Monthly Archives: September 2010

Where the particulates are (and aren’t)

Posted on by
Reply

“Where the particulates are (and aren’t)“. NASA posts a press release (New Map Offers a Global View of Health-Sapping Air Pollution) about an estimate of the global distribution of fine particulate matter, and talks about efforts to assess the health risks these particles pose. Anthony Watts decides it’s all just dust (natural!).

Global Particulate Matter (<2.5μm) Distribution

Satellite-derived map of particulate matter (<2.5μm) distribution averaged over 2001-2006. Source: Dalhousie University.

Donkelaar and Randall Martin published Global Estimates of Ambient Fine Particulate Matter Concentrations from Satellite-Based Aerosol Optical Depth: Development and Application in Environmental Health Perspectives. They combined data from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) on NASA’s Terra satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on both NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites.

Why the random grousing about random NASA research, Anthony? Just some kind of reflexive urge? The commenters join in with a chorus of “scare tactics!”

More dirty pool by NCDC’s Karl, Menne, and Peterson

Posted on by
4

“More dirty pool by NCDC’s Karl, Menne, and Peterson“. Anthony’s still mad that “his data” has been used by scientists. Particularly because they studied his claim of fatal problems with the US surface temperature record and found that it was completely baseless. Sorry, Anthony, the actual data was theirs. You merely claimed loudly that particular weather stations were badly adjusted and they showed that from a climate study perspective the problems were irrelevant. A year later we’re still waiting for your thrilling expose.

Now they’ve used an amateur photo of a weather station on the cover of a presentation about how to respond to amateur criticisms of weather stations! My god, they’re also plotting things! Denialists do that too! What copycats, such infamy!

Sorry Anthony, your only contribution has been to trigger the recognition that there are tenacious and ignorant pests on the interwebs that need to be fended off. Nice to see the sudden awareness of copyright though. Did you ever get around to licensing that painting you use in your blog masthead? Like all of Anthony’s pretenses of taking the high road this rings a bit hollow.

Surprise: Peer reviewed study says current Arctic sea ice is more extensive than most of the past 9000 years

Posted on by
6

“Surprise: Peer reviewed study says current Arctic sea ice is more extensive than most of the past 9000 years“. A blogger discovers a paleoclimate paper by McKay, et.al. in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences from 2008 and Anthony Watts is on it like white on rice. “Peer reviewed!” “More ice now than ever!” “Natural!!!!”

Oh, it’s only referring to a bit of the western Arctic. Oh, they’re only comparing to Arctic Sea Ice extent of a decade ago, when there was in fact rather more sea ice. Oh, they aren’t suggesting that such low ice extents were common. Oh, dinocyst proxies are a bit dodgy. Oh, the paper is merely titled Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chukchi Sea, not “there’s more ice than ever now!”

Obituary: Ernst Georg Beck

Posted on by
Reply

“Obituary: Ernst Georg Beck“. Ernst Georg Beck, teacher, blogger and “co-founder of the European Institute for Climate and Energy” and contributor to the disregarded journal Energy & Environment has died. His research interest was to collate historical CO2 chemical measurements, apparently regardless of their source or methodology (they’re all over the place!) and will apparently be “the final nail in the AGW coffin.” If only he’d lived to see the day?

For Anthony Watts an anti-IPCC rant disguised as an obituary is the perfect response. He even lets through comments that ponder whether Beck’s cancer was “given to him in some shape or form by those with a vested interest in such things as global governance.” Alway the high ground with Anthony…

BBC questions if Pachauri’s continued presence “is still serving the best interests of the IPCC”

Posted on by
Reply

BBC questions if Pachauri’s continued presence “is still serving the best interests of the IPCC”. Apparently some British politicians think that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), should step down because denialists don’t like him. The BBC’s Roger Harrabin writes that Dr. Pachauri is “associated with controversy and error in the IPCC AR4.” What he’s associated with both minor errors? Off with his head! With him gone, Global Warming will naturally stop immediately.

Which image of Dr. Pachuri does Anthony use? Hint: not on the right.

Guess what; Anthony Watts will pour scorn and false accusations on anyone who occupies that office. Is Dr. Pachauri a “railway engineer”? Nope. Does he “write smutty novels”? Nope. Will Anthony repeat these claims as often as possible? Yup.

RC’s response to McShane and Wyner: a case of orange cones

Posted on by
Reply

“RC’s response to McShane and Wyner: a case of orange cones“. This is a classic whine from Anthony Watts about “the Team” and their “egos”. Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and Scott Rutherford (apparently representing the Team) have written a scathing comment letter to the Annals of Applied Statistics about the recent allegedly “hockey-stick busting” paper by the naïve statisticians McShane and Wyner entitled A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable? [PDF].

Update: I just noticed that the URL for Anthony’s blog post is “http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/23/rcs-response-to-mcshane-and-wyner-the-teams-steaming-pile-of-snip&#8221;! Now that’s critical analysis.

The paper has been debunked as wishful thinking and statistical failures (particularly embarrassing if you’re trying to overturn statistical evidence) that rely heavily and uncritically on biased sources and is coated with an irrelevant layer of political posturing. Read the coverage at Deep Climate, or Deltoid, then have a chuckle over Anthony’s first coverage of this “new and important study“. It has proven to be the latest superficially useful denialist effort, so it is being blindly praised in the usual quarters and stubbornly defended by the ignorant (this is Anthony’s cue).

I’d summarize it as an attempt to claim that the weak results of their poor statistical analysis means that the better techniques used to successfully identify the “hockey-stick” temperature trend are invalid. Sort of like saying “we get crappy results, so you must have done a crappy job just like us.”

Anthony jumps in with both feet sputtering about the nerve of those climatologists pointing out improper “data quality control” in McShane and Wyner’s paper. It’s one thing for denialists to fabricate quality control criticisms and splash them about freely, but apparently poor sportsmanship for scientists to point out real data flaws. Even if M&W tried to preëmptively claim that they’re “not interested at this stage in engaging the issues of data quality.” (Except they are.)

M&W are also called out for adding “poor quality proxies [that have] a material effect on the reconstructions, inflating the level of peak apparent Medieval warmth”. Why can’t they spin the climate record for the benefit of their desired conclusions? It’s standard practice for denialist papers! Sorry Anthony, M&W have to play by the big kid’s rules. What M&W did was to throw back in all garbage data they could to try to cherry-pick their way to an inconclusive trend.

And all this adds up in Anthony’s mind as mere wounded egos on the part of some pesky climatologists…

Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)

Posted on by
Reply

“Ocean cooling contributed to mid-20th century global warming hiatus (and so did the PDO)“. Poor Anthony Watts seems in a foul mood here. Muttering about news story that doesn’t give him access to all the data, references to “public money”, particularly asinine comments about press release photos (where on earth does “grinning like a banshee” come from?), etc. You’d think he’d be clutching at a report about oceanic cooling with both hands…

Maybe he’s irritated that Dr. Phil Jones, who the denialists tried to bring down with the false “Climategate” controversy is publishing science again? Or is it that the paper discusses cooling, which the lying climatologists supposedly never talk about and he has no idea how to react.

So the paper in question is being published as a Letter in Nature titled An abrupt drop in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperature around 1970 (here’s the abstract). It says that “the hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution.” Don’t you just hate it when scientists observe things and try to understand them?

Anthony spots professor David W.J. Thompson "grinning like a banshee".

The planet Mercury has a comet like tail

Posted on by
1

“The planet Mercury has a comet like tail“. Anthony Watts posts a random Eurekalert press release, a Boston University Center for Space Physics paper about Mercury, to prove that he’s a well-rounded lover of knowledge. His value-added insight? Not a single word. Aside from dropping the dash from “comet-like”.

Hey, monkeys have tails too! Compare and contrast.

Nice tail, Mercury! Source - NASA/STEREO.

Boom-de-ah-da, Boom-de-ah-da.

Arctic isolated versus “urban” stations show differing trends

Posted on by
2

Arctic isolated versus “urban” stations show differing trends. Anthony Watts has a serious man-crush on anyone who shares his obsession with weather station micro-analysis. Today’s candidate is mechanical engineer Pierre Gosselin, who loves the “gate” suffix and knows that “climate change” is a religion. He sets us all straight on how them dang climate scientists have it all wrong.

Correction: the analysis is by Pierre Gosselin’s “guest author” Ed Caryl, whose credentials seem limited to being a balding white male who likes to parrot that Antarctic ice is expanding. But that’s better than most of Anthony’s esteemed sources.

Apparently any collection of more than two people constitutes an urban setting and hence all that Arctic warming must be discounted as the product of the notorious Urban Heat Island effect! Except there isn’t an Urban Heat Island bias in the weather station records…

All the usual cherry-picking and statistical ignorance (“Looks like an awfully good fit”) are present. Arbitrary selection of “useful” weather stations, comparing carefully chosen “peak to peak” comparison points, reams of amateur photos and charts, uninformed mutterings about station histories, invoking long-duration natural cycles that we should wait out for better understanding.

Noise and dishonesty. Amusingly, Gosselin’s own website is called No Tricks Zone.

And the Lord said: “Go forth and model Moses”

Posted on by
1

And the Lord said: “Go forth and model Moses”. A creationist gets some grant money for a paper on how a fictional event (Moses parting the Red Sea) could have, maybe, happened. He uses the computers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research to model how topographic configurations could interact with unusual wind patterns to expose the floor of a shallow lagoon (pretty lousy “miracle” if you ask me).

For Anthony Watts, this is a chance to rant about goofy computer models while simultaneously complaining about the wasteful use of said goofy computer models. Whatever.

Careful with the George Monbiot links though Anthony! Are the climate change deniers with no evidence just naturally gullible?

A non-miracle occurs! Figure from NCAR.