Category Archives: I wouldn't have seen it if I didn't believe it

Art Horn: a remarkable statement from NOAA

Posted on by
2

“Art Horn: a remarkable statement from NOAA“. Anthony Watts wants us to know that right-wing partisan website Pajamas Media’s meteorologist, Art Horn, shares his obsession, and outrage, over weather station trivia.

The following remarkable statement now appears on the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) site:

For detecting climate change, the concern is not the absolute temperature — whether a station is reading warmer or cooler than a nearby station placed on grass — but how that temperature changes over time.

Welcome to 1950, Art! You too Anthony. This has always been true. That’s the difference between studying weather and studying climate.

Sigh. One day the penny will drop. And rattle around for hours.

P.S. Why do I keep looking at “Art Horn” and seeing “ad hom”?

Concentration vs. Extent

Posted on by
Reply

“Concentration vs. Extent“. Steven Goddard plays word games to try to slip out of his unsupported Arctic Sea Ice claims. He’s nothing if not intransigent!

Steven used to argue about ice extent (surface area) but the ice volume facts completely undercut his position. Now he’s talking about ice “concentration”. This is pretty much just a variation on volume, but it lets him slip away from his claims about extent.

To do this though Steven has to baldly claim that his chosen model, PIPS 2.0, is the proper one to use because it’s the only one that he can use to claim that “concentration” is not collapsing too. The better model is PIOMAS, but unfortunately it doesn’t support his claims.

Funny how quickly the outrage over using “models” disappears when denialists like Steven find one that they think they can exploit.

How ’bout the numbers? Arctic sea ice extent is currently about 270,000 km² lower than the “record low” of 2007. Arctic sea ice volume is also down since then, by about 300 km³.

2007 Sea Ice Post Mortem

Posted on by
1

“2007 Sea Ice Post Mortem“. Lately it’s been embarrassing for denialists to talk about the 2010 Arctic Sea Ice Extent, so the indefatigable Steven Goddard tries to recast various denialist comments about the record low 2007 season and misrepresent the remarks of professional climatologists from the time.

First, he tries to pretend that ice volume was what really counted in 2007, not ice extent. Actually, they fought pretty hard against that metric back then. Too bad the ice volume has been steadily declining.

Next, he tries to tie the expert’s ice predictions to newspaper speculations. That’s just plain dishonest.

It seems that no progressive loss of Arctic sea ice will make Steven admit he’s spitting in the wind unless the Arctic Ocean is completely ice-free. Whenever his ‘nothing to worry about’ BS starts getting shaky, he simply moves the goalposts. The only thing thinner than the Arctic sea ice is Steven’s own skin.

A study: The temperature rise has caused the CO2 Increase, not the other way around

Posted on by
5

“A study: The temperature rise has caused the CO2 Increase, not the other way around“. Anthony Watts posts a retired physicist’s enthusiastic number crunching that proves… if there’s any global warming it’s not because of CO2. It’s the other way ’round!  However, Lon Hocker has to admit that “we offer no explanation for why global temperatures are changing“. It’s amazing what you can conclude when you remove the atmospheric CO2 trend before starting your number games.

Hocker tells us in the comments that “Excel isn’t all that hard to use, though I admit I had a bunch of learning to go though to write this. Remember I’m just using well accepted data, and high school math.” This is pretty much a confession that he’s a victim of Dunning–Kruger syndrome.

What Hocker has shown is that annual CO2 variations are, indeed, the result of seasonal temperature change and the resulting variation in vegetative CO2 production. In other breaking news, water is wet.

Minority report: 50 year warming due to natural causes

Posted on by
2

“Minority report: 50 year warming due to natural causes“. Anthony Watts reposts a blog article by Dr. Roy Spencer. Roy has fiddled around (from his own comments: “this was the result of a couple of hours of work on the weekend, and I didn’t mean to start a whole new research effort”) and managed to amaze himself by extracting a correlation that he uses to claim an unspecified natural cause (“changes in cloud cover”?) for the last 50 years of warming.

How does he do this? Why by mashing together the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and only considering temperature change rate.

I've added the causation to Roy's correlation... After Roy Spencer, 2010/06/06.

Roy often shoots himself in the foot when he tries to use numbers and sure enough a disclaimer about a calculation error was posted within hours. Through the magic of denialist revision its gone now though. I should have grabbed the page for your entertainment.

Let’s say it together: “correlation is not causation.” Roy needs to present a clear mechanism for what he is describing. Turns out that what Roy has actually been plotting is temperature vs temperature, which obviously tracks itself very well…

Note that this computer model is getting a free pass from Anthony’s commenters as is the use of the “corrupt” CRUTem3 temperature data set from the vilified Dr. Phil Jones’ Climate Research Unit…

Dr. Richard Lindzen’s Heartland 2010 keynote address

Posted on by
34

“Dr. Richard Lindzen’s Heartland 2010 keynote address“. In a room full of balding libertarians, Dr. Richard Lindzen tells it like he wishes it was. No doubt his actual remarks will be discussed shortly.

NIWA’s Kiwi Kaper

Posted on by
Reply

“NIWA’s Kiwi Kaper“. Anthony Watts gravely informs us of an uncovered climate conspiracy in New Zealand. But fear not, a “skeptical” (right-wing) New Zealand politician is calling for the replacement the existing New Zealand NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) climate record of a 0.92°C twentieth-century warming trend with something more ‘suitable’. Namely that it should be depicted as “remarkably steady at 12.6°C“.

A former politician named Barry Brill tries to fake it up with a “substantial essay” on a right-wing Australian website called Quadrant Online. Barry is also Chairman of the fraudulent denialist “New Zealand Climate Science Coalition”, caught in 2009 telling flat-out lies about NZ weather records.

The claims are all about “smuggled data” from Dr. Jim Salinger that doesn’t gibe with denialist’s anecdotal recollections, cherry-picked counter-examples and imputed political motivation. Somehow a conspiracy to manipulate climate data was initiated in 1994 in order to support a left-wing political agenda created in 2007.

Here’s the response from the NIWA to the denialist games. The above chart illustrates the dishonesty of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition’s claim that temperatures have been “remarkably steady“. There’s a “kaper” alright, Anthony. You’re part of it.

Spencer on Earth’s missing energy

Posted on by
4

“Spencer on Earth’s missing energy“. Dr. Roy Spencer draws a horizontal line through three years of satellite radiation observations and comes to the scientific conclusion that the difference between incoming and outgoing radiation means that the Earth is cooling. Take that Global Warming, you’ve been defeated by charts!

Well if you know what you want to find its easy to find it…

Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget

Posted on by
1

“Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget“. Sometimes denialists proclaim that there is NO GREENHOUSE EFFECT, sometimes they admit that it is REAL BUT SMALL. Dr. Roy Spencer takes the latter approach here. He’s been “slicing and dicing the [Earth’s radiation budget data] different ways” trying to find a value of CO2 sensitivity that lets him claim the climate impact is small. Guess what? He found one.

Dr. Spencer's usual blob of data without chronological context.

Spencer does it “without going into the detailed justification” by:

  • Ignoring data from polar areas, where most of the climate change has occurred.
  • Comparing global radiation data to ocean temperatures.
  • Pretending that 7 years of satellite data is a sufficient time span for climate analysis (try 30 years).
  • Restricting his plot to just month-to-month variation.
  • Using only monthly temperature changes that were greater than 0.03°C.
  • Ignoring decades of independent empirical studies that conclude that climate sensitivity must be somewhere between 2.3 to 4.1°C.
  • Sweeping away the 0.6°C warming over last 100 years as natural (therefore a similar estimated rise for this century must also be natural).
  • Ignoring the reality check that ice ages are impossible if CO2 sensitivity is as low as he declares.

What does Dr. Spencer end up with? I mean besides the WUWT comments declaring him a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize. He ends up with an artificial statistical correlation with no physical explanation to support it.

“The decrease in upper ocean heat content from March to April was 1C – largest since 1

Posted on by
Reply

“The decrease in upper ocean heat content from March to April was 1C – largest since 1979“. Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. tries on his deceptive “where’s the beef?” complaint about measurement of ocean heat content again. Phil Klotzbach from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center has just reported that there has been a drop in the upper ocean heat anomaly.

Actually, the Climate Prediction Center is only talking about the upper 300m of the ocean, and only in the eastern half of the Pacific Ocean. So Dr. Pielke is enthusiastically extrapolating well beyond his data while also carefully ignoring as much inconvenient data as possible. He even chooses to display only 12 months of data to prove the climate trend! That’s weather, not climate, and when denialists do this they’re usually trying to hide something.

So we’ve got an non-significant time period and a global conclusion being drawn from a regional information. Even still the trend only applies to a cherry-picked subset (upper 300m) of that data! Everything else is waved away. We’re not watching Perry Mason at work here, are we?

Here’s Dr. Pielke’s dubious plot:

And here’s an example I pulled together from the CPC’s original data with a bit longer timeline:

Doesn’t look like the death of Global Warming after all. Just ordinary Pacific Ocean patterns on top of the well-established warming trend.

Speaking of warming, where does Dr. Pielke in his thoughtful scientific way declare that the “missing” heat has gone? He speculates that it was magically transported into space. In other words, he has no idea. But it’s certainly more entertaining than considering good old-fashioned ocean currents.