Weather in Rutherglen with WUWT, Jennifer Marohasy and Australia's denier newspaper

Update: see below.

Once again we are drawn into the "making up stuff for the sake of a bad yarn" territory at WUWT (archived here) .

Anthony Watts has written about articles by science denier and "environment" writer for the Australian, Graham Lloyd and one of Australia's resident deniers, Jennifer Marohasy. They are raising a big kerfuffle about the record of temperature trends from the agricultural research centre at DEPI Rutherglen.

I'd normally leave it up to Nick Stokes of Moyhu to analyse denialist claims like this, but he hasn't done so yet. So I'll give it a shot myself.

Rutherglen is wine-grape country just north west of the Great Dividing Range in north eastern Victoria. As well as wine grapes there is dryland farming - animals and cropping, among other things. There has been an agricultural research centre there since the year dot. Well, since the late 1800s - doing viticultural research and education (from 1880), as well as other agricultural research from the early 20th century.  (There used to be two research centres, now one.)

My family has lived in the region since the 1950s. I worked for the Victorian Department of Agriculture in the early 1980s, was on the agriculture faculty at Melbourne Uni in the 1990s, headed the Victorian branch of the ag science professional body for a while, and have since done work with the Victorian primary industries department (including its research arm) so the research centre at Rutherglen is not unfamiliar territory, although I've never worked on site there.

Picking cherries in Rutherglen

Now what the deniers are complaining about this time isn't the mean temperature, nor the maximum daily. Nor is it the climatology of Australia or Victoria or even of the region. What they are talking about is the minimum temperature and in particular, the minimum temperatures up to around the mid-1960s early 1970s recorded at Rutherglen. That's more than forty years ago. A single weather station. The ultimate cherry pick.

I couldn't find another weather station close by that has records going back to the turn of the century, so Rutherglen is about it as far as I can tell. Here is a chart of raw average annual temperatures (from daily). I've included the raw records from Corowa, which is not far away on the Murray as well as Benalla and Wangaratta. Click to view larger.

Data sources: Bureau of Meteorology - Raw as recorded and ACORN-SAT

As you can see from the above, the raw records are shown as lower than the ACORN-SAT (adjusted/corrected) records for the period prior to the gap between 1959 and 1965. I'm not in a position to say why that is the case. I will say that the proper explanation is not nefarious intent. You can leave the conspiracy ideation to deniers who congregate at WUWT. There are any number of plausible explanations for why an algorithm would have detected a break in the record and made an adjustment, some of which I've described below.

One thing you'll notice is where Benalla overlaps with Rutherglen in the earliest records for Benalla, the difference in raw minimum temperature is much less than later on (I've highlighted the two bits to look at). This suggests that BoM was not in error in regard to Rutherglen.

David Archibald in a momentus denial of gravity at WUWT

Anthony Watts' blog is where science deniers congregate so they don't feel so alone in the world. Usually they are simply rejecting climate science, the greenhouse effect, rising global surface temperatures and anything else that takes their fancy that's to do with climate. They don't normally get into rejecting biology or not openly at least. They will from time to time reject chemistry, usually in relation to ocean acidification.

Today I see that a guest essayist has decided to reject gravity and probably momentum. He was writing about a paper in Science from last week, which got denier blogs all a twitter. The paper is probably raising some eyebrows among scientists too. It's an interesting take on where the heat is going.

Before I get to that, though, let me show you what David "funny sunny" Archibald wrote about thermohaline circulation (archived here). He posted this image from an article in last week's Science, which Eli Kintisch wrote about the subject:

The Atlantic Ocean may be storing vast amounts of heat (red), keeping global surface temperatures from rising.
Credit: Xianyao Chen, Ka-Kit Tung, Source: Science Vol. 345 no. 6199 pp. 860-861 

David Archibald said it can't be so. He wrote:

The illustration shows heat plunging into the depths as far as 1,500 metres. The oceans don’t work like that. Most of the heat energy of sunlight is absorbed in the first few centimetres of the ocean’s surface. Waves mix the water near the surface layer such that the temperature may be relatively uniform in the top 100 metres. Below that there is almost no mixing and no vertical movement of water.

Some of what he wrote was okay, sort of. Some of it was very wrong. In particular, he he is rejecting thermohaline circulation, arguing there is no vertical movement of water in the ocean. He's wrong of course.  Thermohaline circulation is the convection in the ocean driven by pressure gradients and gravity. Saltier water is denser than fresh water. Cold water is denser than warm water. Colder saltier water sinks in the ocean. This process doesn't stop and start, or not easily and not often. There's a lot of momentum behind the conveyor belt. There's a huge amount of water going through this cycle. Just because some of it is a bit warmer at times doesn't mean the water stops moving.

Frozen in ice at WUWT

A smidgen of snow on a mountain and we're heading for an ice age? What utter nutters!

Science deniers who congregate at blogs like WUWT are really, really odd creatures. I wonder what proportion of them also follow non-climate conspiracy theory blogs. Today I found on Anthony Watts reformatted blog, another article about ice (archived here). It's about a science trip on the highest mountain in the British Isles, Ben Nevis, probably the most famous mountain in Scotland. The team reported new finds of fauna as well as spots of "compacted, dense, ice hard snow call neve" on the the mountain's North Face, which I guess is the cold side of the mountain (seeing it's in the northern hemisphere).

Eric Worrall decided that this means an ice age cometh. He wrote:

This is how ice ages start – a buildup of snow which does not melt in the Summer, which leads to a positive feedback loop, as the growing ice sheet reflects more and more sunlight back into space.

Well, no. Not exactly. How an ice age starts is Earth starts to lose more heat than it gains from the sun.  A build up of snow and ice happens because it's colder. It's not colder because of the build up of snow and ice. One could argue that it's a chicken and egg thing but it's not. Not usually. Once the snow and ice builds up then that hastens the cooling, because the snow and ice surfaces tend to reflect more radiation back into space. What causes the snow and ice to build up is the earth getting colder. Most of the time. Sometimes it could be changes in ocean currents for one reason or other. The system is complicated.

Anyway, without getting too bogged down in details, the BBC had an article about the survey that's being done on Ben Nevis. There was no suggestion that what was being recorded and observed was anything new. It was just that some things hadn't been reported before. Like:

So far, many new populations of rare fauna [sic] such as highland saxifrage, tufted saxifrage and wavy meadow grass have been recorded.

Sou: fauna?

Lead survey botanist, Ian Strachan, said: "Many of the rare arctic-alpine species we are searching for are relics from soon after the last ice age.

"Ben Nevis and a few other peaks in the Scottish Highlands provide the most southerly refuge for some of these species which can only survive due to the altitude and presence of semi-permanent snow fields."

Cathy Mayne, of SNH, said work so far had exceeded the project team's expectations.
She said: "Not only have we gathered potentially ground-breaking geological data and significantly added to the known populations of arctic-alpine species, the team have also discovered alpine saxifrage, which has never been found on the mountain before."

You can read the article here on the BBC website.

From the WUWT comments

WUWT-ers must be bored. There were 132 comments, almost none of them having any value whatsoever. Many deniers are falling for the line that just because compacted snow is on cold Ben Nevis, it means an ice age cometh.

fenbeagleblog  August 24, 2014 at 4:07 am

I guess that doesn’t fit in terribly well with the narrative, does it……Another re-write needed.

johnmarshall  August 24, 2014 at 4:15 am

I am surprised that the BBC reported this sign of global cooling. Out of character.

David Johnson  August 24, 2014 at 4:30 am

I wonder how old these climbers and scientists were! I used to go rock climbing in Scotland quite a lot back in the 70s and 80s. It was nothing unusual to see patches of old hard snow that had survived the summer in North facing corries and gullies On one occasion, as late as August 1990, it was quite difficult to get to the start of my chosen climb on Ben Nevis because of a small bergschrund!

jdseanjd  August 24, 2014 at 4:42 am

Looks like the 1974 CIA report may be on right track.
How the Eugenicist 1%s who have birthed, marketed & profited from this deadly scam must be laughing.
They’ve been selling the World global warming caused by deadly plant food, while a very possible New Little Ice Age approaches.
Holdren & Ehrlich will also be pleased.

Denier Smorgasbord: Old men want freedom to vacuum madly, the Arctic and Judith Curry's "interesting"

There are two reasons why you've not seen the usual number of articles here the last few days. The first is I've been busy on other things, unrelated to climate science and its denial. The second is that deniers have been deadly dull. They've been recycling the same old tired and wrong denier memes for the most part. Nevertheless, there's always some entertainment to be had at denier blogs, even when the pickings are thin.

Making criminals of "average" people who clean their home?

The ageing conservative American men who dominate WUWT have been bemoaning the latest news about their favourite task, vacuum cleaning. A subject I'm sure they are intimately familiar with. They probably see it done several times a week, from the comfort of their favourite rocker. If they aren't out playing golf. And I'll bet that most of them swear they could do the job better than the person who actually does the vacuuming. What they are up in arms about is the idea that were they to live in Europe, in a few weeks they wouldn't be able to buy their womenfolk vacuum cleaners that suck up any more than 1600 watts of electricity (archived here). Anthony Watts even goes so far as to claim that:

"One more reason to dump the EU- they are going to make criminals out of average people who just want to keep their home clean. – Anthony". 

He probably meant "who just want their women to clean up after them". And of course, he's wrong. People can continue to use their old vacuum cleaners. Even men can do so. Even conservative ageing men who deny climate science can do the vacuuming any time. It's just that in future, if they want to buy a new vacuum cleaner, their purchasing choice will be restricted to more energy efficient units.

The Arctic is melting and it's driving deniers mad

Anthony Watts posted an extremely long (>13,000 words) and what seems to me a convoluted article by Tony Brown, of central England temperature / an ice age cometh fame. It was more of a novella than a "guest essay". (Archived here.) I might come back to that one later on. I did notice a comment by Steve Mosher at Curry's place, which related to Tony's article. Steven Mosher wrote:

August 23, 2014 at 10:14 pm
tony “However, the conclusion must be that drawn that warming was more widespread in the arctic generally -not just the Atlantic side-than is currently noted in the official sea ice data bases covering1920-1945/50 and that the official records appear to substantially overstate the ice area extent. Some of the thinning of the ice and reduction of glaciers noted today appears to have had their genesis in the period referenced, or earlier.”

with no actual numbers, no actual method, no actual uncertainty calculations, I fail to see how your conclusion MUST BE drawn.

In general we have a collection of text that is long on adjectives and short on quantitative analysis. Further since we have apples and oranges to compare its hard to say anything MUST be drawn.

Finally, I find it odd that today when it warms and the arctic melts, skeptics, such as Anthony point to the wind and soot .. as if warmer temps did nothing. but when looking at historical records they quickly assume that warmer temps mean less ice. I dont doubt the latter, I only note the inconsistent application of a principle amongst skeptics

Judith Curry finds John McLean "interesting"

Judith continues to wallow in the depths of denialism, finding an article by Australia's John McLean "interesting". John's the computer operater / climate science denier who somehow managed to get a paper published, in which he removed the temperature trend from global surface temperatures and then looked at what remained and declared there was no trend. To much hilarity from all whose knowledge of statistics was at least sufficient for them to calculate an average of two numbers. John also declared, in 2011, that  "It is likely that 2011 will be the coolest year since 1956". Guess how that turned out! John is a denier of the utter nutter kind and so is Judith Curry, for giving him the slightest bit of credibility.

From the WUWT comments

This is a bit of a mish mash from a couple of WUWT articles. First from the vacuum-cleaning experts:

Andrew N has done his sums. I wonder how many times he's pulled out a vacuum cleaner? He says:

August 22, 2014 at 9:18 pm
It appears the ecocrats of the EU have confused power with energy. If it takes you twice as long to clean while using half the power then you have used the same amount of energy. Have they factored in the CO2 generated by the increased effort required by the vacuumer in any of their saving the planet calculations?

Eric Worrall decides that using an energy efficient vacuum cleaner is the worst punishment that could be doled out to anyone, causing much pain and misery all around. He visits from time to time. Perhaps he'll share some tips from his years of experience with vacuuming cleaning his floors. He says:

August 22, 2014 at 9:46 pm
In a totalitarian state, the measure of your power is how much misery you can cause.
Anyone can be nice – but spreading pain and misery proves to your colleagues that you are powerful. 

There were 58 comments to Tony Brown's book. Here is a sample:

Nick Stokes says, of Tony Brown's article:

August 22, 2014 at 5:52 pm
Congratulations, Tony
A very informative post

I don't know which bits Nick found informative.

Paul Homewood says (extract):

August 22, 2014 at 2:43 pm
It’s a bit long!!

FergalR says:

August 22, 2014 at 2:54 pm
I can’t possibly read all this while drunk. Maybe tomorrow afternoon. More likely Monday evening.

Hans H says:

August 22, 2014 at 3:32 pm
Dunno why u spread this Noaa/Giss stuff ? Check raw data n do it again. ” as seen in the graph” is not ok..n really Wuwt must know by now ?

Sorry for the paucity of articles the last few days. I'll hope to do better this coming week.  BTW, feel free to point out how sexist I was, poking fun at all the old conservative men getting upset about vacuum cleaners. I think I was being ageist rather than sexist. And there's good grounds for the stereotyping, don't you think?

---

Foster, G., J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth. "Comment on “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” by JD McLean, CR de Freitas, and RM Carter." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 115, no. D9 (2010).  doi:10.1029/2009JD012960
.

For Arctic ice watchers - a satellite view from NASA

From NASA:

"While this year is not heading toward a record low minimum extent in the Arctic, sea ice is well below normal and continues an overall pattern of decreasing sea ice during summer in the Arctic,” said sea ice scientist Walt Meier, based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

.

While I'm here, might as well add a couple of live linked charts (click for larger view, or the links below) and a link to Neven's Arctic Sea Ice blog.

JAXA

Arctic ROOS

Unsurprisingly there's no recovery, but no record this year either, from the look of things.

Arctic ROOS is a bit strange today, so I've added another (Sou: 22 Aug 14)

AMSR2 U Bremen

How scientists feel about climate change plus Anthony Watts mixes logic and emotion

Joe Duggan has a blog on which he's posted letters from Australian climate scientists, expressing how they feel about climate change.

There are a lot of them and they are heart wrenching and frightening. They remind me of the seminar I attended earlier this year, which caused my stomach to knot up with dread for the future. At the seminar, none of the scientists spoke about their feelings. They didn't have to. The science spoke for itself. At the time I could only wonder how they had the stamina to continue to work in their field, knowing what they know.

In these letters we get a glimpse of what must at times be personal torment. These are from people who understand more than anyone else what we and our children and their children are going to have to try to cope with.

Take a few minutes and go and read the letters at Joe's blog.

If you are a climate scientist or do research in a related field, then you won't need to read what your fellow scientists are dealing with.  I've worked a lot with scientists. As a general rule, scientists don't wear their heart on their sleeve. They tend to be analytical rather than emotional. These letters were in response to a specific request. They are a rare opportunity for human insight rather than just plain science, from people who understand, more than the rest of us, what the future may bring.

Anthony Watts mixes logic with emotion

Anthony Watts copied and pasted the blog article in full. Then he wrote (archived here):

Two things:

1. Logic (Science) and emotion (feelings) are polar opposites. Mixing the two is a sure recipe for logical disaster. Ref: fMRI reveals reciprocal inhibition between social and physical cognitive domains. NeuroImage, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.10.061

2. I feel like I want to hurl.

(h/t to Maurizio Morabito)

-Anthony

Denier weirdness: Anthony Watts tiny brain explodes when hit with science, and he fails economics, finance and accounting 101

Poor little Anthony Watts is having a hard time coming up with interesting things to write about. Maybe it's just the fact that I've been very busy lately, but WUWT is looking very tired and uninteresting to my way of thinking.  Today Anthony does what all good deniers do - he moans about science.

How dare scientists report what has happened!

This time he's up in arms about the fact that scientists have looked very closely at what has happened to global surface temperatures over the past few years, compared it with climate models and found that there is not a lot of difference in the end. The reason is that natural variability, mainly ENSO, has kept the heat in the oceans and hasn't released big chunks for a few years. Climate models aren't designed to mimic every little interannual variation in synch with the weather. Their projections are for longer term trends. As well as that the observations haven't been keeping up with the rapid warming in the Arctic. Add in aerosols and the slightly dimmer sun and what do you get? The models are pretty good.

Anthony is furious that scientists would report this sort of thing. What he's complaining about is a new letter in Nature Geoscience, by Markus Huber & Reto Knutti who did a review of recent work on global surface temperatures. They looked at some of the work done a little while back, where models outputs were reviewed to take account of actual observations (or estimates) of aerosols, volcanoes, solar radiation and ENSO. They also looked at the work of Kevin Cowtan and Robert Way in regard to Arctic temperature trends. They put it all together and came up with what many other scientists have figured - that the models aren't that different to observations once you take all these factors into account.

Well, that was all too much for Anthony's tiny brain to absorb. He can't cope with reality. He's dead against the idea of bringing what's actually happened into account. This is what he wrote (archived here):

This quote from ETH Zurich is actually from another just published post, but it is so grating, so anti-science, that it deserves its very own thread to highlight it.

Here it is:

If the model data is corrected downwards, as suggested by the ETH researchers, and the measurement data is corrected upwards, as suggested by the British and Canadian researchers, then the model and actual observations are very similar.

Gosh.

This is like saying:

If we take all our economic projections for performance as suggested by our financial models, and correct it downwards, and at the same time, if we take all of our revenues and expenditures that are in the red, and adjust them upwards, out company will be on track and our investors will be satisfied.

Except, people go to jail for that sort of thing.

Anthony Watts is no economist, finance expert or accountant

You can tell that Anthony's never looked at a balance sheet and that he hasn't a clue about any of economics, finance and accounting. What does he get wrong? First of all, he's got economics mixed up with finance mixed up with accounting. And you don't have "revenues and expenditures in the red". You're "in the red" if you're bank balance is negative (you've got an overdraft) or your current liabilities exceed your current assets. And one doesn't make economic projections from financial models. You can make financial projections from financial models.

But it's worse than that. Anthony's got it all back to front. If companies don't issue updates to the stock exchange when their circumstances change, well that's when directors can go to gaol. If they try to hide the fact that things went awry in their financial projections and they are suddenly blessed with a much bigger profit or have suffered a huge loss, then they will get into strife.

Thing is, anyone who is monitoring what is expected against what has happened is doing the responsible thing by reporting it. If a financial projection is based on an expectation of high sales because of a upturn in the economy, and then there's a financial crisis - then the projection needs to be revised.

About the paper

If you want to read about the paper that so muddled Anthony's already muddled brain, you can read it at Nature Geoscience if you've got a subs or otherwise have access. Or you can read the press release at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich.

From the WUWT comments

As expected there are gasps and shrieks of indignation that anyone would examine what has actually happened in the world over the past few years. What cheek those scientists have. How dare they look at the data. That goes against everything that deniers hold sacred.

Frank K. is appalled that scientists would report their findings and says:

August 19, 2014 at 9:10 am
This is the most perverted use of the word “corrected” I have EVER seen. Just stunning…

David Johnson is speechless but not wordless and says:

August 19, 2014 at 9:20 am
I am speechless.

 JohnB wonders what all the fuss is about and says:

August 19, 2014 at 9:28 am
A bit of context…
The “downward correction” is to account for the predominance of La Nina over recent years.
The “upward correction” is to account for bias due to lack of arctic temperature stations.
Unreasonable?

PeterB in Indianapolis doesn't understand that the science was based on what actually happened and says:

August 19, 2014 at 9:28 am
So basically, if we make sh*t up to match what we think is the “right answer”, then we can finally demonstrate that our answer is right! 

grumpyoldmanuk says:

August 19, 2014 at 9:36 am
“Except, people go to jail for that sort of thing.”
Not if they are Chairing a Central Bank they don’t.

Nor if they go by the name of Matt Ridley and chair a bank called Northern Rock.


Louis Hooffstetter says:

August 19, 2014 at 11:23 am
JohnB says: A bit of context…
The “downward correction” is to account for the predominance of La Nina over recent years. The “upward correction” is to account for bias due to lack of arctic temperature stations. Unreasonable?

John, John, John… We can’t adjust the models. They are based on sacrosanct laws of physics. To adjust them would be to “deny the science”. Surely you don’t want to be called a denier.
As for the temperature data, it has been adjusted enought already (way more than enough actually). So here’s what we do: Throw out the adjusted temperature data and use the satellite temperature data instead. Compare that to the unadjusted model outputs and see what you get.
Report back to us to let us know how that works out.

Louis, I'll go one better. Rather than throw away good data, let's compare four temperature data sets, including two satellite measures of the lower troposphere and two surface data. They are remarkable only for their similarity.

Data sources: NASA GISTemp, Met Office Hadley Centre, UAH, RSS

All the rest of the comments are much the same. Deniers don't want to see scientists reporting what has actually happened. They can't bear to lose one of their favourite faked memes that "all the models are wrong". They are all in a tizz because the models are most likely pretty right after all.

PS Maybe Anthony's mind hasn't been on his blog because he's putting the final, final, final finishing touches on his brand new "getting older every day" paper that has yet to see the light of day. Go comment about that at Stoat :)

---

Huber M, Knutti R: Natural variability, radiative forcing and climate response in the recent hiatus reconciled. Nature Geoscience, online publication 17 August 2014, doi: 10.1038/ngeo2228

Denier weirdness: The weight of the atmosphere is pressure cooking Ferd Berple at WUWT

For you to ponder - seen at WUWT, in the comments to an article in which Anthony Watts was downplaying the current extreme drought in California. (Arguing it was worse 700 years ago so why worry?).

ferd berple says (quoting someone or other):

August 18, 2014 at 12:02 pm
the effect of increasing the concentration of the two main GHGs, water vapor and carbon dioxide, from about 303 to 304 molecules per 10,000 molecules of dry air would not be measurable.
=========
due to partial pressure law, increasing CO2 by 1 molecule will tend to reduce H2O by 2.4 molecules, all else remaining equal. Otherwise the increased CO2 would increase the mass of the atmosphere, increasing the surface pressure, making it harder to evaporate water, until such time as the same weight of water failed to evaporate, bringing the weight of the atmosphere back into equilibrium.

Since the molecular weight of CO2 is 44, and the molecular weight of H2O is 18, it takes (44/18) = 2.44 molecules of H2O to equal the weight of 1 CO2 molecule. What is interesting is that this would yield a negative H2O feedback of 2.4, which almost exactly balances the 3 time positive water feedback assumed by climate science. Since the H2O will tend to come out of the atmosphere more rapidly than temps will rise, it could well be that partial pressure law causes a net negative feedback.

Which would explain why the models are running hot. They fail to allow for partial pressure law to reduce H2O in their calculations, as CO2 increases.

Usually deniers talk about CO2 being so small it can't have any effect. Ferd takes a different tack. He's run this argument before, that CO2 pressure is so great that it presses on the sky's walls and floor and ceiling and stops water evaporating :) (Shades of our friend, Mack!)

Double Dunce Award: WUWT gets it wrong when it claims the LA Times was wrong about Missouri streamflows

Today one of the WUWT regulars got a spot in an article at WUWT. It was about a very detailed study of streamflows in the Missouri River Watershed, which can be downloaded here.

Findings support a climatological forcing for the upward trends

The study noted significant changes over time. There was an upward trend in streamflow in some regions and a downward trend in others. The nature of the upward trend lends support for climatological forcing.  Other work identified that the downward trend is at least in part because of groundwater pumping. In the trend analysis at the end of the report, the authors wrote:

Either upward or downward significant trends in annual, monthly, and seasonal streamflow were pervasive within three watershed regions: downward trends in WR1 (upper Missouri River), upward trends in WR3 (Great Plains and Central Lowland physiographic provinces and Niobrara River), and downward trends in WR5 (Kansas River watershed). A comprehensive analysis of cause of trends is outside the scope of this report. An increase in diversions or consumptive use of water during the study period, however, could not result in upward trends in annual streamflows over broad regions, such as WR3. All seven HCDN streamgages in WR3 have upward trends, which supports a climatological forcing for the upward trends. Although not examined in this study, an increase in consumptive use because of groundwater pumping has been identified as a contributing factor to the downward trends in WR5 (Wen and Xunhong, 2006).

Downward trends in WR1, the upper Missouri River, were significant throughout this region and even on main-stem streamgages below reservoirs, such as streamgages 06177000 and 06185500 (map numbers 20 and 21, respectively) in WR1 and streamgage 06342500 (map number 53) in WR2. Two out of eight HCDN streamgages had downward trends, streamgage 06278300 (map number 32) and streamgage 06298000 (map number 40), whereas the remaining HCDN streamgages had no significant streamflow trends. Future studies could examine the forcing factors of these observed trends in streamflow, the watershed effects and potential long term consequences.

Now compare that with what was written at WUWT (archived here). To start with, Anthony wrote the article based on a comment by one of his fans, Joel O’Bryan, who has had quite a few of his comments quoted here at HotWhopper. He tends to make really dumb comments and gets very worked up about climate science.

Word search vs reading the words

Joel did something a bit unusual for a science denier, he went and checked the paper after reading a report in the Los Angeles Times. Well, he obviously didn't actually read the paper. What he did was do a search for the word "climate". I guess that's why he missed the Synthesis of Trends, which was just above the Summary at the end of the report, because it used the word "climatological", not "climate".

Another con job: the Galileo Movement put their hand out for Patrick Moore in Australia

Is Australia becoming a breeding ground for science-denying con men?

You may have heard (or not) of the "Galileo Movement" in Australia. It's a very small "organisation" of two rather nutty Queenslanders, Case Smit and John Smeed, who can't even understand what their own people are arguing. I think it probably still only numbers those two people plus a few hangers on.

As an example of how dumb they are, they couldn't accept that one of their mob were spouting a lot of anti-semitic conspiracy theories as part of a very garbled (to the point of incomprehensible) nonsense a year or so ago. I'm talking about the screed from Malcolm Roberts which Graham Readfearn wrote about, and which prompted journalist Ben Cubby to ask:

how does one critically analyse a pile of horse shit?

Australia's home grown deniers aren't up to the job?

You'd have thought this pair would be happy enough with seeing the opinions of Australia's resident supposed business leader turned fruitcake, Maurice Newman, occasionally plastered all over The Australian newspaper. Or the various efforts of people like Ian "iron sun" Plimer and Bob "agnostic" Carter. This mob have sponsored Christopher Monckton to tour Australia in the past. Christopher's latest visit was notable only for the absence of its coverage in the media.

Setting their sights low

This time the Galileo duo are angling for another small fish, Patrick "not a founder of Greenpeace" Moore. He's some Canadian who spends much of his time promoting golden rice. When he's not doing that he spends time rejecting climate science, if the fee is right, apparently.

The "value" of science denial - $100,000

I doubt too many people in Australia have ever heard of the chap. He seems to be a pseudo-environmentalist for hire. His fees are big. He's charging the Galileo Movement $100,000 for a short trip to Australia. (It rivals the ten minute video that went absolutely nowhere, by which some chap in Perth fleeced a bunch of deniers from all around the world of their hard earned dollars.)

Anthony Watts is lending a hand by putting the latest scam on his blog (archived here), which invites his readers to send their big fat cheques to Australia.

What are they paying for? Well, the article is short on detail. Apart from telling everyone that they need $100,000, the only details about what people will get for their investment are:

Rather than lecturing to the “converted”, the principal purpose of this visit is for him to meet with opinion leaders in the media, politics and business to convey a rational environmentalist’s views on why policies instituted because of the “catastrophic climate change” scare need to be realistically addressed.

Cheques can be deposited in the National Australia Bank account of the Galileo Movement Pty Ltd.

Sounds like a right lark. No details. No indication of who he'll be meeting with or why. No objectives other than to "convey" views. As if deniers' views aren't already well known. All zillions of them :)

I can't imagine who they'll manage to line up to meet with Patrick Moore. Maybe he'll find a couple of politicians willing to put up with his company in exchange for wine and pasta. You never know, Patrick might sell them some of his golden rice.

Anyway, I wonder how peeved Christopher Monckton is right now. He had to traipse across the country from one mediocre gathering of doddering old deniers to another, staying in who knows what lodgings along the way.  I don't know what he earned from his trip, but it wouldn't have been the most pleasant journey. More like a hard slog for any entertainer and especially so for someone who's no longer a spring chicken.

And along comes Patrick Moore. He manages to get someone willing to pay $100,000 and gets the high life. He can probably spend most of his time feasting in sumptuous surrounds. All he has to do is entertain a few bored politicians and anyone else who's willing to be taken out to dinner.

From the WUWT comments

It took a little while before any comments surfaced. Are they struck dumb? Are they a bit shy after the video fiasco? I've popped back in to see if they've hooked any suckers. (Archive here, latest archive here.)

davidmhoffer is the first to comment and says:

August 17, 2014 at 12:41 pm
$100K?
Seems a bit steep?

Johna Till Johnson says:

August 17, 2014 at 12:52 pm
Anthony,
You might let him have a share of your big oil money. :-) That plus $5 could get him a cup of coffee at Starbucks…

John piccirilli says:

August 17, 2014 at 12:56 pm
100k is a bargain if it can help stop the not so green machine which
Spent a 100k of taxpayers money as I wrote this. Goon luck MM

outtheback says:

August 17, 2014 at 12:59 pm
Sadly “believers” are not likely to come as their mind is made up and Dr. Moore is viewed as a heretic. No conversions will take place.

A few fence sitters and the rest are going to be people who like/need confirmation of their thoughts and findings.

I venture to guess that not too many politicians want to be seen with Dr Moore.