it is not equally spread out and that in parts the flux is considerably higher than previously thought. All of which means more meltwater under the ice sheet, which is already fragile.

From the WUWT comments

Since I started this article, a few more comments have appeared (archived here), not all of which are related to the topic.


Marcos says the news apparently reported the science better than WUWT did, (although I don't know if the effects are additive or not) and says:

June 9, 2014 at 6:48 pm
The article I read about this paper (on Fox News I think) made it sound like things were extra bad because the geothermal heat was combining with the effects of CAGW to make the ice shelves collapse super fast…

Chris Marlowe says those scientists are just trying to scare him (the "scare" factor is one of the main things that cause deniers to deny - something to do with the amygdala) - excerpt only:

June 9, 2014 at 8:13 pm
This is definitely a useful contribution because it explains why the rate of movement of the Thwaites Glacier is faster than what would be expected if the base of the glacier were locked to the bedrock and the movement is the result only of shear within the glacier.
This study, combined with others, explains [the] rate of movement from purely natural causes and not from accelerated warming caused by man.. .
However, the article contains an unscientific alarmist statement:
“The collapse of the Thwaites Glacier would cause an increase of global sea level of between 1 and 2 meters, with the potential for more than twice that from the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
This statement is obviously calculated to inspire fear. It is unscientific because there is no time period, no indication if the rate of rise of sea level is faster or slower than now or in the past.

latecommer2014 wonders if warming can increase volcanic activity and says:

June 9, 2014 at 9:12 pm
Brings to mind chicken little. Does an increase in CO2 cause volcanic activity. If I can suggest it’s even worse than we could imagine can I get some grant money? ……..100K sounds about right. Does anyone know a good financial expert who can hide the money?

I don't know the answer to that one. However it's quite feasible that massive flooding in fragile areas or the rapid depletion of massive ice sheets or large water reservoirs would have an impact on the stability of the crust and maybe cause earthquakes. The filling of the Thomson Dam in Victoria caused earth tremors.


michaelwiseguy is another one who thinks/hopes that global warming is from a whole bunch of newly active undiscovered underwater volcanoes, presumably rather than the greenhouse effect, and says:

June 9, 2014 at 9:40 pm
A better question might be; To what extent is Earth’s liquid molten magma iron core heating the worlds oceans, and what is that contribution to climate change?

Caleb mistakes ice sheets for sea ice and says (excerpt from a long rant about scientists only in it for the money):

June 9, 2014 at 10:06 pm
Considering nine-tenth of an iceberg lies under water, and a tenth protrudes upwards, then, if the ice extends down 2 km to rock below sea level, 0.X km of the ice extending above sea level is due to expansion, and could melt, along with the ice beneath, without effecting sea level at all.

There. Even a member of the “general public” can understand that.

Of course, it isn’t so simple. Further study, funding, and trips to sunny Antarctica during dark northern winters are needed to determine if the ice flows the same speed at the surface as at the bottom, and at the middle as at the sides. If the top of the ice flows off leaving the bottom in place it might lift sea levels.

The “general public” can also understand that, especially the word “funding,” when it concerns their tax dollars in a time of economic hardship.

The “general public” is not as stupid as some here think. Call them “sheeple” if you will, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. Furthermore, once a minority produces definite evidence of dishonesty, awareness of the dishonesty spreads through the “general public,” and sometimes the awareness achieves a sort of critical mass and “goes viral,” (and this happened even before computers were invented.)...

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Dustin M. Schroeder, Donald D. Blankenship, Duncan A. Young, and Enrica Quartini. "Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet." PNAS, June 9, 2014 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1405184111

Gavin Schmidt, the new Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Congratulations to Gavin Schmidt. He's the newly appointed Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt, new head of NASA GISS.
(Photo credit: B. Gilbert)

From NASA's website:

NASA has named Gavin A. Schmidt to head the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, a leading Earth climate research laboratory.

Currently deputy director of the institute, Schmidt steps into the position left vacant after the retirement of long-time director James E. Hansen and becomes only the third person to hold the post.

"Gavin is a highly respected climate scientist who already also has proven himself as a terrific leader of the GISS team," said NASA’s Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan. "He is the perfect candidate to continue leading this vital research institute at a critical time for the U.S. and the world."

Schmidt, an expert in climate modeling, began his career at GISS in 1996. His primary area of research is the simulation of past, present and future climates. He has worked on developing and improving computer models that integrate ocean, atmosphere, and land processes to simulate Earth’s climate, and is particularly interested in how their results can be compared to paleoclimatic data.

"It’s an honor to lead the team of talented scientists at GISS," he said. "The work being done here has implications for societies across the planet, and I will strive to make that research as valuable as possible."

Schmidt received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University in 1988 and a doctorate in applied mathematics from University College London in 1994. He came to New York as a 1996 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change Research.

In addition to more than 100 published, peer-reviewed articles, he is the co-author of "Climate Change: Picturing the Science" (W.W. Norton, 2009), a collaboration between climate scientists and photographers. In 2011, he was awarded the American Geophysical Union Climate Communications Prize.

GISS was founded in 1961 as NASA's theoretical division for work on planetary atmospheres, under the direction of Robert Jastrow, and is today a leading Earth climate research laboratory. Major areas of GISS research include measurements, remote sensing and simulation of Earth's climate, the forces driving climate change and its impacts on human society, agriculture and ecosystems and continuing work on planetary climates in the solar system and beyond. GISS works closely with partners at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and with the Earth Institute and School of Engineering at Columbia University.

NASA's Earth science program monitors the planet's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

For more information about Schmidt’s research and publications, visit: www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/gschmidt/

And here's a video :)

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Irons in the fire at WUWT...well there might not be so much in the oceans these days

Frequently Anthony Watts (owner of the blog WUWT) copies and pastes a press release about a new scientific paper so his readers can have something new to mock. He usually starts his headline with the word "Claim", just so his followers know they aren't supposed to "believe" science.  Many of his followers aren't too bright and they need these clues so they can tell how to respond.

Today Anthony puts aside his "claim" headline in favour of this (archived here):

Warming climates intensify greenhouse gas given out by oceans

From the University of Edinburgh and the department of soda pop science, comes something we already knew. I wonder who approved the grant for this one?

Anthony reckons this is something "we already knew". He doesn't spell out what he "already knew" but going by his "soda pop" reference, it's fairly clear that the paper discusses something that he didn't know already and he doesn't know now. He's confusing the findings of this study with the fact that CO2 dissolved in water will be released as the water warms. But that's not at all what this study was about. The study is about diatoms, silica, iron and carbon. (Click here to read more if you're on the home page.)

Fossil fuel-funded climate action - plus Anthony Watts has no cause to worry...

Anthony Watts has posted a "guest essay" by Eric "Eugenics" Worrall (archived here).  Eric is writing about a new climate fund set up by a US hedge fund billionaire, Tom Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor. Huffington Post describes it as a climate victim relief fund. However at the same time, it reports it as a Climate Disaster Relief Fund, for which the:

...first order of business will be providing grants to firefighters, nurses and other first responders to the catastrophic fire season plaguing the west.

You can read about it here at Huffington Post. Sounds like a worthy venture. Eric Worrall is amused or bemused by a CBS report that Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor liquidated their holdings in Kinder Morgan, an energy company, to finance the venture.

Eric also noticed that Tom Steyer is spending a huge amount ($50m of his own and $50m from other donors) to fund nationwide political campaigns to "shape climate policy". Eric idly wonders:

Is it OK for large amounts of oil money to be expended influencing American politics, as long as the oil money is spent on helping Democrat candidates?

First of all, it appears to be idle speculation on Eric's part that there are large amounts of oil money being spent on helping Democrat candidates. There was nothing in either of the two articles I looked at to suggest that Tom Steyer's $50m is "oil money". Though that doesn't mean it's not. Secondly, it's cute that Eric thinks that "shaping climate policy" helps Democratic candidates. He's probably correct though, given that most Republican candidates want global warming to continue untrammeled at a great rate.

Oiling Democrats for climate action

What do you think. Is it okay for "large amounts of oil money" to go towards helping Democrat candidates? Does it depend on the source? For example, from liquidating assets previously tied up in oil stocks versus ongoing proceeds from going concern oil companies.

I'd say it wouldn't hurt for shareholders to consider shifting their investments from fossil fuel companies to renewable energy companies and I doubt you'd hear too many people complain. Or they could stick with their investment and use it to mobilise shareholder power and urge fossil fuel companies to progressively shift to renewable energy. In fact that's what some energy companies themselves are doing - albeit some more quickly than others.

Anthony Watts can rest easy - deniers don't stray from his herd

Incidentally, at the bottom of Eric's article Anthony wonders if he can get paid from a climate disaster relief fund for "being a victim of daily climate abuse" here at HotWhopper.  Is the HotWhopper rain dance working too well? Is it causing climate disaster at WUWT?

Not really.

Apart from the fact that demolishing some of the daily disinformation peddled by deniers at WUWT and elsewhere doesn't constitute "daily climate abuse", someone should tell Anthony he has no need to worry. Google stats show that barely any of his audience strays here.

Anthony, can breathe easy. He's safe with his loyal denier crowd. Very few of them visit science blogs.

Even when Anthony mentions HotWhopper in one of his main articles, like today, if his webstats are correct, then of his reported 50,000 plus visits a day, barely 0.03% 0.04%of his readers venture beyond the borders of denierland - even when prompted by Anthony to do so. (To compare, it takes almost two weeks for HotWhopper to get 50,000 page views. Not visitors mind you, just page views. HotWhopper is a minor player, a small irritation to WUWT. An itty bitty thorn in the flesh.)

Yep, out of his 50,000 plus reported daily visitors, so far only twelve twenty-one, that's right - a mere 12 21, have followed his link through to HotWhopper. (Updated around nine hours after the WUWT article was posted).

That's an infinitesimally small number compared to the rush of visitors if someone like Phil Plait links here.  Barely a spec of dust on planet Earth by comparison. I also get way more hits from a mention at ClimateProgress and heaps more visits from the sidebar links at Moyhu and RabettRun, or a retweet by Michael Mann. Even mid-sized discussion boards beat WUWT hands down when it comes to visits.  (He he, it's all true, but I only wrote it to rub salt in Anthony's imagined wound.)

I conclude that deniers don't like to travel. After all, why would Anthony's mad crowd want to be confronted with science when they can get all the pseudo-scientific reassurance they can handle at WUWT?

HotWhopper demolishes disinformation. It's for a completely different audience to Anthony's anti-science blog. It's for:

• people who are interested in climate science and can tolerate a bit of snark
• people who want to keep up with denier antics, or are looking for solid science with which to rebut denier nonsense on discussion boards and elsewhere
• climate hawks and scientists, to give them a chuckle or groan at the idiocy that goes on at denier websites - with the bonus that they add a huge amount to the information here, keep me on the straight and narrow and otherwise are a very affable, friendly and knowledgeable lot.

Another solution for Anthony Watts

There is another solution for Anthony if he's really feeling abused by climate. It's simple, ethical and very easy - but I doubt he'd consider it. He could stop his daily abuse of science and scientists and not fill his blog with disinformation and pseudoscience, ripe for demolition.

PS Since observing/writing about WUWT over the past year and a bit, I have noticed a drop in the scientist-bashing recently, which used to be almost a daily feature there. It still happens of course, but not nearly as often.  I'd guess it's because scientists have started standing up to personal, libellous attacks. I haven't noticed a drop in paranoid conspiracy theories though.

Putting on an old EPA hat, WUWT revisits peer review

Anthony Watts has another copy and paste (archived here), this time from some right wing crowd that calls itself the National Association of Scholars, not to be confused with the National Academy of Sciences.

In short, the article is just another denier diatribe, long on insinuation and short on substance.

I checked out the National Association of Scholars at SourceWatch and they don't sound like the sort of crowd that any self-respecting person would want to be associated with. I'm surprised that Anthony Watts would promote them. Publicly at any rate, he frowns upon racist bigotry (not so much sexism). I guess beggars can't be choosers. This is from SourceWatch:

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non-profit organization in the United States that opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action and seeks to counter what it considers a "liberal bias" in academia.[1]

In 2010 and 2011, its president was espousing climate contrarianism under the group's auspices, with no evident expertise in the climate science field.[2]

The rest of the SourceWatch article makes interesting reading. It looks as if National Association of Scholars has an extremely large (unwieldy) board that rarely if ever meets. Is it just another organisation providing plum posts for a small number of ideologues?

This is another long article, because the WUWT article is about another article which is in turn about yet another article. This HW article features the National Association of Scholars, the ITSSD, and the EPA and its Office of Inspector General as well as some WUWT comments.  I don't want to dissuade you, but I'll warn you that apart from introducing organisations new to HotWhopper, it's simply more of the same old hat denier nonsense - largely about peer review.  Still, if you're interested and you're on the home page, click here to read on...

Ridiculous Richard Tol sez 12,000 is a strange number...

Anthony Watts has put up another promo for Richard Tol (archived here, latest here). Richard is an economist who agrees there is an overwhelming consensus among the experts that global warming is real and caused by human activity. Over the last year or so, however, he's been on a crusade to try to argue that 97% isn't 97% or something.

I've already written how Richard's "arguments" range from the idiotic to the preposterous and have been well and truly demolished. For a more orderly, less snarky and highly readable account, see the paper by John Cook and co where they identified at least 24 major blunders in Richard's silliness.

This time, because there have been a number of articles in the UK Guardian about Richard, his errors in his economic papers and now his "verging on the lunatic" crusade against John Cook and SkepticalScience.com - the Guardian allowed him an article of his own.

Richard contradicts himself

Richard doesn't start off his article too well, contradicting himself right up top, writing:

I show that the 97% consensus claim does not stand up. 

At best, Nuccitelli, John Cook and colleagues may have accidentally stumbled on the right number.

It gets worse from that point onward. (If you're on the home page, click here to read on...)

Christopher Monckton urges WUWT deniers to play high stakes climate in Las Vegas

Christopher Monckton has written a PR piece for the Heartland Institute and got Anthony Watts to publish it at WUWT (archived here).  Anthony wouldn't have thought twice about it. Did he even have a choice? (He's very, very low in the hierarchy of the Society of Denialist Organ Grinders. So low that often it's he who's cavorting to the tune of the higher ups.)

The title of Christopher's marketing blurb is:

End of an error

...which is a fun play on words, but most misleading and sets the scene for the rest.

If you're on the home page, click here to read on...

BUSTED: How Ridiculous Richard Tol makes myriad bloopers and a big fool of himself and proves the 97% consensus

Update - see below.


Anthony Watts is all excited (archived here, latest here) because economist Richard Tol finally found a journal to publish a paper he's been trying to get someone to publish for nearly a year.  Anthony wrote, mischievously and wrongly a headline and opening comment:

BUSTED: Tol takes on Cook’s ’97% consensus’ claim with a re-analysis, showing the claim is ‘unfounded’

A new paper by Dr. Richard Tol published today in ScienceDirect, journal of Energy Policy, shows that the Cook et al. paper claiming that there is a 97% consensus among scientists is not just impossible to reproduce (since Cook is withholding data) but a veritable statistical train wreck rife with bias, classification errors, poor data quality, and inconsistency in the ratings process. The full paper is available below.

Anthony Watts is wrong, and wrong and wrong again - he's busted!

Firstly, Richard Tol didn't do any reanalysis. He didn't categorise all the abstracts himself. He just did some wonky sums and got the wrong answer, based on flawed assumptions and more. And he threw in a large number of unfounded speculative statements. Not only did Richard not show the claim was "unfounded", he wrote that he accepts the main finding of Cook13.

Secondly, thirdly and fourthly etc, John Cook isn't withholding any data. He provided more than just all the data anyone would need to repeat the analysis (here and here), he even provided a web tool to help people who wanted to to categorise abstracts for themselves. John Cook provided all the data needed to reproduce the analysis. Richard Tol didn't even try to do so. As for the quality of the data - it's a complete set of around 12,000 abstracts returned using a Web of Science search of key terms. So I don't know if Anthony is trying to say that Web of Science isn't any good.  Anthony probably doesn't know either. He just likes blowing hot air.

Anthony's wrong on another point, too. The full paper isn't available at the site Anthony linked to unless you're a paid up subscriber or are willing to pay for the privilege.  (You can read one of Richard's earlier rejected versions here, which I got from Richard's own blog. It's not much different to the final paper.)

This is a very long article, although it barely scratches the surface in the myriad flaws in Ridiculous Richard's paper. If you're on the home page, click here for more.