Category Archives: I'm not a Climatologist

Concentration vs. Extent

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“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

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“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.

Sea Ice Graphs Have Limited Predictive Value

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“Sea Ice Graphs Have Limited Predictive Value“. Steven Goddard decides that since the sea ice charts aren’t illustrating his desired climate trend he’d better start deprecating them. Funny, for a few weeks there he thought they were definitive! Now, they don’t tell you anything until August. Now he admits that:

The fact that April, 2010 had the highest extent in the DMI record tells us little or nothing about the summer minimum.

As a backup, he posts a photo of Barrow, Alaska with dirty-looking snow. Therefore all increased Arctic snow or ice melt is due to dirt, not Global Warming. Got it.

Venus Envy

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“Venus Envy“. Steve Goddard tries once more to explain how Venus’s surface temperature is strictly the result of atmospheric pressure. Um, nope.

Steve’s confused about transient temperature changes that occur with changes in pressure. Like a good denialist he’s clinging to this belief in spite of clear explanations of why he’s wrong.

“Catastrophic” retreat of glaciers in Spitsbergen

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““Catastrophic” retreat of glaciers in Spitsbergen“. Someone’s sent Anthony Watts a scan of an anecdotal Soviet (can we trust those Commies?) report about Arctic Ice from 1943. Gosh, there’s natural climate variability? No. Way!

So how could anything happening now be anything other than natural? Stands to reason.

Predictions Of Global Mean Temperatures & IPCC Projections

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“Predictions Of Global Mean Temperatures & IPCC Projections“. A guest post by Girma Orssengo “B. Tech, MASc, PhD”. He’s created a mathematical model that predicts global cooling by about 0.42 deg C by 2030. Good work! Take the rest of the day off, everyone.

Uh oh, he doesn’t even know the name of the institution whose temperature data he has used. What is the “Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the Hadley Center”? CRU is part of the University of East Anglia. The Hadley Centre is part of the Meteorological Office.

Left unmentioned is the critical mechanism behind his “mathematical model”. What drives all this? I vote for mermaids. Wait, make that pirates. Or… pirates and mermaids, working together.

Update 2010/05/13: I must have rushed this post, here’s Dr. Orssengo’s evidence in chart form:

Not a great fit or even a prediction of declining temperature. Source: WUWT.

Of Hawks and Handsaws

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“Of Hawks and Handsaws“. Willis Eschenbach, citizen-scientist, has more pretty pictures with data stuck on top of them. He’s figured out that if you slap a bunch of thick lines representing cyclic annual trends on top of each other and obscure their order, you can hide the incline pretty handily.

His expert eyeballing tells him that there’s an Urban Heat Island effect at work in Scandinavia! You betcha. And there’s nothing like a quote from Shakespeare to give an intellectual air to an empty argument. (The cheesy clip-art kind of undermines that though.)

Who needs to bother with statistical analysis when you can pull a powerful ‘intuitive’ conclusion like this from thin air? Italics mine:

At least part of the warming in the US and the NORDKLIM datasets is the result of UHI distortion of the records. An unknown but likely significant amount of this UHI heating is due to direct energy consumption in the cities.

You know what would give this claim some credibility? Credible statistics.

Where’s the Climate Beef?

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“Where’s the Climate Beef?” Willis Eschenbach decides he can disprove Global Warming by talking about just the USA. And the WUWT commenters are gobbling it up.

I don’t think anything further needs to be said…

A New And Effective Climate Model

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“A New And Effective Climate Model“. A 5,699 word guest post by Stephen Wilde, who has falsely identified himself as a meteorologist, states that existing climate models have “no predictive skill whatever despite huge advances in processing power and the application of millions or even billions of man hours from reputable and experienced scientists over many decades“. That’ll surprise the climatologists who have been predicting things pretty well for some time now.

But he’s here to set it all right. He’s got a “serious hypothesis”! It involves talking about “Solar surface turbulence”, boiling pots and sandwiches. Backed up by newspaper article references. Groan. Looks like textbook example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Why is Anthony posting this goof-ball rubbish? Oh I see. This line, buried 3/4 of the way down – “The contribution of the Greenhouse effect is miniscule.”

In spite of the generally credulous welcome given to this nonsense in the WUWT comments, Solar Physicist Leif Svalgaard makes this authoritative and entertaining comment, taking two sentences to address Wilde’s 5,699 words:

I think the first two points:
1: Solar surface turbulence increases causing an expansion of the Earth’s atmosphere.
2: Resistance to outgoing longwave radiation reduces, energy is lost to space faster.
are wrong, and hence the rest.
The part of the atmosphere [the thermosphere] that expands and contracts is 1 centimeter thick [if at same pressure as at the surface] and contains 1/1000,000 the number of molecules, so has no measurable effect on point 2.