More wild weather for the USA

A couple of days ago I mentioned the big storm that was threatening the east of the USA. At the time, most weather forecasters were giving a cautious warning, saying it was a bit soon to know for sure when and whether it would hit. However Bob Henson wrote at wunderground.com: "computer models were in remarkable agreement late Tuesday". Today he wrote:

Everything from tornadoes to paralyzing ice to blizzard conditions will be unfolding over the next several days as a massive storm system, dubbed Winter Storm Jonas by the Weather Channel, takes shape over the eastern half of the United States. Computer models have doggedly pointed to this scenario for the better part of a week, and the model consensus on the big picture continues to be unusually strong. The crosshairs for the heaviest urban snow appear to be on the Washington, D.C., area; more than two feet are possible there and nearby. Blizzard warnings were in effect Thursday afternoon in and near the Washington, D.C., area. The crystal ball is cloudier on where the storm’s north edge will end up--and that location is crucial, since it could be near New York City.

Desperate Deniers Part 3: Rud Istvan mixes up GISTemp data versions

This is Part 3 of the Desperate Denier series, following the announcement that 2015 smashed the record for the hottest year. A numerically-challenged disinformer called Rud Istvan is blaming the hot planet on Dr Thomas Karl  from NOAA and Dr Gavin Schmidt from NASA (archived here).

Deniers have been swiping at NOAA ever since it updated its data set to include a heap more weather station records over land, and switched to an updated version of sea surface temperatures. Thing is, in Part 1 of this series, I showed how the trend for the NOAA data set is virtually identical to that of three other main datasets. In fact if you look at the trend since 1971, which was the last time there was a change in the trend, NOAA has the second lowest trend.

Desperate Deniers Part 2: David Middleton fakes satellite data "Just for grins"

This is the second article in the Desperate Deniers series and is about David Middleton's deception. In the first article, I posted charts of the global mean surface temperature from four different sources: the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, GISS NASA (USA), NOAA (USA) and Berkeley Earth (USA). Below is the chart that probably explains best why climate science deniers are so desperate:

Figure 1 | Global mean surface temperature from four datasets. The 2015 line is the average of the 2015 temperature from all four sources. Data sources: GISS NASA, UK Met Office, NOAA, Berkeley Earth.

Desperate Deniers Part 1: Stephen Hodgart from University of Surrey and HadCRUT4

Deniers can't figure out how best to protest that 2015 was the hottest year on record, which came straight after 2014, the previous hottest year on record. They need to get together and work up a decent strategy, because 2016 could be yet another hottest year on record, given the currrent El Nino on top of global warming.

This article is part 1 of a series on the desperation of deniers now that there have been two "hottest" years in a row. At WUWT they are very reluctant to let go of the meme "it's not warming". One wonders how much longer they'll keep it up, given that 2016 is likely to another very hot year, and might even turn out as hot or hotter than last year.

I publish in Nature, sez Bartleby @wattsupwiththat...Oh yeah? Pull the other one!

You know how deniers at WUWT like to make out they know it all? Well, here's a comment you'll appreciate. It's from a pseudo-scientist who calls themselves Bartleby, who was protesting a Letter in Nature Climate Change. He or she wrote that the article was a mere letter, not a refereed article (or so Bartleby thinks)!

January 20, 2016 at 5:47 pm (my emphasis)
That was my first criticism Gary, but then I noticed the article was published in Nature.

I publish in Nature. Members of my family also publish there. I have to express strong disappointment with Nature’s editorial staff. In their defense, I’ll make note of the fact this was a “letter” rather than a refereed article. I suppose that should carry some weight, but I’ve also noticed an editorial bias towards publishing absurd psuedo-scientific flapdoodle like this.

Personally? I’m disgusted and will never submit a paper to Nature again.

Bartleby has clearly never even looked at the table of contents in a Nature journal, much less submitted a manuscript.

PS There's nothing wrong with not knowing that to have a Letter published in Nature is something that many budding scientists hope they can achieve once in their career. It's his woeful attempt to bignote himself with the illiterati by pretending familiarity with a journal he's never looked at, that makes Bartleby the fool.

Watching the global thermometer - year to date GISTemp with a scorching hot December 2015

Every month since March, I've posted a chart of the progressive year-to-date global average surface temperature, from GISS. This is the update with December included, so it's the final for the 2015 year. The explanation has been included with each update together with what seem to be things to watch. The next article will be in April (to March) or May.

The main article for the 2015 year can be found here.

2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Dr Thomas Karl, Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA have just given a press conference to to announce the annual average global temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

You will not be surprised to know that 2015 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2014 by a huge 0.13 °C. It was 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial. It is now 106 years since there was a "coldest year on record". (Gavin Schmidt said that 2015 would have broken the record even without the El Niño, though presumably by not as much.)

Anyone who tries to tell you it hasn't warmed since 1996, or 1997, or 1998, is dead wrong. See for yourself:

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature. Anomaly from the 1881-1910 mean. Data source: GISS NASA.

The average global temperature in 2015 was:

• 0.13 °C hotter than in 2014
• 1.33 °C hotter than the coldest year in the record (1909)
• 0,24 °C hotter than the average for 1998
• 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial (ballpark)

Note about the ballpark: I took the pre-industrial benchmark to be 0.3 °C cooler than 1900, from this recent article by Professor Michael Mann in Huffington Post.

Anthony Watts is stumped by snowballs, volcanoes, CO2 and cap carbonates

Now "it's volcanoes", according to Anthony Watts!

Anthony Watts is a dim and rather rough gruff bloke who runs a climate conspiracy blog called wattsupwiththat, better known as WUWT or WTFUWWUWT. He claims he accepts the greenhouse effect, but only a little bit, and only as long as he doesn't have to pay taxes. He has a strong aversion to climate science, and falsely accuses climate scientists of fraud, and when they so rightly object he accuses them of "sliming" him.

Anthony's deepest fear is that an asteroid is about to come down from the heavens and smite him, which is rather unlikely. He promotes and encourages a lot of conspiracy theories, ranging from the scientists are committing fraud through to Pope Francis is a KGB sleeper agent, to it's a plot of evil green nazi communist fascist types who want to rule the world to the simple "physics of the past two hundred years is a hoax". He's posted various "theories" for global warming on his blog, when he admits that it is warming, ranging from "it's Russian steampipes" through to "OMG it's insects". Unsurprisingly, his blog has made a small contribution to the advancement of cognitive science.

Today Anthony has decided (archive here, latest here) it must be underwater volcanoes, not CO₂, that "were the driver" behind the snowball Earth.

It's unacceptable: Forty two years after Kellog and Schneider with Tim Ball at WUWT

Way back in 1974, William Kellog and Stephen Schneider wrote these closing words to an article they had published in Science:

While it is essential to work out international mechanisms to guarantee that any new knowledge of our climate system will have only constructive uses, the price in human suffering of continued ignorance of the causes of climate change may already have become unacceptably high. 

In that paper there was a photo of a glacier in France, which the authors compared with an engraving of the same glacier from about 100 years earlier, which was on the front cover of that December 1974 issue of Science. Below are the two images. You can guess which one is the earlier one. I added an arrow to the 1970s photo showing how far the glacier retreated:

Top: Engraving of the Argentierre Glacier (French Alps) made about 1850-1860 showing its front still close to the plain and the village. See page 1163. [From Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, Copyright © and published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1971. Translated by Barbara Bary] Bottom: Photograph of the town of Argentierre in the French Alps, taken in the mid-1960's. Source: Science 27 December 1974

Anthony Watts heroically defends cool satellites

Not long ago I wrote about how the satellite lower troposphere data diverged from the surface temperature trends some time earlier this century. I put it around 2006, just going by the charts. Tamino took a different approach and compared satellite data with that from thermometers on balloons (which I missed at the time, I'm embarrassed to say). It used to be just RSS that was the outlier, now with the latest UAH beta, both are.

There have been recent papers on the subject as well (see below), but so far the satellite researchers have not identified what is the cause (or not to my knowledge, yet).

This is not cool

Now Yale Climate Connections has posted a YouTube video by Peter Sinclair of Climate Crocks, called as part of the "This is Not Cool" series. (H/t metzomagic)