Oodles of hockey sticks on display for WUWT

Poor old WUWT is in the doldrums. Now that temperatures are shooting to unprecedented heights again, deniers don't know what to say or do. So they've fallen back on an old faithful.


Just when I was thinking it's been a while since WUWT took a shot at Professor Michael Mann, he makes another appearance. This time in an article by climate disinformer Doug L. Hoffman. Doug mistakenly thinks that the days of hockey sticks have passed. I'm here to tell him he's wrong - and to show him oodles of hockey sticks.

Doug's article is very long considering the point he is trying to make. He's arguing that the MBH98 hockey stick chart, which shows that modern temperatures have shot up suddenly from what they were for most of human civilisation, is "dead".  He's dead wrong!

Figure 5 Time reconstructions (solid lines) along with raw data (dashed lines)....b, for Northern Hemisphere mean temperature (NH) in 8C. In both cases, the zero line corresponds to the 1902–80 calibration mean of the quantity. For b raw data are shown up to 1995 and positive and negative 2σ uncertainty limits are shown by the light dotted lines surrounding the solid reconstruction, calculated as described in the Methods section. From MBH98

Nervous or stupid laughter from WUWT as their anticipated ice age cometh fades

Some people laugh nervously when they get scared. Some people become hysterical when stress becomes too great to bear. That's what seems to be happening at WUWT today.

There's nothing of substance at WUWT since the article I wrote on earlier, about the extra hot seas. There is one new article (archived here), which got a much larger than normal response - 497 comments so far. It seems to be providing a release from the pent up anxiety, knowing about the record heat that's being observed lately. The new article was by Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale, who seems to be pushing the idea that it won't get hotter or drier or wetter with global warming because it's just models.

Bob put up a chart from the IPCC AR5 Synthesis Report, which showed the risk levels in different parts of the world and the potential for risk reduction.

It looks to me that the chart is of marginal utility, being more illustrative than predictive.  I say that from a parochial perspective because the chart doesn't list the three biggest hazards we face in the region in which I live, which are extreme heat, wildfire and water shortages (and associated threats to agricultural production and health).

Here's the diagram for what it's worth. It's Figure 2.4 from the recently released IPCC AR5 Synthesis Report - Longer report. Unlike Bob Tisdale, I've added the caption. Click the chart for a larger version:

Figure 2.4: Representative key risks for each region, including the potential for risk reduction through adaptation and mitigation, as well as limits to adaptation. Identification of key risks was based on expert judgment using the following specific criteria: large magnitude, high probability or irreversibility of impacts; timing of impacts; persistent vulnerability or exposure contributing to risks; or limited potential to reduce risks through adaptation or mitigation. Risk levels are assessed as very low, low, medium, high, or very high for three timeframes: the present, near term (here, for 2030-2040), and long term (here, for 2080–2100). For the near term, projected levels of global mean temperature increase do not diverge substantially across different emission scenarios. For the long term, risk levels are presented for two possible futures (2 °C and 4 °C global mean temperature increase above pre-industrial levels). For each time frame, risk levels are indicated for a continuation of current adaptation and assuming high levels of current or future adaptation. Risk levels are not necessarily comparable, especially across regions. {WGII SPM Assessment Box SPM.2 Table 1} Source: IPCC AR5 Synthesis Report - Longer report.

The chart shows a map of the world, with risks for nine regional areas, being six inhabited continents, the oceans, the polar regions and small islands. It purports to show the risk level for the present, the near term (2030-2040) and the long term, for two scenarios, 2°C and 4°C. As well as that it shows the potential for additional adaptation to reduce the risk.

So the diagram is quite clever, fitting a lot into the one chart. But it is very much simplified, which is why I say it's of marginal practical use. It is more illustrative than pragmatic. To get a better appreciation of the main risks to each region and the potential to adapt or not, or to act to reduce the various risks, you'll need to read the report itself - and the more detailed reports.

Nervous or stupid?

Bob Tisdale at WUWT is making light of the chart. That could be because it makes him very nervous so he jokes to reduce the stress. Or it could be because he is too stupid to realise that it should make him very nervous or at the very least, it should prompt him to act. If one takes his article at face value, it's because he's too stupid. He wrote:

The map resembles the planet Earth, where most of us reside. The continents are in the right places, and so are the oceans. But we know that’s not the Earth. The risks illustrated are based on climate models, and we know that climate models used by the IPCC for their reports are not based on Earth’s actual climate, as it has existed in the past, or as it exists now. The maps output by climate models may resemble our Earth, but they’re fantasy maps of a fantasy world. They create nothing more than an illusion…an illusion that is intended to make it look like bad things will happen in the future if we all do not agree to reduce our carbon footprints.

Bob's intelligent enough to understand what the diagram represents, but too thick to understand that the diagram is based, not just on models of future climate but on expert knowledge of past climate plus the current and potential economic, social and physical status of each region. He adds:

We need a name for the imaginary planet simulated by climate models—a planet that looks like Earth, but is not Earth. I’ll propose the climate-modeled planet be called TurnsToCrap. No matter how the modelers present the product of their endeavors, they show the planet TurnsToCrap.

So far his article has 497 responses, which must be a record not just for an article by Bob Tisdale, but for WUWT itself for this year. It's rare these days to get so many comments from the WUWT denialati. It comes across as an hysterical release of pent up nervousness.

The deniers have had a lot to get anxious about this past few weeks, with a swathe of announcements of record high temperatures shattering their dreams of an ice age to cometh.

From the WUWT comments

Most of the 497 comments are one-liners, with the deniers vying with each other to make the silliest remark. I've scanned some of them and few are genuinely funny. Most would not win a prize at a comedy festival. Quite a few did pick up on the fact that the future is grim if we don't reduce emissions. And there were a fair few who made an obligatory reference to "algore". Here's a small sample, you can read the rest here:

Resourceguy

November 14, 2014 at 11:32 am
Planet X, Y or Z, depending on the excuse needed.

Red Dust

November 14, 2014 at 11:34 am
Reblogged this on Scratch Living and commented:
I know a good name for the imaginary planet simulated climate models for the IPCC, “Paycheck” or “Easy Grants”.

Matthew R Marler

November 14, 2014 at 11:35 am
Good contributions above. Here are mine:
Simulistan,
Compustan,
Silicastan,
Democratic Republic of Alarm.

Mike Bryant

November 14, 2014 at 12:14 pm
Fear Sphere

Scott Wilmot Bennett  

November 14, 2014 at 4:46 pm
Terror Sphere
Terra Fear

steven strittmatter

November 14, 2014 at 12:30 pm
Algore-an. (As in a great disturbance in The Farce)

Jtom referred to the glaringly obvious about WUWT in general and this thread in particular. It could be that he intended it as an insult to career scientists rather than as an insult to his fellow WUWT illiterati. That would be if he was too incompetent to know he was incompetent:

November 14, 2014 at 7:57 pm
This might help explain the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which says stupid people are too stupid to realize they’re stupid:

DAVID DUNNING: Well, my specialty is decision-making. How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life? And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true. And I became fascinated with that. Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them. Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS: Why not?

DAVID DUNNING: If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas. And to our astonishment, it was very, very true. 

Getting hotter - much too hot for WUWT

It's getting a bit too hot for the deniers at WUWT. Anthony Watts is even disputing a report from the University of Hawaii ‑ SOEST that the oceans this year are the hottest ever recorded.  He's written one of his "claim" headlines, meaning his readers are meant to deny the science (archived here).

ScienceDaily.com has carried the report, under some charts provided by Professor Axel Timmermann:

Figure 1: a) NOAA Sea Surface Temperature anomaly (with respect to period 1854-2013) averaged over global oceans (red) and over North Pacific (0-60oN, 110oE-100oW) (cyan). September 2014 temperatures broke the record for both global and North Pacific Sea Surface Temperatures. b) Sea Surface Temperature anomaly of September 2014 from NOAA's ERSST dataset.

Deniers are catching up with climate science - they're now only 76 years behind

Wondering Willis Eschenbach at WUWT (archived here) has just discovered Guy Stewart Callendar, 76 years after everyone else did. He sings his praises, though he is selective about the bits he quotes.

"GS Callendar 1934"
University of East Anglia Archive (provided by James R. Fleming).
Source: Spencer Weart

At this rate, by 2032, deniers will be praising the 1956 work of Gilbert Plass. Then in 2051, some science denier will discover a 1975 paper by Wallace S. Broecker, and sing his praises.

In around 2064, another random denier will claim discovery of Dr James Hansen's 1988 testimony to the US Congressional Committee and say what a brilliant scientist Jim Hansen was.

Callendar didn't anticipate the rate at which we'd burn fossil fuel, with his Table VI showing CO2 at 360 ppm in the 22nd Century instead of 1995. He figured at 360 ppm, CO2 would result in a rise in global surface temperature of 0.57 degrees Celsius, which is pretty close to the actual increase by the mid-1990s, but doesn't allow for the climate to come to equilibrium. So it's probably an underestimate.  Someone more familiar with Callendar's work might comment on this.

Ed Hawkins and Phil Jones wrote a paper last year, to celebrate 75 years since Callendar's seminal paper. They also put together a poster. I see from their paper that if deniers want to get access to a "large collection" of Callendar's notebooks, they'll have to go cap in hand to the University of East Anglia, and maybe beg forgiveness from Dr Phil Jones.

Confirming Lewandowsky: More self-sealed conspiracy theories at WUWT

Anthony Watts today has highlighted the curious ongoing obsession fake sceptics have with stolen emails written in the dim distant past (archived here). He's pointed to an article in Environmental Research Letters by Stephan Lewandowsky.

Don't confuse conspiracy theorists' obsessions with general public interest

Professor Lewandowsky's article is a perspective piece about a paper published in ERL earlier this year by William R L Anderegg and Gregory R Goldsmith. The abstract:

Anderegg and Goldsmith (2014 Environ. Res. Lett. 9 054005) use Google Trends to examine the impact of specific media events - the so-called "climategate" imbroglio and the glacial-melt error in the IPCC's 2007 report - on public opinion regarding climate change. There has been an overall decline of public interest in climate change after 2007, accompanied by spikes of interest with a half-life of six days for these two media events. The brevity of public interest in "climategate" stands in contrast to the continued and growing fascination of the "skeptic" blogosphere with that event. These results document the assertion that conspiratory obsession by a small number of people should not be mistaken for general public interest.

Indeed. It would be hard to mistake the conspiratory obsession by the small number of people at WUWT with general public interest about anything. For example, is the general public really interested in fake skeptic allegations that climate science is a hoax because climate scientists use email? And is the general public really interested in Tim Ball and his theories about how Tom Wigley has become the ruler of the world?  Is the general public really interested in the WUWT paranoid conspiracy theories about the IPCC?

Who's the wackadoodle?

Although he probably hasn't read the paper, Anthony Watts doesn't seem to like what Professor Lewandowsky wrote, and said:

A new paper by Stephan Lewandowsky once again projects his own conspiracy ideation onto skeptics...

Extract:
One known element of conspiratorial thinking is its ‘self-sealing’ quality (Keeley 1999, Bale 2007, Sunstein and Vermeule 2009), whereby evidence against a conspiratorial belief is re-interpreted as evidence for that belief. In the case of ‘climategate’, this self-sealing nature of conspiratorial belief became evident after the scientists in question were exonerated by nine investigations in two countries (including various parliamentary and government committees in the U.S. and U.K.; see table 1), when those exonerations were re-branded as a ‘whitewash.’ This ‘whitewash’ response can be illustrated by U.S. Representative Sensenbrennerʼs published response to the EPAʼs endangerment finding. 

...Basically, the gist of it is that being interested in Climategate, makes you a conspiracy theorist.

What a wackadoodle.

h/t to Barry Wood. 

Which is funny on a few counts. First of all, there's no hint of any conspiratorial thinking on the part of Professor Lewandowsky in his article.  Anthony is just trying to be "clever" and failing. And yeah, being consumed by a desire to find something, anything in the stolen emails that will "prove" that climate science is a hoax - is a prominent sign of conspiracy ideation. Finally - h/t Barry Wood. Of course!

Empty vessels

The Lewandowsky paper closes by observing that the empty vessel effect is evident. People think there are more deniers than there actually are, because they make so much noise. He writes:

It is known that the perception of the prevalence of ‘skeptic’ opinions is grossly over-estimated compared to the actual extent of ‘skepticism.’ In a representative Australian sample, (Leviston et al 2013b) found that only around 6% of respondents denied that climate change was happening, whereas the publicʼs estimate of the prevalence of that opinion was in excess of 20%—more than three times greater. 

He then discusses the miconceptions about scientific consensus and how that can shape people's attitudes. He wrote:

Given the well-known linkage between the perception of a consensus and actual opinion (e.g., Lewandowsky et al 2013b), peopleʼs mis-calibration of the perceived public-opinion landscape—in particular the inflation of a small minority into 1/5 of the population—raises the possibility that peopleʼs attitudes are disproportionately shaped by a small but very vocal minority. 

And he notes that scientists themselves are not immune to the influence of the empty vessels, writing:

It must be of particular concern that the scientific community does not appear to be immune to such misperceptions. There is some evidence that ‘skeptical’ voices are affecting—and arguably distorting—the course of climate science and the communication of its findings (Freudenburg and Muselli 2010, Brysse et al 2013).

Stephan Lewandowsky rounds off the article cautioning people not to confuse the obsessions of the small number of fake sceptics with the wider public interest. And refers again to the Anderegg & Goldsmith paper, which showed that:

... the wider public astutely lost interest in ‘climategate’ long ago.

Not being as astute as the wider public, Anthony Watts and his fake sceptics at WUWT are still obsessed, turning innocent conversations from innocuous fifteen year old emails into grand conspiracies of climate hoaxes.

Self-sealing conspiracy theories from the WUWT comments

If you go to the WUWT comments, you'll find confirmation of what Professor Lewandowsky wrote in his paper, which Anthony Watts quoted above, about the "self-sealing" quality of conspiracy theory advocates.

...whereby evidence against a conspiratorial belief is reinterpreted as evidence for that belief. ...

WUWT readers decided to prove the points made in the paper. I saw scant evidence of self awareness in the comments. See the self-sealing in action, from Anna Keppa, who wrote:

November 12, 2014 at 6:29 pm
What a crock. It isn’t a case of evidence of a conspiratorial **belief** that matters, it’s evidence of the conspiracy itself. In the case of climategate, there were no independent or disinterested investigations, just parties either invested with stakes in the outcome or on record as having held the same position of the warmistas.

Will Nitschke tries to fudge, but fails to hide his self-sealed conspiracy theory:

November 12, 2014 at 6:42 pm
People don’t trust “internal” police investigations because of the obvious conflict of interest. That’s why police are usually investigated by special and separate branches of the police, or in some cases anti-corruption special judicial appointments.
The issue needs to be correctly framed. Not, that ‘conspiracy’ or more correctly, ‘self interest’ is impossible or highly unlikely, but rather, with any group behaviour, can one expect it to NOT operate? It seems like a rather absurd proposition. It’s rather self evident that conflict of interest is normative in any field of human endeavour.

Malcolm is another self-sealer and says:

November 12, 2014 at 8:21 pm
The primary purpose of these ‘investigations’ was to exonerate the scientists. This point is completely lost on most people. 

Chip Javert decides that Professor Lewandowsky is part of a conspiracy to curtail his freedom to indulge in conspiracy thinking:

November 12, 2014 at 6:54 pm
Oh good. Some witch doctor climbs out from under the psychology rock to defame a community attempting to conduct a legitimate science discussion.
He easily demonstrates a firm grasp on bovine excrement, but how much math & physics does he understand? 

ossqss says he knows from experience that psychologists are nuts. He's married to one, he said, so he knows!

November 12, 2014 at 7:01 pm
Mr. Lew’s continued behavior speaks to psychological issues of his own. I am not a psychologist, but I married one. I have viewed this type of behavior through studies helping my better half get that credential. Just sayin, fixation through facination can lead to strange things. Perhaps one of our credentialed viewers could comment further, but he seems to have a serious internal problem with no known way out of it now. A plateau has been reached in more ways than one for him. 

Konrad. agrees with ossqss and says that because he analyses the fake sceptic psyche he must be nuts, and maybe he's right :)

November 12, 2014 at 7:46 pm
Yes, strange isn’t it? Every time complete foamer Lewandowsky goes to write another of his turgid psychology papers, he keeps coming back to his own crazed conspiracy ideation about sceptics. It’s like a dog returning to its vomit.
I fear there is no hope for a “physician heal thyself” solution. For Lewandowsky it may be time for the quiet clinic in the country where all the nurses speak softly, the furnishings are padded and all the utensils are plastic…

---

Anderegg, William RL, and Gregory R. Goldsmith. "Public interest in climate change over the past decade and the effects of the ‘climategate’media event." Environmental Research Letters 9, no. 5 (2014): 054005. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/9/5/054005

Stephan Lewandowsky. "Conspiratory fascination versus public interest: the case of 'climategate'" Environ. Res. Lett. 9, no. 11 (2014): 111004 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/9/11/111004

Someone needs to explain the seasons to Willis Eschenbach and Stan Robertson at WUWT

I started to write this article some time ago in response to an article by Wondering Willis Eschenbach (archived here). Today there's another article on the same topic by someone called Stan Robertson (archived here) so I figured I'd resurrect this. Stan's been featured here on a previous occasion.

The main question they are asking is: why doesn't Earth heat up more when it's closest to the sun, in January? The corollary they didn't ask is, why doesn't Earth cool down more when it's furthest from the sun, in July?

The main answer is: the tilt of the earth dominates seasonal variation, not distance from the Sun. For Earth that is. (It's different on Mars.) Plus - oceans.

This is a long and long-winded article, probably with too much repetition and a tad muddled. But I've spent enough time on it so click read on if you're up for it :)

In case you missed it - UAH for October

Strangely, I missed seeing this at WUWT so I figured you might have missed it too. It's the UAH update for October - the temperature of the lower troposphere. Roy Spencer reported it a few days ago but the data has only just now been uploaded. Anthony Watts must have overlooked it for some reason.

I've plotted the October anomaly (October only for each year) as well as the annual average anomaly. I've added lines for the latest data so you can compare it with past years. Click the chart to view a larger version.

Data source: UAH

This October was equal hottest in the UAH record, with 2012. As for the annual average, it's shaping up to be the third hottest in the UAH record, after 1998 and 2010.

Addendum

I just noticed this curiosity when I googled for Roy Spencer's article. Notice the grouping. What a disreputable lot.

WUWT trips over p's and H's in the ocean

Here's another teaser on oceans and acidification. I've got another article in train but have been busy, so it won't be up for a while longer. Meanwhile, WUWT has another "claim" article (archived here) about a not so new paper on ocean acidification,  total CO₂ concentration and the degree of CaCO₃ saturation (from June this year).

The paper itself is by a team led by Professor Taro Takahashi and has been published in Marine Chemistry. Anthony copied and pasted the press release but didn't have time to link to the source :) Never mind. It wasn't hard to find. The press release is on the website of the Earth Institute of Columbia University. I don't know why it has just been released. The paper itself has been out for a while. It looks to be a continuation of the work discussed in this paper from 2010, which itself built on work done prior. In fact, as stated in the press release, Taro Takahashi has been doing this research for four decades.

Taro Takahashi has spent more than four decades measuring the changing chemistry of the world’s oceans. Here, aboard the R/V Melville, he celebrates after sampling waters near the bottom of the Japan Trench in 1973. (Lamont-Doherty archives)

In a nutshell, the scientists have published maps of the world's oceans, showing:

... a monthly look at how ocean acidity rises and falls by season and geographic location, along with saturation levels of calcium carbonate minerals used by shell-building organisms. The maps use 2005 as a reference year and draw on four decades of measurements by Lamont-Doherty scientists and others. 

Fallen off their rockers...

Seems like Anthony Watts and everyone else at WUWT have fallen off their rockers. They've gone into denial extremis. Today Anthony has posted the dumbest article ever by his good friend and much alleged scientist defamer, Tim Ball (archived here).

Tim writes:

Man-made global warming is real, because it was humans who created the idea and proved, independent of nature, that human activity was the cause. It is a real idea; it is not real in fact. 

And then started quoting Goethe. I didn't read any further. Why would I? Would you? I'll just post a selection from the comments of the "fallen off their rockers" WUWT brigade.

Meanwhile, in the Bering Sea ...

If you want to read something more interesting, try this article about the strongest storm in the Bering Sea since records began in the 1970s - from Angela Fritz of the Capital Weather Gang. Looks like some people are riding it out.

Jim Steele at WUWT pushes for pseudo-science, not science, in schools

Update: See below for comment from Michael C Singer, husband of Camille Parmesan, who Jim Steele referred to in his article and the comments.

---

Jim Steele is a climate science denier who's popped up in the last year or so at WUWT, trying to flog his book protesting climate change. He is known for denying practically anything to do with global warming and more (eg ocean acidification), but most of all he will use any excuse to take a shot at scientist Camille Parmesan (see here).

Jim Steele's Serengeti Strategy

I don't know what is really at the heart of Jim Steele's vendetta against Camille Parmesan. He hasn't said except that he disputes something about her 1996 publication on butterflies. But his ongoing personalised campaign goes way beyond that. If it was merely a scientific dispute he'd argue scientifically, in the literature. He doesn't. He just rants and raves to science deniers, and contradicts himself, and misrepresents Dr Parmesan's work. This leaves one to wonder - did she snub him at a party? Did she forget who he was one time? Does she not know who he is? Whatever the reason, if Jim Steele can bring Dr Parmesan into a discussion he will. Even if there's no reason to do so, he will.

It's Jim Steele's application of the Serengeti strategy.

Today he's arguing (archived here) that Dr Parmesan and the AAAS are wrong about teaching science to children in Texas. To demonstrate how he applied the Serengeti strategy, the article that Jim used as his launching pad was written by Camille Parmesan and Alan I. Leshner. But Jim doesn't once mention Alan Leshner by name, only by his organisation, the AAAS.

Camille Parmesan is a world-renowned biologist. Last year, she was named the 2013 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is one of the most highly regarded scientific organisations in the world. Alan I. Leshner is the CEO of AAAS.

By way of comparison, Jim Steele is not a scientific researcher. He has never done scientific research that I could find. Or none that he's published in the academic literature. I believe this would be the closest. He was a part time teacher at different places, and ran a field station part-time. He also says he ran a bird counting program that got funding from the US Forest Service. You can read the chips he's lugging around on his shoulder in his own bio.

Draft science textbooks have wrong information

The first paragraph of the Statesman article Jim quote-mined was this:

Some proposed Texas textbooks would badly misinform K-12 students by falsely suggesting that scientists do not agree on what is causing climate change and by incorrectly suggesting a future cooling trend. Two draft textbooks — astoundingly — even confuse climate change with the ozone hole, which is a completely separate concern and driven by different human actions.

So now you can see the context of the article. Apparently some ideologues in Texas got some people to write some dodgy science denying books and want to flog them in schools. It's the same as the religion vs science vs politics battle that's been waged before in the USA - for example, creationism vs science. Jim is on the side of the ideologues and against science. Jim Steele seems to be arguing that textbooks that confuse climate change and the ozone hole should be used in K-12 schools.

You can read the Parmesan and Leshner article here. It lists a few awful examples of pseudoscience that the politicians want taught to the children of Texas. (It also says that Professor Parmesan is a geology professor. She's not. Her field is biology.)

Debating pseudo-science in schools

Jim Steele reckons that children should be fed all manner of denialist nonsense and allowed to "debate". He cites climate science denial as an example, but it looks as if he means it to apply to any scientific topic, writing:

Science textbooks should not be instruments to teach one-sided propaganda. Textbooks should encourage debate....

A bit later he writes:

...It is Parmesan and the AAAS that are using politics to pressure school boards to force feed school children that CO2-caused global warming is now some sort of scientific law, when in fact both Parmesan’s research and the CO2 hypothesis are increasingly not supported by the evidence. 

So Jim Steele is a greenhouse effect denier, with his "CO2 hypothesis". Well, I already knew that.

By all means let's debate science in the classroom. Except it's clear from what Jim wrote that he wants to control the debate and argue that all the science is wrong. Anyway, I've had a shot at chapter headings for debates to be included in Jim Steele's revised science textbooks:

• Debate the moon: Is the moon made of cheese and is there really a man living there?
• Debate the shape of the Earth: If the Earth is flat, have all the missing persons simply fallen off the edge?
• Debate evolution: Is Jim Steele evidence that humans evolved from the same ancestor as our (very) distant relative, the gibbon?
• Debate extinction: Which species will survive the sixth major extinction and how.
• Debate water vs beer. Which is better. Do a taste test.
• Debate atoms. Are they no more than imaginary models?
• Debate models. Miranda Kerr vs Fernando Cabral vs Henrik Fallenius vs Kate Moss vs Tyra Banks vs Gryphon O'Shea.
• Debate the atmosphere. Would wacky pseudo-scientists like Jim Steele have evolved if there were no atmospheric CO2 and Earth was a snowball?
• Debate the ice age that cometh: Are rising sea levels evidence that an ice age cometh?
• Debate science itself. Should paranoid conspiracy theories be given equal weight with science in the classroom. The pros and cons.
• Debate science hoaxes: Is climate science the biggest hoax perpetrated on dumb deniers? List all the people and organisations that must be in on the hoax and explain how the scam has been kept secret from the other 8% of the world's population.

Here are some debating tips from Huffington Post for all the deniers at WUWT, as if they need them.

And if Jim Steele doesn't want his children and grandchildren to learn about science, he can always send them to a charter school that is anti-science.

Update: Comment from Michael C Singer

The following was sent to me via email. It was too long to be posted as a comment. 

Sou 12 November 2014

I am Parmesan's husband, referenced by Jim Steele.  I have, indeed, advised him against replicating Parmesan's work.  However, I didn't say that the original study was "not important," I said that it would not be important to replicate it NOW.  And I gave Jim an explanation of my opinion.

Parmesan's work was done between 1992 and 1996.  As a grad student she spent 2-3 months in the field each summer, driving her pickup from Baja California to Alberta and back, examining previously-reported populations of Edith's checkerspot and reporting which still existed and which were, at that time, extinct.  Her published study reported presence or absence of the butterflies in sites that she judged to be still suitable habitat.  She concluded that the average location of an existing population in good habitat was both significantly further north and at significantly higher elevation than prior records.

Edith's checkerspot is not migratory, it lives in small habitat patches susceptible to natural extinctions.  However, usually when natural extinctions occur, not all the populations in an area go extinct and if the habitat is OK the extinct site can be naturally recolonized.  I've observed this several times; I've seen extinct sites recolonized after just 3 or 4 years or after 20-25 years, and I've seen them stay extinct to the present day.  Ilkka Hanski in Finland, working with a related butterfly, has shown that every population has a high risk of natural extinction. The species persists in Finland only through an approximate balance between rates of extinction and colonization.  What Parmesan showed was that in Edith's checkerspot the extinction process had recently involved an elevational and latitudinal bias. For me to observe, as I have informed Jim, that some populations reported by Parmesan as extinct have since been recolonized, is entirely unsurprising and does not refute the conclusion that she drew.  Jim accuses me of scientific dishonesty by not publishing these observations, because he believes that they refute Parmesan's conclusions.  He is wrong. They do not.  If they did, I WOULD have published them.

It would be possible to repeat Parmesan's study now and to ask whether Edith's checkerspot has shifted its range in the opposite direction to that reported by Parmesan, but to do that you'd need to examine the entire species' range again, from Baja to Alberta. This would be an enormous amount of work, and it did not seem to be what Jim proposed to do.  Instead, he felt that, if he could show that some of the populations reported as extinct by Parmesan were no longer extinct, this would refute her conclusion. It would not. 

Unfortunately it's not possible now to ask whether Parmesan was wrong back in 1996, you'd need to be a time-traveler.  This study was important in 1996 as a pioneering effort to ask what was happening to an entire species’ range.  But this study was just a single species, and the bias that Parmesan showed, while consistent with warming climate, could have been caused by other factors.   For this reason the study is no longer an important part of the evidence that biologists use to conclude that species’ ranges are shifting upwards and polewards in a GENERAL sense.  This comes from aggregate studies, called meta-analyses.  For example, Vincent DeVictor and 20 other authors (not including myself or Parmesan) published a paper in Nature Climate Change in 2012 in which they summarized data from 9,490 bird communities and 2,130 butterfly communities and found an average poleward shift of 37 km in the birds and 114km in the butterflies.  In this study some species were shifting towards the equator, some towards the pole and some were not shifting at all, but there was an overall significant trend for poleward range shifts.  This is the type of evidence used to conclude that a general trend for range shifts is under way.

Suppose that Jim Steele were to replicate Parmesan’s study and find that Edith’s checkerspot has now shifted its range towards the equator.  Suppose that Jim’s conclusion were incorporated into a summary like the one by DeVictor et al.  In the context of such a large study it would be a drop in the ocean and would make no difference to their overall conclusion.  The average poleward range shift of butterflies might change from 114km to 113km.  This is the sense in which I have advised Jim Steele that he would make little scientific impact if he were to replicate Parmesan’s study of a single species and get a different result.  The original study was important at the time.  However, to replicate it now in the context of the very large amount of knowledge on other species that has accumulated since 1996, would not be important, no matter what the result.   

Parmesan’s affiliation is correct: in Texas she is now in Geology; in the UK she is a Professor of Oceans and human health in a Marine Biology dept.

From the WUWT comments

The extremists come out in favour of Jim Steele. A very large number of comments were about what a nasty awful person Dr Parmesan is, and how people should write to her university (email address was provided) and anyway, climate science is a hoax.

SasjaL is an illiterati who argues science shouldn't be taught in school and likens science to extreme religious indoctrination.

November 8, 2014 at 2:58 pm
Parmesan is a nice cheese (like all other Italian food), but this both smell and taste bad!
This type of indoctrination are found in countries where extreme forms of Islam exists.
– Wait … We already have these (climate) changes in Swedish schoolbooks 

M Courtney says that one can use pseudoscience to teach children how to distinguish it from real science. Perhaps he's just wanting to up the traffic to WUWT.

 November 8, 2014 at 11:38 am
Surely science is a process not a catechism?
Why doesn’t she call for the “wrong” science to be presented and then debunked with numerous validated models of how the climate works, graphs of the correlation of GHG emissions with Global temperatures and, of course, the obvious methods of distinguishing anthropogenic from natural effects?
Wouldn’t that teach the young Texans how to spot pseudoscience and confront it thorough out the lives?

J. Philip Peterson thinks there are only two "sides" to climate science. He knows nothing about it.

November 8, 2014 at 1:58 pm
I wish more would speak out. You really can’t teach both sides of the CAGW science?? (without getting fired)?? You have to teach it as settled science??

mpainter does get one thing right:

November 8, 2014 at 11:46 am
This report dismays. Camile Parmesan seems to be an evil antithesis of science. That there are so many in science who are like her is sickening.

It bears repeating: the CAGW crowd represent a setback for science.

One person posted Dr Parmesan's email address, with obvious bad intentions. Another said they've already written to her University - something about the IPCC's Nobel Prize award.


jim Steele says populations of Edith’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha) haven't moved north, only the statistical centre has moved north. Huh? He's not that good at arithmetic. (extract)

November 8, 2014 at 2:48 pm
What I find most disgusting and dishonest in this 2013 video is that she still repeats her old story that her butterfly (Edith Checkerspot) had moved upwards and northwards when 1) No such thing ever happened. Only the statistical center moved because more the butterflies had been extirpated due to urban sprawl mostly in southern California and 2) she has known for at least 5 years now that populations that she reported as extinct have now returned. Thats why she refused to let me replicate her study. So she still refers to her zombie data, instead of telling the world she was wrong the butterflies returned and never died due to global or local warming! 

He makes up weird stuff, implying butterflies "died" rather than shifted, due to global or local warming. Is he an utter nutter or a disinformer, or both? He's not very bright but is he at some level conscious of his absurdities?

Another thing. Jim Steele claims that the butterfly populations reported as extinct have now returned. But he also claims he doesn't know where those populations are, so how does he know they've returned? jim Steele claimed:

November 8, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Although good science requires a methods section to allow independent replication her paper in Nature never had a Methods section. I needed the coordinates of each location and her determination of present or absent, to check both her statistical conclusions as well as to examine the surrounding habitat to assess the effects of landscape change. Instead of providing me that data, her husband and colleague Dr. Michael Singer kept trying to dissuade me from replicating her work saying it was “too much work” or that original study was “not important” any more. Curiouser and Curiouser she still touts that original story in every press release as a “beautiful example” global warming. (Makes me gag)

Note: See update above for response by Michael Singer.

The thing is that Camille Parmesan doesn't ignore landscape changes. (Also, unlike Jim, she knows the name of the butterfly in question.) Click here to read a short overview of the work of Dr Parmesan on Edith’s checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha). Click here for the original paper that Jim Steele is still stewing over nearly twenty years later.   Click here to see what I discovered when I looked into Jim Steele's various claims some time ago. Jim Steele has not published one scrap of scientific research to support his own claims about it. Not in the scientific literature. It's all hot air denier style - full of fudgery, misrepresentation and self-promotion.

If Jim Steele represented the work of others properly, he'd never be invited to write at WUWT or be a guest speaker at science denier shingdigs, and his pseudo-science book sales would plummet.

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Parmesan, Camille. "Climate and species'range." Nature 382, no. 6594 (2009): 765-766. doi:10.1038/382765a0