Author Archives: Ben

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About Ben

I trained as a sedimentary geologist at a Canadian University, but have worked in the I.T. field as a programmer and manager for many years.

Himalayan Sherpas as climate proxy

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“Himalayan Sherpas as climate proxy“. (May 1, 2011) Anthony Watts reposts a “Bishop Hill” (Andrew Montford’s pseudonym) blog item mocking researchers for asking Himalayan Sherpas about changes in their environment (Biology Letters, April 2011). Anthony ‘piles on’ with a link to a twenty year-old anthropology book.

As reported by Richard Black of the BBC, apparently only about half of the villagers questioned reported that summers were starting earlier than they did ten years ago. This means the other half couldn’t be bribed to lie by the corrupt researchers I guess.

Their top line conclusions are that villagers are noticing signals suggestive of climate change.

Warmer weather, drying water sources, the advance of summer and the monsoon, new insect pests, earlier flowering of plants… all consistent with the basic idea of a warming world.

Anecdotal evidence is a favorite denialists talking point, but only when it goes their way. They like to report one person recalling that the beach height is exactly the same as when they were kid, but not when 250 people report about when flowers bloomed. Just a few days ago Anthony and his teammates were touting an opinion poll.

Selective as always, Anthony tells us about an imprecise research method but fails to mention that ways of successfully using it exist. Weak “remembered data” is better than a lack of data. Social anthropologists and social scientists live in that sphere and know how to use it with caution.

Are Gulf Of Mexico Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies Near To Record Levels?

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“Are Gulf Of Mexico Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies Near To Record Levels?” As Anthony Watts foolishly suggests in his one sentence contribution to Bob Tisdale’s guest post, “the devil is in the details.” He is indeed…

Bob is trying to dispute the claim by meteorologist Jeff Masters that the recent Midwest deluge [was] enhanced by near-record Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures. Although Jeff is talking about weather, Bob Tisdale recognizes the threat. This might mean that global warming really is happening! Of course it’s not, so he accuses Jeff of  a “contrived” claim and counters that “…over the past 80 years, there is no global warming signal in the Gulf of Mexico SST data.”

My blue trend is just eyeballing but it's a lot less contrived than Bob Tisdale's flat red line in this example from his "analysis".

Unfortunately for Bob any open-eyed reader will see that every chart he tries to use as evidence reveals that he has deliberately picked dishonest comparison points that minimize the increase and he has ignored everything in-between. Details, details.

Statistics, Bob. Look into ’em. There’s a reason scientists use ’em.

Why windmills won’t wash

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“Why windmills won’t wash“. British motor-mouth buffoon Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (not a guest at William and Kate’s recent wedding) guest-posts a stream-of-consciousness conversation with himself on Anthony Watts’ blog. The apparent subject is a primary school wind turbine and its implications for mitigating global warming (which, of course, isn’t happening, but would be natural if it was happening). Apparently “the warming the Birmingham Bat-Batterer [one of Monckton’s varying pet names for his chosen scapegoat wind turbine] will forestall over the next 20 years will be rather less than 0.0000000000007 Celsius.”

If one backyard wind turbine won’t stop, say, at least half of the global warming why do anything? Seems sensible.

Also, since the lonely little 33-foot high Midlands primary school wind turbine only generated 209 kilowatt-hours of electricity in its first year, the Thanet Wind Farm, consisting of one hundred 3 MW wind turbines, will be useless too. All you need to do is take a hostile economic evaluation from a denialist buddy (in this case the Daily Telegraph’s reliable Christopher Booker) and give it an extra “twist”.

Monckton spews out great swaths of bogus economics gobbledygook in his arguments here and refers to “smidgens” and “tads” when trying to obscure his assumptions. He’s learning to avoid those concrete details that keep tripping him up and stick to the cocktail party clowning that he’s actually quite good at. The estimable Viscount finishes his ‘calculations’ thus:

So there you have it. After the biggest and most expensive propaganda campaign in human history, leading to the biggest tax increase in human history, trying to stop “global warming” that isn’t happening anyway and won’t happen at anything like the predicted rate is the least cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money in human history, bar none – and that’s saying something.

Now that’s what I call climate science! Like most denialists for Monckton, after all the verbal dancing, it boils down to taxes.

“Justice has been done”

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“Justice has been done”. Osama bin Laden, founder of the terrorist organization Al=Qaeda, was killed by US special forces during a raid on a fortified house in Pakistan on Sunday May 1st. This is clearly a good thing… Bin Laden had been in hiding for ten years, since masterminding the September 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

Anthony Watts’ urge to be a part of history, and lust for web hits, compels him to cast about for satellite photos of the site for his readers’ vicarious pleasure. Funny how President Obama seems strangely absent from Anthony’s version.

World Opinion on global warming: not so hot

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“World opinion on global warming: not so hot“. Anthony Watts tells us that a Gallup poll result means that we don’t have to worry about global warming! Whew, saved by public ignorance.

It turns out that if ordinary folks don’t notice climate changes then they didn’t happen. Here are the global poll results that Anthony thinks prove there is no global warming (evidence be damned).

The question was “Temperature rise is a part of global warming or climate change. Do you think rising temperatures are”:

  • Result of human activity – 35% (54% of Canadians believe this, but only 34% of Americans)
  • Result of natural causes – 14%
  • “Both” (i.e. some human causes) – 13%
  • Don’t know/refused – 2%
  • Not aware of global warming – 36%

Anthony Watts prefers not to dwell on the fact that of the “aware” respondents, 48% think human activity is contributing to global warming and 14% don’t. Instead he invokes the ‘noble savages’ argument that more primitive people are more aware of their environment (which is weather, not climate…) and the “not aware” respondents here are keenly insightful.

Also, people in the western world are poisoned by the mainstream media.

Tell us Anthony, how are people supposed to notice a less than 1°C rise over several decades amidst a variety of much larger daily, seasonal, and locale changes?

This poll was about awareness of human activities as a factor, not whether people think temperatures are rising. Anthony has tried to spin both the question and the answers. Nice try.

Real Climate on Spencer – Bad timing or just bad judgment?

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“Real Climate on Spencer – Bad timing or just bad judgment?” Anthony Watts decides to read nefarious purpose into the timing of a RealClimate review of denialist scientist Roy Spencer’s book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists”. They seem to have posted it on the same day that a series of massive tornadoes (nothing to do whatsoever with global warming!!!!!) took out power in Spencer’s hometown of Huntsville, Alabama.

Did they deliberately release their review when they thought they would be safe from Spencer’s devastating intellectual rebuttal? Those cunning, corrupt, dishonest communist climate scientists! But the always high-minded Anthony Watts sorted it out with an e-mail offering ethics advice. Anthony’s readers start the libeling by themselves.

So what of Spencer’s book? Could he be right? Would it really take “only one research study to cause the global warming house of cards to collapse”?

Well unless you embrace Spencer’s astonishing belief that decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world could actually flip into untold thousands of admissions of “my bad”, no.

Instead Spencer accuses “the IPCC researchers” of “fundamental mistakes” that only he has discovered, but never identifies the dumb scientists or references their alleged mistakes. He waves away detailed paleo data with “we don’t have a clue”. (I suppose as a creationist he is uncomfortable with any date before 4004 BC.) He’s so intellectually flexible that he’s already contradicted his own book in later papers. Is it true that “short-term fluctuations in the energy balance and surface temperature are consistent with a low climate sensitivity” (the whatever-he-can-get-away-with book, April 2010), or  that “the climate system is never in equilibrium” ( the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, August 2010)? I guess the ice ages are impossible.

Perhaps next Spencer will be confidently asserting that toothpicks are made when beavers sneeze? He should stick to remote sensing, where he actually has some expertise.

Read some other critiques at Climate Progress and Barry Bickmore. Anthony Watts and right-wing blogs such as “The American [un]Thinker” offer gullible high praise of course.

It’s probably nothing*

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“It’s probably nothing*“. Anthony Watts tries to slide another stupid “Snow! Somewhere!” post by as just a little “humor“. Apparently busy denialist copy-and-paster Tom Nelson noted that there was lots (41 inches) of ice in Nenana, Alaska (which is in the Arctic you know) on April 21st this year. But the ice was all gone by that date in 1940! Therefore global cooling.

Nenana has held an annual draw to guess the date of spring breakup on the Tanana River for a century now, and this is Anthony’s new gold standard for global climate data.

Like most northern rivers, the Tanana’s spring ice breakup is almost entirely dependent on flow volume during the spring run-off. The ice broke up, at a thickness of 39″, just four days after this astonishing climate evidence was presented. Also at 64°N Nenana is below the Arctic Circle.

Willis Eschenbach accidentally undermines Anthony's "humor".

Anthony’s teammate Willis Eschenbach creates the real punchline by inserting a chart (above) that shows that ice break up on the Tanana River is clearly trending to earlier dates. Or maybe he just can’t understand his own work.

I guess Anthony’s readers aren’t subtle enough to follow Anthony’s attempt at humor; they’re reacting with stolid earnestness.

Not Whether, but How to Do The Math

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“Not Whether, but How to Do The Math“. A Willis Eschenbach “citizen-scientist” post on Anthony Watts’ blog is always entertaining.In this one he’s taking on the denialist’s former BFF, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. Apparently any kind of quality control or “homogenization” is bad science, but since BEST may still swing back into the denialist camp Willis couches his attack as constructive advice.

Willis invokes the “Zipf Distribution” as the best test for outliers but, predictably, he may be the only person who has ever suggested using an empirical linguistics law for temperature data. Cutting-edge thinking from the make-the-data-look-as-bad-as-possible school of thought.

Willis’ preferred approach is plotting the raw data and let the public figure it out themselves. Let a thousand uninformed opinions bloom!

If only BEST, and those other secretive climate scientists would stop hiding their raw temperature data we might be able to believe them. Oh that’s right, it’s been publicly available for years. Funny how you don’t hear that much in the denialist blogosphere.

The greens worst nightmare? A CO2 to Oil process

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“The greens worst nightmare? A CO2 to Oil process“. Anthony Watts projects his mental rigidity onto “the greens” when he posts a University of Minnesota press release titled U of M researchers close in on technology for making renewable “petroleum” using bacteria, sunlight and carbon dioxide.

Them greenies and climate scientists will be so mad when they can’t complain about oil companies! All that climate stuff is just an excuse I guess.

No thoughts about feasibility or production costs from our deep thinking Anthony, just misrepresentation in four words. The comments are an ocean of “greens hate everything”.

Are biofuel policies to help Mother Earth killing her most vulnerable children instead?

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“Are biofuel policies to help Mother Earth killing her most vulnerable children instead?” Indur M. Goklany returns to Anthony Watts’ blog to tell us about his paper in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Could Biofuel Policies Increase Death and Disease in Developing Countries? reveals how “global warming policies may be helping kill more people than it saves.” OMG, stop everything! We’re killing poor people!

I always think it’s a bit dodgy when a scientific paper title is in the form of a question. Maybe because the author is ever so slightly overreaching? “Could” is about as close as Indur gets to any kind of supporting evidence. He calls his research an “exploratory analysis”. With, apparently, exploratory conclusions.

Who reviewed and published it? Oops, The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is a “politically conservative non-profit organization“. They are anti-vaccination, anti-universal healthcare, pro-gun, don’t think HIV causes AIDS, try to link abortion to breast cancer and claim that illegal immigrants are bringing leprosy to America. Nice.

But is Indur Goklany right? Are biofuel production consequences the result of AGW policies? As I recall American ethanol production began as a response to the “energy crisis” in the Seventies. Nothing whatsoever to do with climate. Some current forms of biofuel production can reduce global food availability and increase global food prices. This says more about the enthusiasm of agribusiness for government subsidies than it does about attempts to reverse AGW. Biofuels are primarily an economic issue.

Indur Goklany illustrates a linear process as a circle, but leaves something out.

This is just another one of Indur’s right-wing think-tank revisionist efforts. Based on a fast-and-loose numbers, with an exaggerated connection to climate policy and used to infer imaginary negative future consequences. This time, instead of understating the consequences of AGW we get an overstatement of AGW’s alleged political power.