David Burton @wattsupwiththat denies what's really warming the world

If you've been around climate stuff these last few days you may well have come across a neat climate graphic at Bloomberg. Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi, with help from Kate Marvel and Gavin Schmidt, have charts of global surface temperatures and more. What their charts show are the various contributions to global surface temperature changes since 1880, modeled and observed. There are a number of different charts illustrating the observed annual mean global surface temperature against modeled, as affected by:

1. Natural factors:

• orbital changes only
• solar variation
• volcanic eruptions
• all three natural factors together.

2. Human activity:

• land use changes
• ozone changes
• aerosols
• greenhouse gas accumulation
• all human activity together.

3. Natural factors and human activity combined.

The graphic is worth bookmarking for showing to (normal) people to illustrate how human activity has led to the large rise in global surface temperatures since 1880. There's not much point showing it to deniers, the sort of people who relish articles like the one by David Burton at WUWT the other day (archived here).

You might remember David. He's the chap who spent 547.5 days and nights fretting about Doran & Zimmerman (2009) before coming up with a number-fudging brainwave (It was not a brainwave, it was nothing but Dave's bad arithmetic.)

The secretive Open Atmospheric Society shows tentative signs of life @wattsupwiththat

Unnoticed by almost everyone, Anthony Watts announced earlier this month that US taxpayers will be subsidising his secret open society, the OAS. He's managed to get 501c3 tax exempt status in the USA. I only found out because he's snuck in another tiny promo at the bottom of an article today. He has also finally provided a name associated with the OAS, announcing himself as "acting executive director" of what now appears to be a one man show, so far. Until now the society didn't have a single person associated with it in any official capacity. It's not announced any Board of Directors yet, despite its Charter mandating it be established by 1 January this year. Not publicly anyway. Maybe its board of directors is a secret.

Anthony has extended the time to be able to call yourself a "founding member" of his society. It's been extended from December last year until the end of December this year.

Does this mean the OAS is not quite brain dead and will awake from it's slumber? Time will tell. At this rate, a lot more time will probably be needed.

Moderation change - no more Smokey

In other news, I was given a tip the other day that long time sock-puppet and lapdog of Anthony Watts, dbstealey aka Smokey plus other aliases has been dropped as moderator. It happened sometime between 10 April this year and June. I didn't see any public announcement or public word of thanks for all the efforts dbstealey has made to rid WUWT of any presence of science commenters, since at least 1 November 2010. Ungrateful is what I call it :(

Related articles

• OAS - The No-Name Society Hides its Light - September 2014
• Verum in obscuro no more: Is OAS, WUWT's secretive open society about to reveal itself to the world? - January 2015
• Another fail at WUWT? Where is the Open Atmospheric Society? - March 2015

Undermining 50 years of gains. Wild claims from @wattsupwiththat

Anthony Watts is stuck for superlatives. He's still recovering from the demise of the "pause" and his appalling reaction, then the Pope came out and spoke about the moral implications of climate change. Now The Lancet has hit him again. This time with a message about the health impacts of climate change. Anthony responded in the only way he knew how, he wrote a "claim" preface to his headline about the study. Not just any "claim" headline. This time it was a "wild claim". Here is the sum total of Anthony's thoughts on the subject: "Wild Claim: ‘climate change…could wipe out health progress over the past 50 years’". He was otherwise lost for words. (Archived here)

The passage below is from The Lancet report:

The implications of climate change for a global population of 9 billion people threatens to undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health. The direct effects of climate change include increased heat stress, floods, drought, and increased frequency of intense storms, with the indirect threatening population health through adverse changes in air pollution, the spread of disease vectors, food insecurity and under-nutrition, displacement, and mental ill health.

Denier weirdness post of the day @wattsupwiththat

An odd admission at WUWT (archived here). Not that what is written is wrong, just that deniers at WUWT aren't normally as up front about their deviant behaviour. By deviant I'm referring to the fact that in their real worlds, deniers wouldn't as often come across people who reject science with such vim and vigour. It's only because of the Internet that they can find other people receptive to their wacky ideas. The Internet enables a small pool of science deniers from around the world (or the US, Canada and Australia) indulge in the illusion that their conspiracy theories are "normal" - taking comfort in numbers.

Anthony's put up a postcard with words that all WUWT-ers live by:

That was a very well laid out, rational point.

But I will still hold to my emotional opinion based on no facts or evidence.

Matt Ridley spins Lysenko conspiracy theories and more in a classic denial of science

Was it Pope Francis who pushed deniers over the edge? Is it the climate negotiations taking place this year? Matt Ridley, a science denier from the UK who claims to be a "lukewarmer", has written a Gish gallop worthy of Tim Ball. It's as if he collected up all the worst WUWT conspiracy theories and rolled them into Quadrant.

Quadrant is a right wing outlet for the extremists. It publishes dumb articles from deniers fairly often. Today Matt Ridley, a denier turned defamer has written an article (archived here). Anthony Watts has published bits of it on his blog, too (archived here).

Matt Ridley's Lysenkoism conspiracy theory

Matt lurched from one conspiracy theory to another. To illustrate how far he's gone he starts out with the Lysenko conspiracy theory that deniers call upon when they run out of ideas. The conspiracy goes something like this. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was an agricultural official who rose to prominence under Joseph Stalin. He denied genetic inheritance in plants (as described by Gregor Mendel in his famous experiments with peas in the 1800s). He even managed to outlaw research in genetics. It set plant breeding back a lot in the Soviet Union. Well, the climate conspiracy theorists claim that Lysenkoism is alive and well throughout the entire world, and has been for the past couple of hundred years. I've never seen anyone name a person who is supposedly filling the role of Lysenko and banning climate science research of any kind. Nor have I ever seen anyone say just what aspect of climate science is forbidden.

I wonder if Matt will be calling upon Hitler and Osama bin Laden next (like Tim Ball has done)?

Hottest May on record at NOAA. Has the "pause" gone for good?

NOAA has released the global analysis for May 2015. It reports that May was the hottest on record, beating the 2014 record by 0.08°C. NOAA has May higher than GISTemp, but that doesn't mean a whole lot.  For one thing it's only one month. For another, GISTemp does change as it receives reports from around the world. Not all data comes in at the same time.

Here is a chart with both GISTemp and NOAA data. The chart includes 2015 year to date average, which might or might not drop as the year progresses.

Data sources: NOAA and NASA GISS

You'll notice that the Y axis is shifting higher. If it stays hot this year, any "hiatus" looks as if it will be nothing but a memory soon, with all the other hiati, sorry, I mean hiatuses of the past.

The Papal Encyclical: On Care For Our Common Home

The Encyclical from Pope Francis was released a short while ago, after a press conference. In some areas it is much stronger than I expected it to be. Even in the English translation the words are powerful. I expect they resonate even more strongly in the original Italian. In other parts it's almost schizophrenic. What seems clear is that there were multiple (teams of) authors.

These are just my first impressions, which may change if I study the document more closely. The letter is divided into six chapters. (I've added bookmarks to my version. It's not till you get to the end that you find a table of contents.)

First of all, the letter starts with a reminder that this is not the first pontiff to sound the alarm about how we are hurting our environment. There are quotes from preceding Popes, going back to 1971, more than forty years ago including Paul VI in 1971, John Paul II in 1979. and Benedict XVI in 2007. (You'd think from reading the outcry on denier blogs that no religious leader had ever spoken about the environment before. It's not so.)

Chapter One is hard-hitting. It's got very strong messages about the environment and what is happening. The language and imagery is powerful. It's the chapter that most climate hawks will go to if they are looking for a quote. I've listed some below. It covers pollution, climate change, biodiversity, and water quality as well as social order (over-crowded cities etc).

Live streaming of the Encyclical "Be praised: on the care of our common home"

If you're up and about, the much-awaited Encyclical from Pope Francis on the environment is to be live streamed, starting in just a few minutes. Here is the link.

For italian speakers.

Here is the link to the official English Language version - just released.

From Lewandowsky with love: climate conspiracies from WUWT

This week, Anthony Watts and his followers at wattsupwiththat (WUWT) are competing among themselves to see who can come up with the best climate conspiracy. Anthony Watts himself hasn't got a lot of imagination. All he could come up with was accusing the NOAA of fraud and lying. His fans know that the climate conspiracy goes way beyond NOAA. It goes way beyond the whole of the USA (at least for the WUWT-ers who've begun to realise that the USA is not the entire world).

The Catholic Church is in on the climate conspiracy too. And it's all because it was infiltrated by the KGB, who planted Pope Francis as its leader.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with May 2015

This is the update of the progressive year-to-date global average surface temperature, from GISS. This update includes May.

Worth noting

• May was an average of 0.71°C above the 1951-1980 mean.
• April was adjusted back to 0.71°C from 0.75°C 
• May this year was equal second hottest with May 2012.
• Every month this year has been at least 0.71°C above the 1951-1980 mean. 
• The progressive year to date average up to and including May is 0.77°C above the 1951-1980 mean.

Explaining the chart

The chart 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. (As before, I've made it extra large because of all the fine detail.)

Data Source: NASA GISS

2015 is still ahead of the pack so far, just ahead of 2010 for this time of the year. 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.  The next time someone tries to tell you that "it hasn't warmed since 1996" then show them this chart :)

Related articles and data file

I promised to provide a data file because the chart is so messy. You can access it here on Google drive.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date with April 2015 and the same with YTD to March this year.