Settled science: there is a scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change

You probably think this topic has been done to death, however there are still people who won't or can't accept that there is a strong scientific consensus on climate change. Even people who accept the strong scientific consensus keep coming up with claims that it isn't. The science on the consensus is "settled science". (I say that to annoy science deniers who don't understand the difference between settled science and ongoing research.)

There are two new papers about the extent to which there is a consensus that humans are causing global warming. One is a rather silly comment by Richard Tol (who can't let it go). The other is a reply to Richard's comment by a team of heavy hitters, including many of the people who have already published papers quantifying the consensus, plus more. The reply is much more than a mere reply. It's a synthesis of the consensus papers and something that you'll no doubt find useful the next time you come across a climate science doubter.

La Niña Watch announced by the Bureau of Meteorology

Although El Niño is still in effect, the latest ENSO wrap-up from the Bureau of Meteorology has put La Niña into watch status. The Bureau says that there's now a 50% chance of a La Niña developing later this year.

The model outlooks are shown below. The average is above the threshold for La Niña but some are dropping below. We're still in autumn which is when modeled projections are especially iffy (a meteorological term meaning things could change):

The HadSST error was an error and has been fixed

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how John McLean thought he found an error in HadSST data, and how no-one else who looked could find the same error (except for some "missing data" notations that Zeke Hausfather noticed). Well it turns out there were some errors - in the files (not the data - see below). I found out from WUWT that there's an update on the HadSST website:

08/04/2016: An error in the format of some of the ascii files was brought to our attention by John McLean. Maps of numbers of observations and measurement and sampling uncertainties provided in ascii format ran from south to north rather than north to south as described in the data format. This has now been fixed. In some cases, the number of observations in a grid cell exceeded 9999 and were replaced by a series of asterisks in the ascii files. This too has been fixed with numbers of observations now represented as integers between 0, indicating no data, and 9,999,999, indicating lots of data.

So if you've been using HadSST lately, you might want to check the data.

Update

After someone said that Nick Stokes and Zeke Hausfather should apologise, Nick Stokes points out why no apology is warranted and has clarified what the error was and what in the original claim was wrong:

Bob Tisdale has no empathy for millions of Americans affected by rising seas

Three years ago I wrote about how fake sceptics see things differently from most people. When most people see up, deniers see down. Today Bob Tisdale wrote about how he and the "rest of us" (ie climate conspiracy theorists) look at potential disaster with different eyes to those of most people (archived here, latest here).  Unlike the "most of us", Bob enjoyed reading how 4.2 million people in the USA could be affected if sea level rises by 3 feet (almost a metre) by the end of this century. Instead of empathising with the 4.2 million people, Bob, with a hint of sadism, turned it into a small number. He wrote:

What did I see?

Less than 1% of Forecast U.S. Population by 2100 Might Be, Or Might Not Be, Displaced by Projected Sea Level Rise of 3 Feet That Might, Or Might Not, Happen. The Other 99% of U.S. Residents Couldn’t Give a Rat’s…  Some Optimistically Looking Forward to Their Inland Properties Becoming Oceanfront.

As Gavin Schmidt once wrote:

Changing a unit to have a small sounding number doesn’t actually change anything; neither the significance nor the accuracy. .... – gavin

The illogic of deniers: David Legates on the 971 vs 20 in a thousand abstracts

David Legates is a Professor at the University of Delaware who somewhere along the way managed to get a tenured position. I don't know what he teaches or if he's allowed to get anywhere near students - his profile gives not a clue. However he spends some of his time writing articles for climate conspiracy blogs. Today he's written an article for WUWT (archived here) where he's making wild and wrong claims about consensus studies. That is, about studies that show that almost all scientific papers that attribute a cause to global warming attribute it to human activity. David tells outright lies and also builds a few men of straw along the way.

971 in a thousand vs 20 in a thousand

Let's get the numbers from the Cook13 study. Did you know that Cook13 found that since 1991, there were less than 7 abstracts out of every thousand, that disputed humans are the main cause of global warming? That's not how it's presented in Cook13 though. In that paper they properly looked at the numbers only in the context of abstracts in which a position was expressed. In Cook13 the researchers categorised 4,014 papers that expressed a position on the cause of the current global warming.

Yucky tasting medicine: You can't do that - only us - sez CEI

At WUWT today, Eric Worrall has written how the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is getting a taste of its own medicine (archived here). The CEI is complaining that they've been issued with a subpoena to produce twenty years of emails and other documents relating to their climate science denial campaigns. You might have heard of CEI, they are the same mob who usually appear at WUWT boasting how they asked for decades of emails from other people. Now the tables have turned and CEI doesn't like it.

In a complete about face, the CEI is now claiming that letting people know what is said in emails is a violation of freedom of speech! The article claims it to be part of "an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate". Wow! (Is that why Chris Horner and the CEI spend almost all their time suing people for emails - to intimidate and stop research on climate?)

Dave Burton wants to level the seas at WUWT

Over at WUWT, deniers are clutching at straws to continue to reject science in the face of all the "hottest evers". They really, really liked the last big El Nino in 1997-98, but they really, really dislike this current El Nino of 2015-16. It means they'll have to wait a while before they can start pointing to a drop in the surface temperature although Anthony Watts keeps jumping the gun and is excitedly telling his readers that a La Nina is just about here.

Here is some of what they got up to today, with a moan and lots of misdirection from a WUWT regular commenter called Dave Burton about another bane of deniers' existence - rising seas (archived here). But first, what's been happening...

Most of the Arctic sea ice is on land and other WUWT musings

Arctic sea ice from 1953

 Willis Eschenbach has been wondering about sea ice trends of the past few decades. He's written a couple of articles but seems to me to be more interested in hiding the trends than exploring them. In today's article (archived here, latest here), he has used HadISST data from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre. I don't know why he chose that over the more often cited Sea Ice Index from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.  I think he's meant his title to this latest article to be sarcastic, in the way that the Dunning-Kruger set use sarcasm: "The Awful Terrible Horrible Global Sea Ice Crisis".

Willis decided to look at the data from 1974 only because he found that for Antarctica before that time there was not good data. Then he said he removed the seasonal component, which looks like he deducted something from each month. Since Willis used HadISST data, let's look at what the authors of the authoritative text on the subject found in the 2003 paper by Rayner et al:

Some early history about Australia's deeply troubled R&D organisation, CSIRO

Peter Hannam at the Sydney Morning Herald has been writing a series of articles about the deep troubles at Australia's flagship R&D organisation, CSIRO. Some of you won't be aware of the early history of this institution, so I thought I'd pull a few threads together to give you a taste.

Billy Hughes vision for a national focus on science

The origin of the CSIRO goes back to 1916, when the Australian Government established the Advisory Council of Science and Industry. The purpose was to put a national focus on scientific research. This was during the first World War when Labor politician William Morris ("Billy") Hughes was Prime Minister. It was Hughes who convened the conference in January 1916, with the purpose of establishing the organisation. The main offices were in Melbourne originally (Canberra didn't exist).

Denier weirdness: Ari Halperin thinks the IPCC's climate change definition is too broad

The Stupid It Burns Credit: Plognark

There could be an entire field of study devoted to how the brain of a climate science denier is wired, or miswired. There is a very strange article at WUWT (archived here) that shows up the deep flaws in thinking processes of deniers. The best explanation I can come up with is that Ari Halperin doesn't understand what climate is and the people commenting at WUWT are not able to process logic.