Category Archives: Half of the Story

IPCC AR4 also gets a failing grade on 21 chapters

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“IPCC AR4 also gets a failing grade on 21 chapters“. Anthony Watts wants you to know that Donna Laframboise (blogger) and a team of denialist “citizen auditors” have performed a grade school (literally) evaluation of the IPCC’s 2007 Assessment Report’s (“AR4”) references. The report, which Donna refers to as “the United Nations’ Nobel-winning climate bible“, gets an “F” for 21 of the 44 chapters, based on their personal assessment of the references.

“We’ve been told it’s 100 percent peer-reviewed science.” Um, no you haven’t. And the bulk of the claimed low-quality references are in the “Impacts” and “Mitigation” sections, not in the far more important “Climate Science” section.

Nothing is said about the physical science or historical evidence, of course. Funny how often “citizen” gets used as a descriptive badge among denialists.

Anthony finishes optimistically: people are beginning to laugh at the “robustness” oft touted in climate science. You’d better unplug your iPod, Anthony…

Oh Donna, you get an “F” too.

Climate Craziness of the Week – Greenpeace posts threats

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“Climate Craziness of the Week – Greenpeace posts threats“. Greenpeace can talk tough, but Anthony Watts can talk tough right back. He throws opinion polls at ’em. Hard.

Actually, the Greenpeace post is about Micronesia challenging expansion of the Czech Republic’s most polluting coal power plant. When Environment Minister Dusik’s intention to reject the expansion plans was countermanded he resigned, apparently citing pressure from lobby groups and big business.

That part is inconsequential to Anthony.

Arctic Sea Ice about to hit ‘normal’ – what will the news say?

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“Arctic Sea Ice about to hit ‘normal’ – what will the news say?” “Hah!” says Anthony Watts. The Arctic sea ice is about to recover all the way to “normal”. That’ll show those Catlin Arctic Survey folks with their tents and sleds!

Arctic sea ice extent on March 29, 2010. Anthony ignores that the variability is mostly in summer. Arctic Regional Ocean Observing System.

Actually it appears that Arctic sea ice is about to reach average extent, which has quite a different meaning. There is little mention of the fact that the meaningful changes are in the summer ice extent. They do bury this quote from Dr. Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center deep in their post though and then wave it away:

This has very little implication for what will happen this summer, or for the long-term trends, since the Bering Sea ice is thin and will melt completely well before the peak summer season.

NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, GISS Admits

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“NASA Data Worse Than Climate-Gate Data, GISS Admits“. The latest scientific analysis Anthony Watts has copied-and-pasted is… a Fox News article! This is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Blake Snow of FOXNews.com reports as an admission of inferiority a NASA scientist’s assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the different global surface temperature analyses. He also presents as definitive the opinion of Christopher Horner, a ‘senior fellow’ from the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute, that “three out of the four temperature data sets stink”. When another ‘senior fellow’ this time at the right-wing Heartland Institute, James M. Taylor, is quoted next and the article ends with our own Anthony’s unchallenged arm-waving about the “quality” of surface stations, you know the fix is in. “Fair & Balanced”, eh?

The only hint of reality comes from Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground: “It would be nice if we had more global stations to enable the groups to do independent estimates using completely different raw data, but we don’t have that luxury”.

The real story? Climatologists have a limited number of long-duration surface temperature stations available to them. They use as many of those stations as possible. It’s a fundamental logical fact that they will all start with the same raw data. The differences will be in how they select representative stations from the entire data set and how they extrapolate from those stations.

As a final thought, I have to draw attention to the use of “accuracy” as the sole valid assessment of a temperature data set. Data can be accurate (very close to a true reading) but not as useful (doesn’t reflect the actual conditions over a wider area). The fundamental difference between the interpreted surface temperature data sets is that some are optimized for accuracy, some for global representativeness. There are good reasons for each approach. There are also good reasons why denialists try to define the argument on such narrow and misleading points.

Bengal Island succumbs to global warming nonsense – AP gets nutty over the loss of a sandbar

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“Bengal Island succumbs to global warming nonsense – AP gets nutty over the loss of a sandbar“. A newspaper suggests that a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal has sunk below sea-level due to “global warming”. This sets Anthony Watts and Steven Goddard off on a rant that sea-level change can be due to sea-level rise or surface subsidence.

This is true! There are a number of local factors that affect “sea-level” in either direction. Sediment compaction. Erosion. Sediment deposition. Changes in ocean circulation patterns. Storm activity. Glacial rebound. Earthquakes. Plate tectonics. What does this have to do with global sea-level changes? Nothing.

Next up is the discovery of an ancient city 36 metres below sea-level off India’s western coast. Anthony says “How many Hummers were they driving 9,000 years ago?  Chalk up another clueless AGW claim.” I guess Anthony and Steven haven’t heard of earthquakes.

It’s the denialists who are trying to build the straw-man argument that global warming is the only recognized source of sea-level change. Real scientists know better.

The Guardian sees the light on wind driven Arctic ice loss

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“The Guardian sees the light on wind driven Arctic ice loss“. As Anthony Watts knows, newspapers are where science happens. Anthony seems to think that there’s a grudging admission about Arctic ice underway at The Guardian, at least partly driven by his own searing scrutiny. The article is reporting findings from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Monthly February ice extent, 1979 - 2010 shows a 2.9% decline per decade. Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center.

This quote from Anthony’s copy-and-paste of the Guardian article would be enlightening if he paused to reflect (italics mine):

Ice blown out of the region by Arctic winds can explain around one-third of the steep downward trend in sea ice extent in the region since 1979.

What’s up with the other two-thirds, eh? I guess as long as Anthony can include the word “doubt” he thinks his job is done.

Rewriting the decline

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“Rewriting the decline“. Anthony Watts’ friends have been down in their basement and found a 1976 issue of National Geographic with a temperature history chart of North America that looks different from current global temperature histories! Could there really be a decline in temperatures since the 1960’s that evil climatologists have tried to hide from us?

After admitting that “the global records are not available to check, it’s impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is” they proceed to make the usual speculations and accusations ( including the suitably Orwellian “history has been rewritten”) based largely on a digital photo of a squished magazine illustration. (The version I post here includes more of the original figure than the denialists revealed.)

Art illustrations as scientific evidence. Note: chart in the lower left, excluded from the discussion, is apparently NOT evidence.

The j’accuse comes pretty quick: “the data had been adjusted (surprise)“, backed by this supporting evidence:

But, as usual, the adjustments were in favor of the Big Scare Campaign, and the reasons and the original data are not easy to find.

So in other words, they have no idea why the modern, global, chart differs.

Anthony compounds this ignorance as usual by failing to understand the term “accuracy”, but he really got my attention with his sudden conversion to dendrochronology.

Many tree rings showed a decline after 1960 that didn’t “concur” with the surface records. Perhaps these tree rings agree with the surface records as recorded at the time, rather than as adjusted post hoc?  Perhaps the decline in the tree rings that Phil Jones worked to hide was not so much a divergence from reality, but instead was slightly more real than the surface-UHI-cherry-picked-and-poorly-sited records??

Anthony, do you really think that the temperature records were maliciously altered around the world to suit an implied political agenda? And that now we should trust the innocent, uncorrupted, tree rings?

The global economy carbon yin yang

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“The global economy carbon yin yang“. Anthony Watts tells us that it’s all China’s fault, which suggests that the USA doesn’t have to do anything. Anthony strangely doesn’t mention that industrial CO2 emissions only account for about 15% of the total.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, “A new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution finds that over a third of carbon dioxide emissions associated with consumption of goods and services in many developed countries are actually emitted outside their borders.”

The manufacturing exports of China certainly contribute substantially to global industrial carbon emissions. But that’s the purpose of the various carbon taxes, Cap and Trade, etc. Make the carbon emissions directly impact the cost of goods and encourage industries to adapt!

IPCC AR4 Commenter: “I do not understand why this trend is insignificant – it is more than three times the quoted error estimates”

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IPCC AR4 Commenter: “I do not understand why this trend is insignificant – it is more than three times the quoted error estimates”. Chip Knappenberger found an error in the IPCC AR4 Chapter 4 First Order Draft! The draft said:

“The Antarctic results show a slight but insignificant positive trend of 0.7 ± 0.2% per decade.”

Dr. John Church said ‘hey, isn’t that significant?’ Therefore the IPCC are liars! They’re now up to 3 alleged errors out of thousands of evidentiary statements! Or is it 4 alleged errors? They’re coming in so fast (not) that I can’t keep up. As an aside I have to say members of the climate conspiracy who actually scrutinize our overlord’s statements won’t get their bonus cheques. Follow your scripts people!

Here’s the final version (emphasis mine). Damning, or… not?

The negative trend in the NH is significant at the 90% confidence level whereas the small positive trend in the SH is not significant (updated from Comiso, 2003).

A fuller statement (both are from page 351 – page 15 of the PDF – of Chapter 4 of Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is this:

There is a significant decreasing trend in arctic sea ice extent of -33 ± 7.4 × 10³ km²/yr (equivalent to -2.7 ± 0.6% per decade), whereas the antarctic results show a small positive trend of 5.6 ± 9.2 × 10³ km²/yr (0.47 ± 0.8% per decade), which is not statistically significant.

Sea Ice Extent, Northern & Southern Hemispheres. Pg 351, Chapter 4: The Physical Science Basis of IPCC AR4. Which trend is significant?

The second part of this accusation is that any increase in Antarctic sea ice is proof of “no warming” and a disproof on the criminal climate model predictions. Sorry, this is not a predicted response. The Antarctic sea ice is known to be more sensitive to ocean circulation than it is to temperature. This has been discussed as far back as 1992 (Manabe et al., 1992).

Swedes call out Jones on data availability

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“Swedes call out Jones on data availability“. Anthony Watts wants us to think that The Stockholm Initiative is an objective scientific institution commenting honestly, and of course critically, on the Climategate false controversy.

In fact, The Stockholm Initiative is simply a collection of Swedish denialist cranks. They claim “For more than 20 years, a few dozen researchers, but above all, politicians and media, have spread the notion that carbon dioxide emissions will cause a global climate catastrophe.” (Their website was down while writing this, the quote is from Google’s cache.)

Ah, cranks with Photoshop and a poor grasp of English.

Their accusation is that Dr. Phil Jones was lying when he said that Sweden had refused to allow their climate data to be released. According to The Stockholm Initiative, it is actually already in the public domain.

This leads to some interesting questions. If this claim is true, why were the denialists demanding the Swedish data from Dr. Jones? Why did they never contact the original data holders? Why was their Freedom of Information demand necessary?

My answer is that they weren’t really interested in the data, they simply wanted to harass a researcher whose conclusions didn’t suit their agenda.

2010-03-17 Update: There’s a good look at this deception on Stoat. He draws attention to the fact that The Stockholm Initiative’s legal submission about the availability of the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute’s data is false. The data was not publicly available until a few days ago. Sadly, The Stockholm Initiative is out of reach of the British legal system.