WUWT shows that 99.9% of recent papers don't dispute mainstream climate science

Scientists will be surprised to find their papers featured on a list that claims they are science deniers. They won't be surprised to find that the list is being circulated by disinformer Anthony Watts and a rabid denier, Pierre Gosselin (archived here and here and here).

Pierre is the same person who, eight years ago in 2008, predicted that by 2020 the surface temperature would have dropped by 2.5 °C. That prediction isn't looking too hot right now. It would have to drop by 2.83 °C from 2015.

Figure 4 | Global mean surface temperature (blue) and Pierre Gosselin's 2008 prediction (red). Data sources: GISS NASA and WUWT

Pierre is as woeful at understanding science papers as he is at predicting global surface temperature.

Un-American witch hunts: Karl Rove Tactic #3 from WUWT

If there is one thing that defines climate science deniers it is that they are conspiracy theorists. Some wilful deniers believe the disinformers who claim that climate science is a hoax and that scientists are committing fraud. WUWT is full of it. Today it's Eric Worrall's turn (archived here). This time he's doing a Karl Rove, and accusing Senator Whitehouse of being a conspiracy theorist because he is exposing the deliberate disinformation campaigns allegedly paid for in part by fossil fuel companies.

Some background. Over time, more and more evidence has been compiled showing that fossil fuel companies have paid money to climate denying organisations in the USA. This includes ExxonMobil, Peabody coal and others. Today Eric Worrall copied from the Guardian:

The Senate heard how fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and the billionaire oil brothers Charles and David Koch had funnelled millions into groups that had spread doubt about the causes of climate change.

The Guardian article has a lot of detail, including the role of paid disinformers like Bob Carter. It also has links to other documentation of the deliberate campaigns to spread climate science denial, including in Australia.

Australasian temperatures are unusual in the context of the last thousand years - Joëlle Gergis

You might recall how four years ago science deniers, led by that unsavory character Steve McIntyre, went beserk over a paper by Dr Joëlle Gergis and a team of scientists. The paper was originally published in Journal of Climate but the authors requested it be put on hold. What the researchers were reporting was that recent decades of temperatures recorded in Australia were warmer than at any time in the past millennia.

The paper has now been taken off hold and has been published in the latest issue of the journal. About the paper, Joelle Gergis has said:

We found that the nature of warming experienced in Australasia since 1985-2014 is unusual in the context of the last thousand years...Analysis of climate model simulations shows that the warming experienced since 1950 cannot be explained by natural factors alone, highlighting the role of human caused greenhouse gases in the recent warming of the region.

In the paper the authors describe research looking at proxy reconstructions of temperatures in the warm season in the Australasian region between 1000 and 2001 AD (see Figure 1 below). Since then Australia has got even hotter. The paper is very detailed and interesting, including discussion of the temperature changes over time. For example, the authors point out that in medieval times, warming occurred in the Australasian region later than in parts of the northern hemisphere. However the timing of the minimum temperatures in the Little Ice Age was similar to that in the northern hemisphere.

I'll let Joëlle Gergis tell the rest of the story, from her article at The Conversation. It's not just a story about the research, it's also about sexism, FOI harassment, and general misbehaviour of the sort the world has come to expect from "climate hoax" conspiracy theorists.

Climate science deniers at WUWT diversify into human health

Not only are climate science deniers climate experts they are also human health experts. They are equally good at not reading articles about human health as they are at not reading articles about climate science. That's how one becomes an expert in deniersville. (Cue Dunning and Kruger.)

An occasional blogger at Curry's place and WUWT, Kip Hansen (who revels in straw man fallacies in climate science), has picked up on an article in the New York Times. Gina Kollata has written about how some ailments have shown a marked decline in the USA. They are still prevalent, but emerging in people much later in life than previously. Kip finishes with another straw man anti-environment throwaway to prove he is a well-trained WUWT monkey:

Kolata’s coverage is a breath of fresh air in science reporting, where we are more usually subjected to yet-another alarming report of impending personal disaster .  [Cue music:  “It Ain’t Necessarily So”] caused by vague “chemicals and toxins” [sic] in our environment.

Seriously deluded: wacky conspiracy theories at WUWT with more ozone hole denial

Denier blogs are in the doldrums and have been for quite some time. I wrote about Judith Curry, who actively agitates for no mitigation of global warming, complaining about scientists warning US Congress about the dangers of climate change. Seriously! Is that all she's got?

Jo Nova has been focused on politics. She likes One Nation's climate conspiracy theories and in one article she urged her readers to vote for a Senate candidate from an ultra-conservative populist party that stands on climate science denial, homophobia, islamophobia, and against almost all the values that decent Australians cherish. That is the Christian Democrat Party, which is the creature of Fred Nile. Joanne is a proud deluded conservative (DelCon) who regards centrist conservatives as socialist. She paints everyone to the left of Ghengis Kahn as subversive commies.

Anthony Watts has been posting a lot of political articles too. He hasn't been around much except to put up some very silly articles from his band of freeby contributors. His latest contribution is another wacky article by one of his favourite uber-conspiracy theorists Timothy Ball (archived here).

Australian politics - the Liberal National Coalition to form government

As a follow-up to my previous article about the "too close to call" election results, the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has announced he will form government. This announcement was made, as is convention, following a phone call he got from the leader of the Labor Party, Bill Shorten, conceding defeat.

It's still not known yet whether the government will have sufficient seats for a majority in the lower house, however Antony Green has "almost" called it, and the ABC website shows the conservative coalition probably will just scrape in the required 76 seats, maybe with one more (or less).

What this election result will mean for climate action remains to be seen. The trends in the weather would be more certain.

Beware deniers wanting plant food - or - If science deniers were in charge

Over at WUWT, Anthony Watts has put up another article from his main contributor Eric Worrall (archived here). Eric is thinking of sending the world to hell in a handbasket by adding enough CO2 to the air to bring it to 1000 ppm in the next ten years. He says he wants to feed plants. His plan is to burn limestone.

Eric knows as much about atmospheric science and arithmetic as he does about climate change. His calculations are wonky. He thinks that there is only 920Gt of CO2 in the atmosphere at present. There's about 3,250 Gt or about 8 Gt per ppmv of CO2. So when he works out that he needs another 600 ppm, he thinks he only needs another 1,380Gt of CO2. In fact he needs to find about 4,800 Gt CO2. That means instead of just using 3,136Gt of limestone, he'll have to find nearly 11,000 billion tonnes of pure limestone.

Anthony Watts: culture kills. The European heat wave 2003

Anthony Watts has written a very long article about the 2003 European heat wave and its deadly effect (archived here, latest here). Actually, he didn't write most of it. Anthony doesn't write much these days (did he ever?). He just copied huge slabs of text from Wikipedia, followed by a copy of a press release about a new paper in Environmental Research Letters.

Death spike in the European heat wave

In the paper, the UK team of authors wrote about the impact of the 2003 European heat wave on mortality. Below is a chart from the paper, showing the unreal temperatures in June July and August. The only comparable summer so far was that in 2012.

Figure 1 | Mean summer temperature anomaly (relative to 1985–2010) in observations (CRUTEM4; black line) averaged over a region covering the Mediterranean [21]. The box and whisker plots show the median, interquartile range, 5%–95% range and more extreme data as + symbols over the same region for the (red) Actual scenario and (blue) Natural scenario. Horizontal dashed lines show the 5%–95% range of the modelled data. Year 2003 is marked with an orange arrow. Source: Mitchell16

Christopher Monckton lives in a fantasy future of science denial

Christopher Monckton has made a rare appearance at WUWT (archived here), complaining that an annual temperature chart stops at 2015. Presumably he thinks it should have included annual temperatures for 2016, 2017 and maybe 2018. The article that got Christopher's knickers in a knot was by Ryan Cooper at The Week. Christopher posted the chart below:

Figure 1 | Global average annual surface temperature from 1975 to 2015. Source: The Week via WUWT

Troposphere temperatures for June 2016

The troposphere temperatures are out for June 2016. The lower troposphere is recorded in UAH v6 beta 5 and RSS TLT v3.3. This report also covers RSS TTT for the troposphere (without the "lower").

In all records, the June global anomaly dropped again, as El Nino dissipated. In the lower troposphere (UAH beta v6.05) and the troposphere (RSS TTT) the June anomaly is lower than it was in 1998. The drop was greater than most people expected, particularly for UAH TLT. Anthony Watts called it "spectacular". However it was still the second hottest June in the UAH record and the third hottest in RSS TTT.

Troposphere temperature (RSS TTT v4) chart

First here is RSS TTT with the latest dataset, version 4. TTT seems to be measure more of the troposphere than TLT (that is, it has a greater vertical profile) with less of the stratosphere than the mid-troposphere data (TMT). It shows a higher rate of warming than RSS v3.3 and higher than UAH.

Hover the cursor (arrow) over the plots to see the data points, trend etc.

The chart below is the average of the 12 months to June, from July 1979 to June 1980, through to July 2015 to June 2016.

Figure 1 | Troposphere temperature for 12 months to June (TTT). Anomaly is from the 1979-1998 mean. Data source: RSS