Liquid water on Mars

There has been a lot of speculation about what is going to be revealed at a NASA press conference in 15 minutes or so. Nature Geoscience put an embargo till 11:00 am eastern US time. So the news is now out.

There are signs of liquid water on Mars.

The people who'll be there at the press conference provided a clue. They are:

• Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters
• Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters
• Lujendra Ojha of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta
• Mary Beth Wilhelm of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California and the Georgia Institute of Technology
• Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) at the University of Arizona in Tucson

Pick the odd one(s) out. Lujendra Oiha co-authored a paper in Science a couple of years ago about water on Mars. (Mary Beth Wilhelm is interested in organic biomarkers.)

Neel V. Patel at Inverse guessed it correctly.

Read about it at the Guardian. Here's a preview:

Liquid water runs down canyons and crater walls over the summer months on Mars, according to researchers who say the discovery raises the odds of the planet being home to some form of life.

The trickles leave long, dark stains on the Martian terrain that can reach hundreds of metres downhill in the warmer months, before they dry up in the autumn as surface temperatures drop.

You can (maybe) watch the NASA press conference, though I'm having trouble. Probably too many people tuned in (more than 72,800 people are trying to watch it!).

Moaning about the demise of Maurice Newman, Australia's high profile climate conspiracy theorist

On Anthony Watts' climate conspiracy blog WUWT, Eric Worrall is moaning about Maurice Newman (archived here). In another move showing that he does take climate change seriously (albeit within political constraints), Australia's new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, will not be re-appointing Maurice to the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council, which he chaired under Tony Abbott.

Maurice Newman is an uber conspiracy theorist of the Tim Ball kind. I've written about his wacky ideas on a number of occasions. He's not just a denier, he's a hard core conspiracy nutter who thinks, for example, that the sustainability action plan, Agenda 21, is some sort of evil plot. Eric Worrall couldn't be more wrong when he writes:

Releasing outspoken skeptic Maurice Newman from his advisory role seems unlikely to help Turnbull’s credibility on climate issues. 

Contrary to what Eric thinks, it will be a relief to almost everyone. I'd say most especially to the other members of the council. And it will lift the PM's credibility in regard to climate.

Improving the temperature record vs conspiracy theories at WUWT

Over the years, scientists in different parts of the world have worked hard to get a more accurate picture of the change in global surface temperature over time. This is slow painstaking work. Initially it would have meant working with written records, with people trying to decipher handwriting of the tens of thousands of people who wrote down readings of temperature and rainfall, and other weather indicators, from all the weather stations around the world. Over time the data was digitised - another extremely laborious task.

I'm not going to write about all that's been done. It's a mammoth ongoing effort involving people from all around the world. What I'm writing about are the ignorant scoffers. You know the people I mean. The ones who sit at their keyboards all day to snipe at the work done by scientists.

Anthony Watts has put up three articles from one chap who's been looking to see the extent of this careful work, as measured by adjustments to the original data. He's only looked at two data sets. One which is used by NASA and NOAA for global land surface temperatures. The Global Historical Climatology Network Data or GHCN. This was first developed in the early 1990s, with the current version 3 released in 2011. The other is the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), which is the high quality dataset used by NOAA for USA temperatures since 1987.

Different versions of surface temperature reconstructions: science vs WUWT

This article is really just charts of surface temperature reconstructions. The first charts are the real global and hemispherical and continental reconstructions. And down below you'll see Anthony Watts' very odd notions. (He can't decide which "not global" reconstruction he likes best, so this week he's offered two different versions. Neither of which is global, and for one of which he couldn't even get the dates right.)

Doubling down on doozy: Anthony Watts is now denying the Little Ice Age

Professor Michael Mann recently wrote a response to a denier (who'd accused him of fraud), and corrected him, saying that:

Mr. Sauer begins by promoting the falsehood that “temperatures exceeded what we have today at a time (the Medieval period) when today’s industrialization did not exist”. That is so shopworn a myth that it ranks among the top climate change denier talking points (see the response to this myth by the scientist-run website Skeptical Science). The scientific consensus today is that, while some regions of the globe were relatively warm during the Medieval era, the warmth was not nearly as widespread as today. The overall warmth of the globe and northern hemisphere today is substantially greater than during Medieval time. Mr. Sauer might also want to take note that the year 2015 is off to the warmest start ever, 2014 was the warmest full year on record, and took place during the warmest decade on record.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how Anthony Watts used a wonky chart of temperatures on the summit of the ice sheet in central Greenland, arguing that it "proved" that Professor Mann and all the world's paleoclimatologists were wrong and he, science denying conspiracy theorist was right.

In support of his wrong claim that it was globally hotter in medieval times than it is today, Anthony tried to claim:

• the temperature of the ice sheet in Central Greenland in 1855 was a good proxy for global surface temperature of 2015. 
• if it was widely cold more than 11,500 years ago (the Younger Dryas), then it must have got hotter globally 1,000 years ago.

You say "huh? where's the logic in that?" and I say "there's none". Well, Anthony's doubled down, shifting his focus to a mountainous region in Spain (archived here).

It's not just climate scientists who agree we are causing global warming, yet deniers are eternally wishful

Anthony Watts has discovered a new survey that shows that it's not just climate scientists who know that the earth is getting hotter and humans are causing it.  The paper was authored by a team of scientist from the USA: J Stuart Carlton, Rebecca Perry-Hill, Matthew Huber and Linda S Prokopy. The results suggest almost all biophysical research scientists accept climate science, not just climate researchers. Yes, that includes physicists and chemists and astronomers and biologists and geologists and more. The authors said that "scientists across disciplines nearly unanimously believe in anthropogenic climate change, are highly certain that climate change is happening, and find climate science to be trustworthy and credible."

(Note: almost all the charts were plotted by me, based on information in the paper or the appendix. And this is my take on the research.)

Researchers in and out of climate science agree that temperatures have risen and we've caused it

Almost all researchers in the biophysical sciences that is. 93.6% of respondents agreed that temperatures have risen when compared with pre-1800's levels. Of these, 98.2% agreed that 'human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures'.

The chart below gives an indication of how many respondents had at least some knowledge about their world's climate:

A Doozy Denier Don from Anthony Watts: Medieval Warming was 11,500 years ago!

If anyone is under the wrong impression that Anthony Watts knows something about climate science, this will set you straight. He doesn't. You might have thought that he doesn't "believe" a lot of what he posts. It seems he does. Even the silliest nonsense. I used to think that he didn't read anything he posted, but it appears that he does. Only sometimes. But mostly not. And I was wondering the other day when we were going to get another article from him. He writes so rarely these days, leaving it all up to other people that I was beginning to think that he had quit altogether.

Today he's written a short piece (archived here). What he has called a Quote of the Week. It's not a bad quote I suppose, but there's no reason for a denier to pull it out as a quote of the week unless they are a hard core denier.

Now I've said before that when Anthony Watts decides to write something himself, he usually gets things dreadfully wrong. Today is no exception. He's done a doozy. And he's proven that he does read some of what he posts. He must have read some Denier Don Easterbrook. Or maybe this is a homage to Don.

WM Briggs thinks the dinosaurs read thermometers

William M Briggs sez he is "statistician to the stars" and claims to "know good physics from bad".  He's wrong. Today he's got an article on some god (US-style) blog, that looks as if it's a libertarian (US-style) god blog. Long on faith and free speech and short on fact. I guess William thought he needed to get it in front of climate conspiracy theorists too, because he had Anthony Watts post a short bit of it at WUWT. (Or maybe it's just that Anthony is stuck for articles to fill up his daily quota.)

William faces a conundrum

William can't reconcile the so-called "pause" with the hottest years on record. He wrote:

Which is it? Either it’s hotter than ever or it isn’t. If it is, then (it is implied) man-caused global warming has not “paused.” If it isn’t, if man-caused global warming has “paused,” then it is not growing hotter.

Now William might want to go and have a chat with his favourite co-author, the potty peer Christopher Monckton. He'd soon set him crooked. Thing is, global warming hasn't paused. Sixteen of the twenty hottest years on record have occurred from 2000 onward, including this year, 2015. According to NASA, the hottest years on record are, so far, and in order:

Every day is denial day at WUWT, with models

Anthony Watts and his readers are deniers. There's no way around that. AP journalists might try calling them "climate change doubters", but deniers have no doubt. They have complete confidence in their conspiracy theory that climate science is a hoax.

A case in point. Yesterday it was greenhouse effect denial day at the climate conspiracy blog WUWT. Anthony Watts has rejected the greenhouse effect, again, publishing an article by some chap from New Zealand who went to see one of the Thin Ice viewings (archived here).

In the past, Anthony has been known to come out and declare that he doesn't exactly reject the greenhouse effect. It's just that he thinks it suddenly stopped working or something like that. This is happening less and less often, as he lets his blog slip further and further into conspiratorial paranoia.

Anyway, yesterday Anthony didn't bother with any disclaimer that he, blog owner, accepts the greenhouse effect. As climate change kicks in, Anthony knows that he must hang onto whatever visitors he can get. If that means letting go of any semblance of reality, so be it. Page hits matter.

No doubt about it: AP's new euphemism for science denying conspiracy theorists is not politically correct

Seems that AP has succumbed to the poor sensitive little science deniers who call for jail time for climate scientists. It's more than political correctness - it's political correctness gone haywire. Usually it's the extreme right wing ideologues who moan about people who conform to "political correctness" - except when they want a euphemism for their own behaviour. Instead of calling climate science denial denial of climate science, AP wants to pretend that rampant deniers only doubt climate science. Which is nonsense. Deniers don't doubt. They just "know" that all the science of the past 200 years is wrong. Deniers reject science. They prefer to think that for the past 200 years there has been a giant hoax perpetrated on the illiterati (that is, deniers).

From denial to doubt? No, it's still denial

Paul Colford wrote at AP about a change to the AP Style Guide:

Our guidance is to use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science and to avoid the use of skeptics or deniers.