Judith Curry objects to scientists warning US Congress about the dangers of climate change

Deniers are getting antsy. Judith Curry is complaining about a letter from leaders of prominent scientific organisations in the USA to US Congress (archived here). She is framing it as a political stunt. She just wants to rail against science and climate science in particular, again. Boringly predictable is Judith.

Judith doesn't think much of the knowledge of scientists. She claims that scientists who study fish and amphibians don't know or care that climate change is changing the world's fisheries and frog habitats. She's wrong.

Jo Nova and Eric Worrall, racism, conspiracy theories and climate science denial

There is a lot of overlap between racism and right wing extremism. It seems to me to both are based on the at times deadly combination of extreme fear, ignorance and bigotry. Yesterday Eric Worrall was lauding the election of a person who has been inciting violence for a long time. Today it's Jo Nova. The people who are bigoted climate science deniers are Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts. The party of bigots is called One Nation, which is the opposite of what they are trying to achieve. What they stand for is a nation divided.

Pauline Hanson was voted in by people who probably claim to be Christians, but lack any virtues of love and tolerance, and who are scared to their back teeth of anyone of a different race or religion to them. Pauline wants to install video cameras to perve on people in Mosques and Islamic schools. She hasn't said the same about other churches and other schools. She's also an anti-vaxxer and stands up for men who want to get out of paying child support. Malcolm Roberts is an anti-semitic conspiracy theorist. Graham Readfearn reported Australian journalist Ben Cubby writing about Malcolm Roberts:

In considering your request that I identify errors in the report you sent to me – CSIROh! Climate of Deception? Or First Step to Freedom? – I find myself confronting an unusual problem: how does one critically analyse a pile of horse shit?

Denier weirdness: Anthony Watts wants good economics but bad climate science

This is weird. Anthony Watts (a "climate hoax" conspiracy blogger) has written about a paper in one of the top economic journals, which a lot of people think shouldn't have been published (archived here). That's okay, sometimes bad papers get published and sometimes there are shonky things happening with peer review. Thing is, as shown in his article, Anthony wants bad research in climate science.

Circulating ocean waters of the past confuse Eric Worrall in the present, at WUWT

There was a new paper out in Science last week about past changes in ocean circulation. It's from a team led by  L. Gene Henry, a graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. What they were exploring was the past relationship between climate and ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, several thousand years ago. The paper focused on changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).

Australian Federal Elections - too close to call yet?

Australia has just held a double dissolution election, meaning people are voting for all the Senate positions as well as all the lower house positions (House of Representatives). Usually we vote for all the lower house but only half the upper house. It was a freezing cold day in this part of Australia, but voting is compulsory so that wouldn't have affected the turnout much. In any case, lots of people would have voted before today (by post).

The election is said to be too close to call. Malcolm Turnbull, the Prime Minister (to the political right) is on the left, and the left (Labor leader) Bill Shorten is on the right in the photo below:D

Election too close to call as voters walk away from Malcolm Turnbull https://t.co/eqmw1v7tNr #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/mW9OGRhrEQ

— smh.com.au (@smh) July 2, 2016

However, at the close of counting this morning, the results for the 150 seats in the House of Representatives on the AEC website are as follows:

• Australian Labor Party (Bill Shorten leader) 72 seats
• Liberal/National Coalition (Malcolm Turnbull Prime Minister) 66
• Independent 2
• Other minor parties 3
• Not yet determined 7.

I'll let you do the arithmetic but be aware, the numbers are not final and can change.

Eric Worrall celebrates misery, at WUWT

One thing you'll soon discover about hard-core science deniers is how much distaste they have for the world they live in. Today Eric Worrall (archived here) is celebrating the fact that it's very unlikely we'll be able to keep the global temperature below 1.5 C above pre-industrial and will be battling to keep the temperature rise under 2 C.

I'm not kidding. His headline was: "Celebrate: We’ve Finally Hit a Climate “Tipping Point”". He was writing about another new paper in Nature, written by a team led by Joeri Rogelj. The scientists looked at the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) made by countries around the world, which set out the proposals to limit emissions. What they found is described in the opening paragraph of the press release:

Pledges made for the Paris agreement on climate change last winter would lead to global temperature rise of 2.6 to 3.1°C by the end of the century, according to a new analysis published in the journal Nature. In fact, the entire carbon budget for limiting warming to below 2°C might have been emitted by 2030, according to the study.

Oh No! CO2 can't be plant food, say the folk at WUWT

One has to wonder at the thinking process of WUWT fans. A lot of deniers can't accept their own memes when they are supported by scientific research, even though they were originally derived from scientific research. It's a knee-jerk reaction from the scientific illiterati that science must be rejected at all costs. This time a lot of WUWT-ers reject the notion that plants respond to extra CO2. The latest from lots of people in deniersville is that CO2 isn't plant food after all!

Yesterday Anthony Watts copied and  pasted a press release (archived here). (As usual he didn't link to the paper or the press release.)  The paper in Nature Climate Change was by a large team led by Jiafu Mao of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The scientists looked at the greening of the extratropical northern hemisphere and compared it with what would be expected with no greenhouse forcing. They concluded that without human activity, the observed amount of extra plant growth would not have occurred.

Anthony Watts and his critical thinking cherry blossom fail

Anthony Watts runs a climate conspiracy blog called WUWT. He dismisses most climate science as "claims" and thinks that global warming is caused by Russian steampipes. Anthony often suffers confirmation bias, meaning he doesn't understand what he reads because his mind, shaped by his personal view of the world, twists it into something else altogether.

Credit: Uberlemur 

Yesterday he decided to take on the National Parks Service and plant researchers, and disputed the main causes of trends in blossoming time of cherry trees in Washington DC. Incidentally, Anthony is still fighting World War II, though it took place before he was born. He wrote:

We can assume that because the Washington cherry trees are curated and budding times tracked by the National Park Service that they get plenty of water and nutrients, after all we can’t have dead and dying cherry trees on the mall. That would insult Japan, who made them a gift in 1912 before they decided to surprise bomb the crap out of us at Pearl Harbor.

Brexit tidbits from climate conspiracy blogs

Here are some tidbits from around some of the denier blogs following Brexit.  At Anthony Watts' blog WUWT, a lot of the articles have been about UK politics in the wake of the vote to leave the EU. In one article, Anthony had the gall to compare the "leave" vote to a defining moment in the civil rights movement in the USA (archived here). Given that a lot of the "leave" vote was fueled by xenophobia, his article at best showed an appalling lack of knowledge of US history and the threat of a rise in right wing populism around the world, but could more easily be construed as extreme right-wing racists wanting to re-write history. (In a similar vein, Jo Nova points to British imperialism and past colonisation of countries in Asia and Africa to prove that there's no xenophobia in the UK.)

Politics and financial turmoil

This is where you can clap with glee or express your disbelief that so many people in England and Wales want to try to go it alone. If you don't care about the political and trade issues, how do you feel about the impact on financial sector in the UK and the world.

"You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

Photo by @jeremiahtolbert. pic.twitter.com/20KuMJdKod

— Nick Mamatas (@NMamatas) June 24, 2016

Is this the end of the United Kingdom or did that happen some time ago? Will Scotland have another vote to separate, and to stay with the EU? What about Northern Ireland? Will it revert to civil strife? And will other EU countries follow suit, leading to a collapse of the union?

Post your thoughts here - and even better, speculate what Europe (including England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland) and the world will look like in 2030.

HotWhopper rarely dips into politics, but this vote by the people of Britain to leave the EU could signal some massive changes. It will almost certainly upset the world of finance. The Pound has dropped to its lowest level since 1985. Stock prices have dropped quite a lot all around the world. This could be a kneejerk reaction from the markets, or the start of a bear.

One things seems certain, unwinding from the EU won't be easy or painless. England could sink into a long depression. The Bank of England is trying to talk things up, but will the world listen?

What's the bet that when reality sets in, the people who voted to leave will still blame the EU for their woes?

Update - I've added some links below the fold.