Not so fast, with that so-called hiatus...

Update: Patrick Brown, the lead author, has just written an article about his paper, at realclimate.org. He is answering some questions in the comments.

Sou 14 May 2015

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Anthony Watts (archived here) has posted a press release about a new paper in Nature's open access journal, Scientific Reports.  The research was led by Patrick T. Brown, a PhD student Duke University. What the scientists did was compare recent and projected climate change with that which has occurred over the past 1,000 years - mostly in the northern hemisphere (which is where there is most data). They looked at the recent global temperatures and compared them with projections of climate models - and drew what I see as overly-confident conclusions.

I feel a bit stretched on this subject, and am happy to be shown if I'm wrong about this.

A near-perfect example of a CO2 denierism at WUWT

You know how deniers are likely to write along the lines of: Global warming isn't happening or if it is it's not us or if it is us it's good. Well, here's a near-perfect example taken from WUWT today. Allan MacRae and Kim are replying to wickedwenchfan:

wickedwenchfan  April 20, 2015 at 12:18 am

Who cares what is causing the CO2 amount to rise? It doesn’t do squat to alter temperature so it’s irrelevant

Allan MacRae  April 20, 2015 at 12:43 am

Correct.

kim  April 20, 2015 at 12:53 am

Well, if it does, it alters it to the beneficial side, so it’s all good. Relax, and roll with the punches, er, uh, adapt.

Here's what's happened with CO2 over the past several hundred millenia - 800,000 years or so:

Adapted from data from data at NOAA. Original reference: Luthi, D., M. Le Floch, B. Bereiter, T. Blunier, J.-M. Barnola, U. Siegenthaler, D. Raynaud, J. Jouzel, H. Fischer, K. Kawamura, and T.F. Stocker. 2008. High-resolution carbon dioxide concentration record 650,000-800,000 years before present. Nature, Vol. 453, pp. 379-382, 15 May 2008. doi:10.1038/nature06949

This is what's been happening to the surface temperature as we keep adding CO2 to the air.

Data source: GISS NASA

Lifting the floor at WUWT, to adapt to sea level rise

Over the last couple of days Anthony Watts has handed his WUWT keys over to Eric "eugenics" Worrall. Eric is giving some advice to people living in coastal areas, particularly those areas where rising sea level is going to have a big impact. (Archived here.)

Eric's advice to WUWT-ers who live on the sea shore, is to raise the floor of your house every twenty years. The WUWT article said that Gavin Schmidt's advice was "whacky".  It's Eric's advice that needs to be "whacked".

Eric read an interview with Gavin Schmidt in the Vancouver Sun and picked out one question to write about. Gavin was asked about the future for waterfront cities like Vancouver. He replied that sea levels aren't going to go down. He also pointed out that there is a huge difference between a rise in sea level of one or two feet a century and a rise of one or two metres a century. Gavin wryly commented that the basement won't be the best place for electrical equipment.

Eric did some arithmetic and discovered that two metres in a century worked out at two centimetres a year. (He's not all dumb.) He figured that it would be okay to just lift the house forty centimetres every two decades.

Two little pigs could do it

I don't know what sort of house Eric had in mind. If the house were made of straw, then lifting it wouldn't be too difficult. If it were made of twigs, then it's a bit more of a challenge but do-able. However, if it were built of bricks, then you'd risk the house cracking and collapsing if you tried to lift it by forty centimetres.

Wildfires add to atmospheric CO2: A lesson for Australia from California

There still isn't a lot happening in deniersville. Anthony Watts and his readers are gloating that their campaigns against climate science are having an effect. Well, Anthony doesn't actually admit that denier smear campaigns might be giving graduates second thoughts about doing research in climate - however, he and his denier friends are clearly delighted to hear that some conference in India didn't get enough papers to go ahead. Or so they say. (Archived here.)

Meanwhile, there are lots and lots of scientists beavering away expanding our understanding of the climate and the earth and all its systems.

Just one more example: Anthony hasn't mentioned this new paper about his home state, California. It's from a team led by Patrick Gonzalez, of the U.S. National Park Service. The scientists found that wildfires (and deforestation) are contributing quite a bit more to greenhouse emissions than previously known.

There are rabbits and rabbits and lagomorphs unknown at WUWT

Today Eric Worrall has decided, again, that scientists "don't know nuffin'". He writes about a new paper in PLOS One, which is about rabbits. Or more properly, about the Order Lagormorpha, which includes rabbits. The paper was by a team led by Katie Leach of Queen's University Belfast. It suggests climate change will have an impact on up to two thirds of 87 lagomorph species. In the abstract, the authors write:

Climate change is likely to impact more than two-thirds of lagomorph species, with leporids (rabbits, hares, and jackrabbits) likely to undertake poleward shifts with little overall change in range extent, whilst pikas are likely to show extreme shifts to higher altitudes associated with marked range declines, including the likely extinction of Kozlov’s Pika (Ochotona koslowi).

All lagomorphs look the same to Eric. Not only that, but he goes on to write about how a change in environment affected one particular species of rabbit (though he didn't mention it by name). That's the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). It didn't cause it to die out, it caused it to rise to plague proportions.

Blog enhancements and changes

I think I'm just about done in regard to blog enhancements for the time being. Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.

I've changed the search bar, so that it now searches both this blog and the main HotWhopper site, and has a bit more useful detail about the search results than the old search bar did.

You might also notice advertisements. They'll help bring in a few extra pennies (maybe) that will help in the cost of running HotWhopper. I've expanded the privacy statement. There's a short version here and a longer version here.

The advertisements should be okay, but if you happen to see one that offends or is overly intrusive, or spoils your visit in any way, please let me know.

Is climate science denial going out of fashion? Recycling Fred Singer and his predictions

Update: I've added another chart to illustrate the size of Fred Singer's big Little Ice Age bounce :)


Are climate science deniers taking tentative steps away from denial? Lindsay Abrams wrote at Salon recently:

...it’s no longer fashionable to be a climate denier, or to promote climate denial. And it’s proving to be a rather unprofitable position as well. This has put the group in the rather awkward position of having to defend its belief in climate change.

She was writing an article about how, after lots of prominent companies quit, ALEC (the private sector "regulator") decided to come out and try to paint itself as not really rejecting climate science. Or not all of it.

Fred Singer takes one step forward

Today at WUWT (archived here) Anthony's dredged up and recycled an article from another science denier, Fred Singer. Harrytwinotter noticed that Anthony first posted this article more than three years ago - or part of it (archived here).  He's recycling again. How green can you get :)

In the article, Fred is trying to dissociate himself from the wackier end of climate science denial and paint himself more as a luke warmer. Or is he?

Will Steffen and all of climate science vs Bjorn Lomborg and deniers - no contest! But Tony Abbott picks the loser.

Some Australian readers will have received a copy of this letter from Tim Flannery, which, given it's wide mailout, I think is okay to share more broadly. (Bernard has already posted a copy in the comments).

Deceiving the Australian public

The Australian Government today announced they would contribute $4m for Danish climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg to establish a new “consensus centre” at the University of Western Australia.

In the face of deep cuts to the CSIRO and other scientific research organisations, it's an insult to Australia’s scientific community.

As the Climate Commission, we were abolished by the Abbott Government in 2013 on the basis that our $1.5 million annual operating costs were too expensive. We relaunched as the Climate Council after thousands of Australians chipped in to the nation’s biggest crowd-funding campaign - ​remember this video?

It seems extraordinary that the Climate Commission, which was composed of Australia’s best climate scientists, economists and energy experts, was abolished on the basis of a lack of funding and yet here we are three years later and the money has become available to import a politically-motivated think tank to work in the same space.

This is why the work of the Climate Council is so important- to counter this continuing ideological attempt at deceiving the Australian public. 

Please consider chipping in a few dollars a week to help us stay independent and continue to fight the rising tide of misinformation. 

Mr Lomborg’s views have no credibility in the scientific community. His message hasn’t varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn't take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it's usually a sign those views are politically motivated. 

But with your support we will continue to fight back and reach millions of Australians with information that is based on the best science available. 

Thank you 

Tim Flannery

P.S We're already busy responding to misinformation in the media. We just called out The Australian for deliberately misinterpreting the science and the Prime Ministers Business Advisor Maurice Newman for getting his facts wrong. 

I've also previously written about Maurice Newman's wrong facts, such as here and here and here. And on several occasions about misleading articles in the Australian.

I've also been told about an article in the Guardian on the topic of Bjorn Lomborg's new creation (h/t Bert).

My reaction is the same as Tim Flannery's. One of the very first things the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott did was to abolish the Climate Commission. Australians were outraged, and within only a few days Australian people donated $500,000 dollars to create the Climate Council. And soon doubled it. It must vie with the biggest responses of any appeal for donations.

Now Tony Abbott is reportedly funding a "denier" (as defined by rationalwiki) at around the same annual cost of the then Climate Commission. (I'll need to check the numbers.)

I don't have time to write any more about this. Feel free to express your opinions in the comments.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp

There was some discussion on a previous thread about how much the earth may warm this year. I know it's a bit soon, but figured it might be interesting to see how things are faring.

If I remember, I'll post an update to the chart below each month, after GISTemp data comes out.

The chart below is a progressive year to date average for all years from 1995 to the present. What that means is for January each year, it just shows the anomaly for January. For February it shows the average of January and February for each year. For March, its the average of the monthly anomaly from January to March.

If you look at December, each year shows the annual average temperature for the full year. For November, each year has the average for the year up to November, not including December.  (I've made it extra large because of all the fine detail.)

Data Source: NASA GISS

2015 is ahead of the pack so far, though it only goes up to March. The years to watch are 2014, 2010 and 2005. I've plotted them with slightly thicker lines so they stand out more easily.

The coldest year of the lot was 1996, which still ended up more than 0.3°C above the 1950 to 1981 average. Incidentally, the potty peer, Christopher Monckton keeps saying that "it hasn't warmed since 1996" - the drongo. He's got his temperature charts upside down :)

Related updates 

• YTD includng April 
• YTD including May

How to add the author, time and comments link to the top of your Google blog - with a difference

This is an article, by request, about how to add the author, time of article and links to comments - to the top of your blog article. This is for Google blogs and bloggers only. Be aware that fiddling with a blog template can make it unusable, if you aren't careful. Make these or any changes to your blog at your own risk.