We enter the age of “…or else”. Nothing makes a libertarian madder than governments acting on something. Anthony Watts copies-and-pastes excerpts from a Washington Post report that the death of a Senate Climate bill means that the White House will use its power to act on Global Warming via the EPA’s clean-air regulations.
Obama is such a bully! And a Nigerian communist.
“A color scheme change for the SST map“. Steven Goddard still thinks that diddling around in Photoshop is scientifically meaningful. Today he tries to jigger the color scheme to reduce the global temperature anomalies by using a “cooler” color for small positive anomalies.
Of course he had to hunt around the NOAA site to find the Coral Reef Watch group’s variation on the master Sea Surface Temp anomaly map to find a chart that he could make look bad. Note to Steven: Charts are representations of data, they are not data. What you are doing is discarding the data that you don’t like.
Here's a real NOAA SST Anomaly Map, for August 4, 2010.
Using the same logic Steven “proves” in the comments that, by geographical area, President Obama only got 28% of the 2008 Presidential election vote.
“Morphed Climate/Energy Bill is DOA in the Senate“. Yeah! Republican politics has defeated Global Warming! At least that’s what Anthony Watts thinks.
New carbon dioxide emissions model: “carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to around zero by the end of the century”. How dare those Europeans tell Anthony Watts what to do! Wait, the copied-and-pasted Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science press release is simply saying this:
Meteorologists have determined exactly how much carbon dioxide humans can emit into the atmosphere while ensuring that the earth does not heat up by more than two degrees.
CO2 emissions calculated by the model (left, in gigatons carbon/year) and the temporal development of the global mean annual temperature (right). For long-term stabilisation of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, fossil carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to around zero by the end of the century. Black lines represent the observed values. Source: Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.
The practical truth is that if we want to limit the global temperature increase to the 2°C rise that has been agreed is a wise target, we’re going to have to start acting now. There is a significant “inertia” to our climate’s response to inputs such as CO2 emissions, it’s not as if we can just “turn off the tap” when it suits us.
Anthony leaves the wise observations that we’d “better stop breathing” and howls about taxation, socialist vegetarian conspiracies and population control to flourish uncorrected in the comments.
“Open Water At The North Pole“. Anthony Watts wants his followers to hear this news from him first so he can frame it properly. He scours the internet for useful “there was less ice in the olde days” tales and finds photos of surfaced nuclear submarines and some old speculative newspaper articles.
Yes, there’s open water near the north pole now. No, it’s not uncommon at the height of Arctic summer. Big whup. This is called weather. The real story, as always, is the long-term trend. But Anthony’s anecdotes apparently trump that.
Arctic Sea Ice Anomaly, August 3, 2010. Trend is... down. Source: Cryosphere Today
Wait, what’s this? Anthony reports:
The UIUC [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] seems to have “lost” their archive of ice concentration maps. It has been offline for two weeks now, so we can’t use that valuable resource for the time being. I wonder what’s up with that?
Yes! Conspiracy and hiding of data! Back to work.
A reader recently encouraged me to follow-up on the idea of occasionally posting about Global Warming news or events that Anthony Watts’ blog chooses to ignore. It’s tough keeping up with the posts Anthony spews out, but now and then I recognize a small patch of enlightening silence. Here’s one now.
During my recent travels NOAA released a large peer-reviewed study published as a Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society supplement. There’s an excellent online copy with some interactive data-sets too. Anthony Watts has been strangely silent about it even though it was widely covered in the popular media:
The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.
NOAA's ten indicators of a warming world.
It’s all good fun getting attention by shouting about this meaningless contrary trend or that one, or by accusing climatologists of being hostile while ignoring your own vituperation. But when the evidence is lined up in a row like this… Best to keep your mouth shut and hope that your supporters forget about it.
Of course Anthony could be busy on the back-channels helping to craft a useful spin. “Whitewash”? “Data manipulation”? “Conspiracy”? We’ll see.
“UAH Global Temperature – still in a holding pattern“. Thanks for the weather observation from Roy Spencer, Anthony. I wonder if Anthony will ever stop pretending not to understand that good old natural climate variation, such as the eastern Pacific Ocean El Niño circulation pattern, will continue while the progressive human impacts express themselves. It’s not either/or.
It’s well understood that natural “cooling” climate variations can suppress the man-made rise, but when they swing back to “warming” they will magnify it. All Anthony is doing is pretending that these pauses are significant. “Expect drops in the months ahead” says Anthony. So what? But it will be interesting to watch him squirm out of his meaningless prediction if it fails to come to pass.
UAH Global Temperature, 1979 - present
Interesting admission from Dr. Spencer:
As of Julian Day 212 (end of July), the race for warmest year in the 32-year satellite period of record is still too close to call with 1998 continuing its lead by only 0.07 C.
Doesn’t sound like cooling to me. Spencer and sundry denialists are still clinging to that crazy 1998 El Niño as the answer to the painfully obvious warming trends.
“Global Sea Surface Temperature Cooling Continues“. Dr. Roy Spencer lets us know that the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) as recorded by NASA’s Aqua satellite is continuing to fall. It’s been falling for months! That’s a trend! Not.
Yes, the well-known El Niño/La Niña circulation pattern in the tropical east Pacific Ocean has entered a phase that brings colder water to the surface. No, the oceans are not cooling now.
NOAA SST Anomaly Chart for 2010-08-03
“A new must read paper: McKitrick on GHCN and the quality of climate data“. Economics professor Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph has performed a comprehensive review of the GHCN surface and sea temperature data set! It’s published in… Oh, it’s a vanity publication by his denialist friends at The Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Anthony Watts’ associates keep trying to repackage the accusation that the temperature data sets are untrustworthy and hence there is no Global Warming, but they can never make it stick. This time McKitrick even tries to slide in a few “Climategate” e-mails for support. Let’s look at the two excerpts that Anthony posts:
1.2.3. Growing bias toward lower latitudes – This actually biases against warming. McKitrick tries to float the idea that “this implies less and less data are drawn from remote, cold regions and more from inhabited, warmer regions.” In fact it’s well established that the warming anomaly is more pronounced at higher latitudes. Either McKitrick is uninformed or he’s trying to mislead readers.
2.4. Conclusion re. dependence on GHCN – Another canard from Ross, claiming that “All three major gridded global temperature anomaly products rely exclusively or nearly exclusively on the GHCN archive”. Guess what? There aren’t large overlapping collections of weather stations around the world. What climatologists interested in historical temperature trends do is select stations from the larger group that meet their analytical requirements. Good morning Rip Van Winkle.
“July average maxima in San Francisco coolest since 1971“. Anthony Watts returns to the idiotic “it’s cool somewhere, so Global Warming is wrong” theme.
Weather is not climate, is it Anthony? Nor is July the same as a 30-year time span, or San Francisco a good representation of the Earth.
But keep flapping your gums.
Wott's Up With That? 