“NZCLIMATE TRUTH NEWSLETTER NO 320“ (2013-11-08). Can a “Dr.” get high school level science wrong? Anthony Watts helpfully offers the newsletter of New Zealand’s denialist retired coal researcher Dr. Vincent Gray for our consideration.

Somehow this educational so-called newsletter manages to forget the recent news that Gray’s denialist New Zealand Climate Science Coalition was ordered to pay costs of $90,000 by the NZ High Court in the wake of their abandoned lawsuit against the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. Their lawsuit was declared not in the public interest and they “cannot claim to have acted reasonably.” Seems they wanted to force the NIWA to change New Zealand’s official temperature record to match their biases because of… reasons.

But Gray’s still the guy to impartially explain climate science to us and he wants us to know that carbon dioxide and ‘greenhouse gases’ “have no place in a scientific study of the climate.”

Dr. Gray also shares his nuanced understanding of the flaws of modern climate modelling:

• The earth can be considered flat
• The sun has a constant intensity, both day and night.
• All energy exchanges are by radiation
• Energy entering the earth equals that leaving
• All change is caused by changes in:greenhouse gases
• Natural influences are merely :”variable”

I’ll just point you to Nick Stoke’s comment to save myself some typing:

[…] This is just completely untrue and no evidence is given:

“completely different computer models”
They are not. GCMs are adaptions of numerical weather forecasting models which do take into account longer term forcings such as GHGs (which make insignificant change on a 10 day period). Some, like GFDL, can be and are used for numerical weather forecasting too.

· The earth can be considered flat
Certainly not. They use a spherical grid with topographic coordinates. Here is GFDL doing SST. Flat Earth?

“The sun has a constant intensity, both day and night.”
No. Diurnal and seasonal solar are calculated for each location

“All energy exchanges are by radiation”
No, heat is convected, with turbulent transfer and of course, latent heat is computed.

“Energy entering the earth equals that leaving”
Well, it does, to a very good approximation. Only recently has a discrepancy been measurable, and I’m sure that will be included.

“All change is caused by changes in: greenhouse gases”
Where on earth do you get that from? They are solving time varying PDEs.

Natural influences are merely: ”variable”
I don’t even know what that means.