Roger Pielke Jr's weather disaster essay is too simplistic, and befuddles deniers at WUWT

It's a short article. Short in length and short on substance. I'm referring to a paper written by Roger Pielke Jr. where he attempts to report on whether and how much progress there has been in a small part of one of the seventeen United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The paper attracted the attention of Anthony Watts, a science denier who runs a blog known as WUWT. Anthony, not being the brightest spark, not even in the dark deniosphere where the bar for brightness is low, got the paper upside down and inside out. More on that later.

Sustainable Development Goals

The UN's SDG has 17 goals aimed at improving societies, the well-being of people, and the sustainability of the planet. Each goal has several parts and, at present, 232 unique indicators. The indicators are for measuring progress toward achieving the goals.

It was a warm, dry July in Canberra (and kangaroos have fur)

Eric Worrall says there are "Kangaroos Dying of Cold" in Canberra. That's a good one. Eric doesn't know much about Australia and less about kangaroos. I don't know how long he's lived here, but you'd think he'd have picked up some knowledge about the place.

Did you know that when kangaroos can't find enough food where they normally go, they'll look elsewhere? It's the same for for a lot of animals - yeah, really.

There's a bad drought in parts of Australia at the moment. This is affecting wildlife as well as farmers and their stock. I'll talk about the Australian Capital Territory where Australia's capital city, Canberra, is located because there is a bit of idiocy about it being put about by deniers.

Watts up with that vs Google vs Climate Change

There's consternation at the climate conspiracy blog WattsUpWithThat.com (WUWT). Kip Hansen, a random denier dude, is ropeable. He's most upset because, in June this year, WUWT had a big drop in click-throughs from Google. A 30% drop, according to Kip (Google cache here :D).

Now this isn't about paid-for click-throughs (via Google AdWords). It's just about the freebie service that everyone gets. Here's his evidence that the Google algorithm is working better. Feel free to celebrate or commiserate.

Chart source: Wattsupwiththat.com

You probably noticed that, as climate science deniers tend to do with temperature charts, Kip's 30% measurement started at an unusually high point. (He may not have been able to get much earlier data because WUWT moved to a new server at the end of May this year and Anthony Watts might not have kept stats the same way on the old server. Who knows?)

This crazy climate! What do Anthony Watts and Alex Jones have in common? Prison Planet.

Some of you might think HotWhopper may on occasion go overboard reporting the lies, duplicity and straight up weirdness of deniers. That's not so. If anything, the articles here underplay the weirdness of deniersville. Some of what goes on in climate conspiracy land is not fit for publication on normal blogs.

WUWT has recently reinvigorated its crusade to libel or solicit libel of prominent climate scientists and climate hawks. In the last couple of days there have been articles about Michael Mann and Ben Santer, for example. When all else fails, disinformers turn to lying smears.

But that's not all.

WUWT is now using US conpiracy theorist Alex Jones' Prison Planet as a source!

Some bloke called Marcel Crok plays a cruel climate joke on Anthony Watts at WUWT

This is sad. A ratbag from Europe, Marcel Crok, who is considered by Anthony Watts to be a "good friend" (enough said), has written to Anthony asking him to consult his network of "experts" (cached version).

What a horrid and cruel trick Marcel is playing on his supposed "good" friend.

Of course, it might be Marcel is unfamiliar with WUWT and is not a very close friend of Anthony's. He may not know that Anthony has no "network of experts". On the other hand, Marcel could have been wondering what the dregs of climate conspiracy land will say about the wave of extreme events happening around the world. (As far as I can make out, Marcel is a freelance writer who could be considered the equivalent of David Rose, who in turn has a well-earned reputation as a climate disinformer from the UK.)

The global inconsistency of climate science denier, Larry Hamlin, at WUWT

This is rich.

Yesterday I wrote how climate disinformer Larry Hamlin picked out years of hot Junes in the USA and California, as if to argue that global warming isn't worth worrying about because there have been occasional hot Junes in California and the USA in the past. Today he wants to ignore local and go global (cached here).

In the last article I showed how, when you put Larry's USA/Californian June temperatures in the global context, it highlights the ridiculousness of deniers. Early last century the world as a whole was much colder than it is today. This century we're really getting a taste of what's to come. This past few weeks we've been getting a horrific taste of what's to come much more often, with deadly fires, drought, killer heat waves and floods widespread over the northern hemisphere, not to mention the drought back here in Australia. It isn't just hot in California and the USA, it's hot in lots of places as this map of June temperatures shows (from GISTemp).

US-centred climate change denial from the desperate deniers at WUWT

While the distinctly unpresidential Donald Trump is desperate to deny he's in Putin's pocket, his zombie acolytes at WUWT are desperate to deny the world is warming. So much so that they are trying to deny that the weather lately has been quite extraordinary.

There are fires raging in Greece, where at least 74 people are feared dead. There has been a killer heatwave in Japan that broke high temperature records, has claimed at least 77 lives and sent more than 30,000 people to hospital. This follows the tragically disastrous floods that killed upwards of 200 people. Then there was the horrific tragedy in Laos, where monsoon rains led to 5 billion cubic metres of water flowing from a busted new hydro dam, killing who knows how many people and with hundreds missing and leaving 6,600 people homeless. (If the evacuation notice had not been sent out in advance the tragedy may have been even worse.)

In Sweden, which is suffering the worst drought since records began, there are terrible wildfires. In fact, much of Western Europe is facing yet another summer heatwave. In the far north of Finland, of all places, the temperature reached 34.3 C (94 F) the other day!

Climate conspiracy theorist Anthony Watts is hot and bothered by heat in California

It's taking me a while to get back to blogging and there's a lot happening in the world to distract. I couldn't help but notice there is a lot of extreme weather around the world, the terrible floods in Japan, for example. If you're wondering how these examples of climate change are affecting climate science deniers, it's making them even loopier than normal.

Airport UHI disease breakout in Africa

Over at WUWT, Anthony Watts found another airport that had a sudden attack of airport UHI disease. You'll remember how there was an outbreak in Greenland back in 2013. This horrible disease only strikes on very hot days, apparently. Not even that. It only strikes on the very hottest of days according to Anthony's research. He said he his amazing finding was "based on hours of combing Google Earth and other sources". Yes, he really did spend "hours" trying to figure out a reason to discount a temperature reading for a weather station in Africa. He decided that on the particular day of the very high weather reading, possibly a record high reading, the weather station decided to act up.

Pseudoscience in black and white, from Eric Worrall at WUWT

Here's a small example of why one should avoid getting their science from pseudo-scientists. Eric Worrall is criticising an experiment that was designed to determine the impact of higher daytime temperatures on bees.

The scientists put some bees into boxes painted white and some into boxes painted black and monitored them for a couple of years.

Eric thought he found a fatal flaw. His criticism was this:

The team seem to have logged daily maximum temperature inside the boxes, but I didn’t see any attention to daily minimum temperature. Painting the boxes black would have caused higher maximum temperatures from absorption of sunlight in the daytime, but the black painted boxes would also have radiated heat faster at night.

Just in case you thought, maybe Eric was talking about the faster rate of cooling as the sun went down, he's not. He added a sentence so you'll not make any mistake:

So it seems possible that much of the damage to the bees in the black boxes was caused by colder night time temperatures, rather than warmer daytime temperatures.

Wrong! Both boxes would have around the same minimum temperature during the night.

2018 has the fourth hottest May on record

Summary: May 2018 was the fourth hottest May on record. The 12 month period to May 2018 was the third hottest June to May period on record.

According to GISS NASA, the average global surface temperature anomaly for May was 0.82 °C, which is 0.09 °C less than the hottest - May 2016.

Below is a chart of the average of 12 months to May each year. The 12 months to May 2018 averaged 0.82 °C above the 1951-1980 mean, which was 0.19 °C cooler than the 12 months to May 2016.

This makes it the third hottest June to May 12 month period on record after 2016 and 2015.