Category Archives: Half of the Story

JPL: Missing ice in 2007 drained out the Nares strait – pushed south by wind where it melted far away from the Arctic

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Nares Strait 2007 Ice“JPL: Missing ice in 2007 drained out the Nares strait – pushed south by wind where it melted far away from the Arctic“. Anthony presents a JPL news release that concludes that Arctic Ocean ice loss in 2007 was partly because ice arches in Nares Strait failed to form. This allowed more ice than usual to flow out of the Arctic Ocean and melt in the North Atlantic.

Anthony’s implicit conclusion is see, this means there is no global warming! An inquiring mind might go a step further and ponder why the ice arches failed to form. Too bad he didn’t draw his reader’s attention to these paragraphs a bit further down the report:

“We don’t completely understand the conditions conducive to the formation of these arches,” Kwok said. “We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there’s concern that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming.”

and

“If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to account for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean”

I guess Anthony’s readers aren’t expected to look past his bullet points.

North America snow models miss the mark

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“North America snow models miss the mark“. Steven Goddard is like a moth to a flame when it comes to claiming that short-term weather factors are proof of climate trends. This post is yet another spin on the theme of there’s still snow, so how can there be global warming? Steven gets more truculent every time he gets shot down on this. There’s also a replay of the old argument that some of the “climate models” didn’t exactly predict today’s weather, so all climate models are wrong!

Surely even Anthony Watts is embarrassed by these posts? No, he’s standing by him. Perhaps he feels that Steven’s nonsense is usefully occupying the minds of suggestible denialists.

Why Is Winter Snow Extent Interesting?

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“Why Is Winter Snow Extent Interesting?“. Steven Goddard tries one more time to defend his ignorance of climatology. According to Steven snow means cold, end of story.  Just go back to Open Mind for Tamino’s utter demolition of Steve’s garbage.

Antarctic Sea Ice Increase Underestimated by 50%

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IPCC gate Du Jour – Antarctic Sea Ice Increase Underestimated by 50%. A copy-and-paste from denialist lobbying operation World Climate Report. They “reckon” that there has been a significant increase in Antarctic sea ice, but are a bit cagey about why… Could it be because the land ice is sliding into the sea faster? Could it be because Antarctic sea ice is almost entirely governed by fluctuations in ocean circulation patterns?

Maybe Anthony Watt just likes the unsubstantiated claim that the IPCC’s reports are riddled with errors.

Paleo tagging past climate sensitivity

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Paleo tagging past climate sensitivity is a classic “half the story” post by Anthony Watts. A new comment in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Fossil soils constrain ancient climate sensitivity” basically confirms the conventional estimate of climate sensitivity to increases in CO2 that is the basis for concern about AGW. The authors state “the geologic evidence… is most consistent with long-term, future climate change being more severe than presently anticipated.“

Anthony’s predictable response is to repeat the discredited position that this “still does not address the temperature/CO2 800 year time lag seen in ice core records“. Uh, the historical “800 year lag” thing is understood and irrelevant (the impact of cyclic warming due to of the Earth’s orbital mechanics on the ocean’s dissolved CO2 content) and Anthony knows it; he just hopes you don’t. So what if Al Gore didn’t mention it in his film An Inconvenient Truth? This quote from skepticalscience.com explains the concept [italics mine]:

When the Earth comes out of an ice age, the warming is not initiated by CO2 but by changes in the Earth’s orbit. The warming causes the oceans to give up CO2. The CO2 amplifies the warming and mixes through the atmosphere, spreading warming throughout the planet.

So there are two ways for global warming to occur: an increase in heat input or a decrease in heat loss. Slow “natural” global warming seems linked to increases in heat input that release oceanic CO2, which feeds back on that warming by decreasing heat loss until the natural trigger reverses. Rapid man-made global warming lacks the natural cyclic trigger; adding CO2 into the atmosphere decreases heat loss via the greenhouse effect and this warming will cause the oceans to release additional CO2. The distinction is real and significant, no matter how the denialists try to spin away from it.

I think Anthony would have been better served to keep quiet about this one, much as he likes to try to “position” facts for his credulous audience… By the way, the global warming we are experiencing shouldn’t happen for roughly 23,000 years based on Milankovitch cycle estimates.

Daily Mail: The Jones U-turn

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Today’s installment starts with Anthony Watts worrying that some of his favorite “scientists” might have been killed at University of Alabama in Huntsville. Which would clearly be another desperate attempt of the secret world gubmint to prevent noble denialists from revealing the truth. Not to worry though, they were both busy elsewhere doing important research making a video with denialist weatherman John Coleman. Everything’s OK! By the way Anthony; three biologists died.

Next up is this gem from the some scientific geniuses were opposed by their contemporaries, therefore denialists are also geniuses file by half-assed geologist Steven Goddard: Are Scientists Always Smart? Steven discusses the long resistance to the idea of “continental drift” and manages to conclude that resisting evidence of AGW is just like defending evidence of continental drift! No Steven; you’re the one who is squeezing your eyes shut. Continental drift is actually a good case study of scientific progress, too bad it undermines the point you thought you were making…

Congenital Climate Abnormalities. Yet another statistically ignorant round of hand waving, this time by Willis Eschenbach, showing how climate trends in one place prove that there is no global warming trend. Except his example actually shows a… warming trend.

A yawner about 49 States with snow. One more time Anthony: warmer moist air produces higher snowfall, not colder dry air.

Scripps: Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse Possibly Triggered by Ocean Waves. Anthony takes the opportunity to prove his ignorance of ice physics. The original paper’s analysis is interesting, but Anthony’s just preparing the ground for a rearguard action on future reports of declining Antarctic ice volume.

Tisdale on the importance of El Nino’s little sister – recharging ocean heat content. Bob Tisdale loves distract the debate by talking about the El Niño and La Niña Pacific Ocean circulation patterns. Well they’re real and they’re actively studied, but they’re short-term… Regardless, look for Anthony to post about this again in another week or two.

Daily Mail: The Jones U-turn. Here’s this episode’s red meat. Anthony tells us that Conspiracist-in-Chief Dr. Phil Jones admits there has been no warming since 1995!!!!!!! Except the Daily Mail article is a lie. What Dr. Jones said was that, because of a variety of factors, the warming that has occurred over the time period of 1995 to 2009 doesn’t quite reach the desired statistical confidence. Dr. Jones was at pains to be honest and factual, but Anthony and his team jump in with both feet to do the opposite.

Phil Jones momentous Q&A with BBC reopens the “science is settled” issues. Right-wing economist Indur M. Goklany tries to dissect Dr. Jones’ scientific responses from a Q&A session sentence by sentence and merely confuses himself.

New paper on mathematical analysis of GHG. Israeli economists adamantly refute AGW with statistics in a submitted, but not yet accepted, paper! Well, that’s settled, another triumph for economics over the reality! [2010-03-06 Update: “Rabett” has turned his attention to this foolishness…]

Christy and McKittrick in the UK Times: doubts on station data. Anthony approves of discredited UK denialist journo Jonathan Leake trying to pump up Christy and McKittrick’s second (third? fourth?) kick at the we can’t trust any of those darn thermometers anyway thing. This is Anthony’s personal obsession after all.

The Snow Line is Moving South. Anthony got this wrong for the twentieth time just a day ago, Steve Goddard shows that he’s a faithful sidekick by going along for the intentionally simplistic ride.

Dalton Minimum Repeat goes mainstream. Anthony just loves the sunspot stuff. It shows… something, apparently. Well, actually it doesn’t.

Scientist quits: ‘I don’t want to remain a member of an organization that …screws up science that badly.’

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OK, another quick-fire summary of Anthony Watts’ latest missives. I’ll ignore all the “winter storms mean Global Warming is a hoax” tomfoolery that Anthony posts to keep the simple-minded transfixed. The WUWT post referenced in the title is near the bottom of this post…

Sir David King: Half Right on the IPCC and Global Warming Policies, Despite Bad Logic. A political “guest post” by Indur M. Goklany, a right-wing “oil IS prosperity!“ economist.

What NOAA Isn’t Saying About Snow and Ice. Steven Goddard guest posting, muttering darkly about nothing at all.

Prediction: Arctic Ice Will Continue to Recover This Summer. Goddard again splashing charts around and then ignoring them, this time to fabricate an arctic ice prediction from his imagination.

Hansen colleague rejected IPCC AR4 ES as having “no scientific merit”, but what does IPCC do? Anthony misrepresents comments on a report draft as a damning mainstream criticism of the final report.

Climategate: Plausibility and the blogosphere in the post-normal age. Another guest post, this time by Jerome Ravetz, an 80-year-old retired lecturer on the philosophy of science who has lately turned to “environmental consulting”. He starts off with some scientific whoppers and meanders downhill from there.

Brace for the tipping point. Anthony prefixes a UC Davis press release about climate change risks (“Climate ‘Tipping Points’ May Arrive Without Warning, Says Top Forecaster”) with a photoshopped traffic sign.

Pielke responds to Romm and Time. Anthony reports that Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. has some nits to pick over Time Magazine’s Another Snowstorm: What Happened to Global Warming? article, which explains how Anthony’s beloved winter storms fit well with current climate trends. Nothing to say about actual Global Warming though…

Climate “Twilight of the Gods”. The right-wing political journal The National Review takes aim at their ideological opponents and Anthony considers it scientific.

Nature suggests IPCC get an overhaul. Could it be true? Is this the end of the IPCC? Or is it just arm-chair quarterbacking along the lines of who was the best Batman? Anthony; just because someone answers a hypothetical question doesn’t mean they think there’s something actually wrong with the IPCC…

Penn State students to rally for independent investigation of Prof. Michael Mann. Campusreform.org, a far-right student group, wants to attack someone who isn’t as far-right as they are. Not very science-y, Anthony.

GISS adjustments in Australia. Raw data has again been forced to conform with the desired political result! Or corrected to account for regional and site issues. One or the other…

UEA/CRU and the Royal Society make a really bad PR move. Oh my god, the Royal Society is going to have scientists with relevant credentials review some of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit publications for possible errors! This is such a conspiracy! They’re all scientists! Where are the bloggers?

WUWT named to top 30 science blogs by The Times. The Times has a long history of promoting the denialist side, so this sad factoid just has to be swallowed. This kind of uncritical stupidity is the reason I started this blog.

Editor of Nature forced to resign from climate review panel. A blogger howls about bias, Dr. Phillip Campbell says “bunk” but steps down anyway to end blogger’s the crocodile tears. But Anthony does like to spin things.

New Paper in Science: Sea level 81,000 years ago was 1 meter higher while CO2 was lower. Thus ending Global Warming forever. Um, Anthony, there are many natural factors contributing to sea-level and to atmospheric CO2 levels. They are not all directly linked. They do not produce the kinds and rates of change that our man-made factors are now doing. So the lesson is: it’s great to learn more about natural factors and their timings, but that doesn’t make the new man-made factors disappear…

Scientist quits: ‘I don’t want to remain a member of an organization that …screws up science that badly.’ Henk Tennekes, an engineer with only meteorological expertise whose “contrary views on global warming forced him into early retirement at age 58” (15 years ago), according to the denialist “institute” ICECAP, quits the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences because they support action to reduce AGW. No doubt he will continue to express himself through the right-wing political organisations ICECAP and the Institute for Science and Public Policy.

NOAA langoliers eat another 1/3 of stations from GHCN database. Guest blogger E.M. Smith reports that the nefarious Climate Conspiracy “Team” are not using every single raw weather station in their cleverly cherry-picked data sets! They’re only using the ones that are consistent! And stable! And usefully distributed!

That’s it for today. Time for a new pot of coffee.

Gather ‘Round, Compromised Journalists

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Two posts in a row linking to discredited Times journalist Jonathan Leake! Methinks Anthony Watts has a new man-crush brewing. The Times: Top British scientist says IPCC is losing credibility. Sounds bad, huh? Except Leake has a record of playing for the denialist side of the climate debate. We’ll have to wait for a direct response from Dr. Watson before we can figure this one out. The second, IPCC’s “Africagate” blunder as told by Dr. Richard North, presents an IPCC critic as honest investigator when he is in fact a right-wing think tank operative completely lacking scientific expertise.

Another cold weather!!! post, Snow totals for Washington DC storm, for the stupids who need regular reminders that snow in winter proves that there is no global warming.

Tracking the Earth’s orbit: looking for warming signs is another kick at the “it’s all solar” defense by flashing a new paper by Dr. Rohling in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The paper interprets sea-level from inferred Red Sea salinity values over time and correlates this with an orbital mechanics theory. Interesting, but surely we should look at it skeptically until we understand why it differs from so many other well-known lines of evidence? Uh oh, Dr. Rohling also explicitly states “Our study is therefore relevant to the long-term climate future, and not so much for the next decades or century.” Maybe Anthony’s audience will be too eager to notice that bit.

New study using satellite data: Alaskan glacier melt overestimated. Apparently melting Alaskan glaciers may have only produced 0.12 mm/year of sea-level rise and not 0.17 mm/year!  Problem solved.

Swapping my lights: fantastic! Anthony blogs about changing to LED light fixtures. He has a big solar array too, maybe he’s getting ready to declare a libertarian paradise? :-)

Munging Madagascar. A guest post by fellow believer Verity Jones who shows a common denialist enthusiasm for plotting numbers without having a clue about what they actually represent and is shocked that the climate conspiracy staff in Madagascar have, according to him, been lazy about sending in their made-up data.

IPCC Gate Du Jour: Aussie Droughtgate. Aussie lunatic journalist Andrew Bolt gets quoted reporting that South Australia’s drought is all down to too much durn sunshine. Take that, global warming!

UCAR: Roof white out helps UHI. Anthony is amused that scientists have studied and characterised the effect of white roofs on local temperature. I would have thought that a “skeptic” would have been a keen supporter of a careful examination of something everyone takes for granted.

Finally, NOAA’s new ‘climate service’ – not a sure thing yet lets us know that Anthony thinks we don’t need no one-stop gubmint climate information. Might get in the way of play fast and loose with the facts.

Under the “Weather”

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So I’ve been knocked out for a few days by a bad bout of the flu and while I’ve been “under the weather” Anthony Watts has been busy once again talking about weather as if it was climate. (It’s not.) Let’s see what we’ve got.

The Guardian hounds CRU with new reports. Anthony got into a tizzy when he thought that The Guardian might be swallowing the “skeptical” science, but decided it was actually a set-up for some “MSM” “consensus” rebuttals.

LBNL on Himalayas: “greenhouse gases alone are not nearly enough to be responsible for the snow melt”. The Himalayan glaciers are declining because of black carbon aerosols, not CO2 warming! Them scientists are hiding the truth from us. Except they quote a paper by someone named James Hansen talking about exactly this factor…

Lord Monckton wows Melbourne. Do I even have to comment on this one?

Telegraph: India to ‘pull out of IPCC’. Politics, apparently, disproves science.

WSJ op ed – IPCC “Omitted: The bright side of Global Warming”. Ah yes, the bright side. Plants grow faster with more CO2, just ask any greenhouse operator, so keep it coming! Some drought-stricken areas might get more rain (and some will get less…)! Why do denialists happily trumpet any vague suggestion of climate change benefits, but demand absolute certainty about the risks?

UAH global temperature posts warmest January. Dr. Roy Spencer grudgingly blogs that January 2010 has been the warmest on record, but defends his use of deceptive running averages.

Major snowstorm headed for eastern US. Snow in winter! This disproves Climate Change.

Israeli study shows variable sea level in past 2500 years. Sea level goes up and down all the time. Who knows why?

More on Ocean Heat Content and recent revisions to the data: Another “look! they changed the data!” reminder post. Actually, they corrected it modestly. But nothing like suggesting that the data is bad even when it isn’t.

Spencer: Record January warmth is mostly sea. Dr. Spencer blogs that the record warmth is mostly as sea and uses a head-scratching scatter-plot of the anomalies between two different satellite instruments to suggest that everything is OK for denialists. Dr. Spencer’s problems with meaningful data presentation is well-known.

Flashback to 2007 – SST to plunge again? A post by Steven Goddard (geologist?) hoping that Dr. Roy Spencer’s admission that January 2010 as warmest ever is just a blip, because gosh it’s winter now, and it sure isn’t as warm as it was last summer. And El Niño. Entertainingly, Steven calls Dr. Spencer “one of the most trustworthy players in climate science”. Here’s an example of  Dr. Spencer’s woeful track record.

NOAA: All time record snowfall for DC and Baltimore? Another post about the approaching big storm in the northeastern USA bringing heavy snowfalls. Surely Anthony, as an ex-weatherman, knows that cold air doesn’t hold as much moisture as warm air and hence produces less snow? Of course he does, but mentioning it doesn’t serve his purpose.

Inconvenient truth in Britain – scepticism on the rise: A British poll showing that belief in Man-made climate change is declining. This indicates, sadly, increased confusion among the public and not a disproof of the scientific facts. A rise in real skeptical thinking would be great news.

Blizzard Warning for DC, NYT: “Capital Is Crippled as Blizzard Continues”. One more kick at implying that snowstorms prove that Climate Change is a lie.

Well, that’s it. Looks like Dr. Spencer came in for a bit of a whipping in this session.

New paper in Nature on CO2 amplification: “it’s less than we thought”

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Anthony Watts reads a Science Daily article about a Nature paper on CO2 amplification in the upper atmosphere and concludes that everything is OK! Being a good “skeptic” Anthony unquestioningly accepts the paper’s useful conclusion…

The paper states that empirical evidence for the pre-industrial feedback of CO2 levels on global temperature may be as little as 1/4 of the current best estimate over the past 1000 years. Of course we don’t live in pre-industrial times, do we? None of the time periods studied match today’s conditions. As well, there are some issues with the data that required extra manipulation and so while the result is useful, it’s not definitive.