Category Archives: Anti-Science

A reply to Vonk: Radiative Physics Simplified II

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“A reply to Vonk: Radiative Physics Simplified II“. Denialist Jeff Id from “the Air Vent” tries to explain to the more enthusiastic followers of Anthony Watts’ blog why they shouldn’t make themselves look foolish defending Tom Vonk’s recent imaginative foray into radiative physics.

My statement is – CO2 does create a warming effect in the lower atmosphere.

Horrors! But the usual escape hatch is attached:

Before that makes you scream at the monitor, I’ve not said anything about the magnitude or danger or even measurability of the effect. I only assert that the effect is real, is provable, it’s basic physics and it does exist.

Lasers and canisters of CO2 explain it all. Source: WUWT figure 7.

After some simple-minded talk about lasers and canisters of gases Jeff declares that “NONE of this should create any alarm” and says that perhaps “CO2 then, can be considered nothing but plant food”. And of course we all must be reminded why the “true and high quality results from Anthony’s surfacestations project [is] so critically important.”

Expert Embarrassment in Climate Change

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“Expert Embarrassment in Climate Change“. Thomas Fuller, first to publish rash “Climategate” accusations, lets us know that the recent PNAS paper, ‘Expert Credibility in Climate Change’, is somehow a nasty and unethical blacklist.

Sorry Tom, the determination of denier/agree-er was based on freely given public statements and the assessment of expertise was the same for all subjects. Claiming sneakiness, privacy infringement, or violation of confidentiality is bull. Read the author’s defense, several days before Fuller’s repetition, over at Real Climate.

Your denialist victims have been “outing” themselves without any help, and your post is merely an exercise in victim bullying. However your howls do remind me of the frequent calls by denialists for the dismissal of “warmist” scientists or public officials, cuts to their funding, calls for boycotts, etc, etc. What’s that smell? Oh yes, hypocrisy.

CO2 heats the atmosphere…a counter view

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“CO2 heats the atmosphere…a counter view“. Tom Vonk, “Physicist”, engages in some wishful thinking to prove that CO2 is not responsible for heating the atmosphere. If you look at a small enough quantity of atmospheric gases in just the right way, and ignore the rest of the field of radiative physics that is. It’s always a bad sign when an arm-waving pet theory that start with “intuitively”.

So what is responsible for heating the atmosphere? Oh, that’s a question for another day.

Vonk’s conclusion?

The main point is that every time you hear or read that “CO2 heats the atmosphere”, that “energy is trapped by CO2”, that “energy is stored by green house gases” and similar statements, you may be sure that this source is not to be trusted for information about radiation questions.

Oh, I se. This is just an exercise in training denialists to stop reading “warmist” statements as soon as the science begins.

When the educated commenters, including Dr. Roy Spencer and even Steven Goddard, take a big step back from Vonk’s claims in the comments you know this post ain’t earning any Nobel prizes.

Most of the comments are, of course, of the hilariously oblivious wild praise variety. And that’s what counts, right?

Discrepancies In Sea Ice Measurements

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“Discrepancies In Sea Ice Measurements“. Steven Goddard returns for the second time today to prove, via Photoshop, that climatologists are tricking us. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) Arctic Sea Ice Extent plots aren’t identical!!!!!

Because they use different modeling techniques that have different break points for ice/not ice. So what?

Of course Steven is really trying to avoid talking about Arctic Sea Ice Volume, which is much less useful for sowing denialist confusion. We’ll stick with extent though and post this image for Steven to chew on:

Average monthly Arctic Sea Ice Extent trend since 1979. Source: NSIDC.

A cool 50 million

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“A cool 50 million“. Anthony Watts is very pleased with his web statistics. He wants you to think that “hits” mean something. In fact “hits” are a widely discredited, much like everything else Anthony shouts as proof against Global Warming. Hint: each time a web page loads every image, as well as many other items, counts as a hit. Anthony’s pages typically have at least 30 graphics each.

Wikipedia says that hits are “an inaccurate measure of a website’s popularity or web traffic.”

About.com says “Don’t use the term hits unless you want people to know you don’t know much about Web analytics or Web measurement.”

We touched on this a few days ago when denialist/internet genius Mike Lorrey tried to explain that feverish clicking meant the world was beating a path to Anthony’s door. Physicist Joe Romm, whom Anthony considers a deadly rival with his Climate Progress website, schools Anthony on the subject (again) better than I can, so just drop over for an enlightening chuckle. Anthony claims he’s “beating” Joe, but somehow Joe has 50 million hits in 2010 alone.

As usual when Anthony is trying to boast he likes to interrupt his character assassination and general polemics to make grand statements like “I’m really growing tired of the vociferous and voluminous name calling and people bashing, on both sides. It’s palpable.” Oh. My. God. You know what’s “palpable” Anthony? Your hypocrisy. You both encourage and participate in the ugliness.

New “Our Climate” iPhone app released

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Man-made climate drivers needn't apply.

“New “Our Climate” iPhone app released“. Want a collection of cherry-picked, out of context climate facts in your pocket? How ’bout some falsified charts and incorrect scientific explanations? Want to vote on the climate? There’s an app for that! “Our Climate” is an iPhone app by Aeris Systems Pty Ltd. from Australia and it has “made it through Apple’s review process unscathed”. That must have been a surprise. Conspiracy theorists are buying it as fast as possible so they can get their copy before the secret world gubmint shuts it down.

Anthony Watts must love to see his favorite claims packaged neatly in a context that conceals all criticism. The developer promises that “if any material errors have slipped through, rest assured that such errata will be readily addressable.” I won’t hold my breath on that one.

Funny the “warmist” climate science equivilent, Skeptical Science’s iPhone app, shows denialist claims, the scientific responses, and the to-and-fro comments on their website. I guess they’re not quite as afraid of scrutiny.

Which “key climate blogs” are readers driven too in the “Our Climate” app I wonder.

GISS Polar Interpolation

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“GISS Polar Interpolation“. Like the Wandering Albatross, Steven Goddard returns once more to complaining that because the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) doesn’t have 5000 weather stations on the Arctic sea ice their global temperature analysis is a lie composed of “incorrect, fabricated data”. James Hansen even admits that !

Steven cherry-picks June 2010 from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) model for comparison because it’s the only month he can use to “prove” that the Arctic is colder than GISS reports. Steven loathes any kind of “modeling” because they let scientists ‘manipulate the truth’, but the DMI model suits his purpose today so its OK I guess. The DMI model uses a different set of records and different assumptions, in particular with a cold bias due to inclusion of Arctic buoy readings, so naturally it gives a slightly different result. This is useful to Steven.

Daily mean temperature north of 80th northern parallel. Steven likes June 2010 here. It's the only month he can play games with. Source: DMI.

It’s always fun to work yourself up into a nice lather, but if data isn’t available scientists will try to find ways to compensate. It’s called research and it doesn’t involve playing games with Photoshop. Just because it suits Steven’s purpose doesn’t mean that, for example, rejecting the interpolation of temperature beyond 250 km is legitimate. GISS explains their choice clearly:

The correlation of temperature anomaly time series for neighboring stations was illustrated by Hansen and Lebedeff [1987] as a function of station separation for different latitude bands. The average correlation coefficient was shown to remain above 50 percent to distances of about 1200 km at most latitudes, but in the tropics the correlation falls to about 35 percent at station separation of 1200 km. The GISS analysis specifies the temperature anomaly at a given location as the weighted average of the anomalies for all stations located within 1200 km of that point, with the weight decreasing linearly from unity for a station located at that point to zero for stations located 1200 km or further from the point in question.

So what if there was a fatal flaw in the GISS temperature analysis? Well there are several different estimates of global temperature trends, based on different sets of temperature records and different assumptions. They all show a similar pattern of warming, so howling about the specific flaws of one or the other of these analyses is really just meaningless noise.

I can’t let Goddard’s final statement that “GISS Arctic anomalies are high by as much as 4 degrees, and yet he claims a global record measured in hundredths of a degree” go unchallenged. This is plain scientific ignorance (or the pretense of it). The significant digits of a result can be much higher than the accuracy of the individual measured values if the sample size is large. Guess what? In this case, it is.

GRACE’s warts – new peer reviewed paper suggests errors and adjustments may be large

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That's a spicy meatball! Credit: U of Texas Center for Space Research

“GRACE’s warts – new peer reviewed paper suggests errors and adjustments may be large“. Anthony Watts copies-and-pastes a post from CO2 Science (the website for those tired of “alarmist global warming propaganda”). They report that denialists can safely ignore any troubling conclusions based on the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite, because there are “errors and biases” and “the GRACE data time series is still very short”. And of course any adjustments to correct these things are simply ‘tricks’.

Actually, that’s what the GRACE scientists themselves are saying in their 2010 Geophysical Journal International article, Uncertainty in ocean mass trends from GRACE. CO2 Science is taking routine scientific discussion about how to improve data analysis out of context and trying to use it to discredit that very effort. Here’s Quinn & Ponte’s abstract:

Ocean mass, together with steric sea level, are the key components of total observed sea level change. Monthly observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) can provide estimates of the ocean mass component of the sea level budget, but full use of the data requires a detailed understanding of its errors and biases. We have examined trends in ocean mass calculated from 6 yr of GRACE data and found differences of up to 1 mm yr−1 between estimates derived from different GRACE processing centre solutions. In addition, variations in post-processing masking and filtering procedures required to convert the GRACE data into ocean mass lead to trend differences of up to 0.5 mm yr−1. Necessary external model adjustments add to these uncertainties, with reported post-glacial rebound corrections differing by as much as 1 mm yr−1. Disagreement in the regional trends between the GRACE processing centres is most noticeably in areas south of Greenland, and in the southeast and northwest Pacific Ocean. Non-ocean signals, such as in the Indian Ocean due to the 2004 Sumatran-Andean earthquake, and near Greenland and West Antarctica due to land signal leakage, can also corrupt the ocean trend estimates. Based on our analyses, formal errors may not capture the true uncertainty in either regional or global ocean mass trends derived from GRACE.

So the controversy is… what exactly? That is a cool warty globe though.

Tipping point at GISS? Land and sea weight out of balance

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“Tipping point at GISS? Land and sea weight out of balance“. Anthony Watts gives us Frank Lanser’s ill-informed assumptions about how GISS integrates land and sea temperature readings and hopes we’ll bite.

Frank maintains that GISS uses a land weighting of 67%, which is the reverse of the land/ocean ratio. They’re lying! Aussie dunce Joanne Nova is in enthusiastic agreement with Frank’s stunning discovery.

Except Frank, Joanne and Anthony have no clue what they’re talking about. Zeke explains it to them in mostly small words.

NOAA’s Jan-Jun 2010 Warmest Ever: Missing Data, False Impressions

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“NOAA’s Jan-Jun 2010 Warmest Ever: Missing Data, False Impressions“. Anthony Watts finds more denialist whining (by “Alan”) about the NOAA’s recent summary of 2010 global temperatures. Apparently “NOAA performs manipulations to create false impressions”. Also, how dare those scientists not space their temperature recording stations evenly across the planet!

I love how Anthony’s been sucked into Steven Goddard’s losing game of magnifying summary illustrations and arguing over the colour of each pixel. It’s a dunce’s game.